The 'Art' of Stress

I’ve been getting overwhelmed recently. This is not something new; I do find myself getting stressed easily, when the little things I need or want to do start piling up. Doing a craft fair every week (and wanting to create new products for people to see, every week), keeping my Etsy store up-to-date and the looming prospect of an exhibition of my work sometime next year is starting to get to me. And I know, rationally, that isn’t a lot and it is all totally manageable, but sometimes my brain just doesn’t want to hear it and instead just wants to panic.

And that’s where I’m at, at the moment.

Unfortunately, this is also coupled with an (un)healthy dose of self-doubt telling me that nothing that I’m doing is any good and I should just give up.

I’ve been finding blogging every week difficult. At the beginning of the summer, I was writing two new posts a week, but now I’m really struggling to get even one post out a week. I am putting too much pressure on myself to create things for blogs, rather than creating things and then blogging about them. I don’t know how I got into this cycle, but I need to get out of it!

Another thing that has been on my mind, is how much I really miss daily journaling. My plan was, once I’d finished my Second Daily Art Journal, to try and make my Junk Journal into a daily journal, but I didn’t feel inspired by it. I think part of the reason was that most of my work is to do with layering and altering the page, and somehow having layers already there made it difficult to start.

So, with all this in mind, I have made myself take a step back. Creating, at least for me, isn’t supposed to be difficult and stressful and overwhelming. It is supposed to be a break from all of that stuff and a way of releasing all that negativity. So, I thought back to this time last year, when I was struggling to be creative, and remembered doing a project that my mum got me into. All it involved was cutting up a piece of paper into nine equal squares, rearranging them and sticking them down. It was really quick and easy to do, but it ended up making some really interesting pictures. (I mentioned this project in my Works in Progress post a while back).

I have decided to do the project again this year. It will be an alternative to journaling, but it is something I can do every day. It is also very different to the work I would normally do, so hopefully won’t act as a replacement for making art.

Here are the ones I have done so far. I’ll be posting the new ones I do over on Instagram, hopefully every day.