2018, A New Year
I would say, on the whole, that
2017 was a good year for me. Although I didn’t do quite as much as I had hoped
for, for this blog (again, like last year, there were a few patches when I
dropped off a little), I feel like I made progress in other areas. I thought I
would make another recap post, like I did last year (which you can read here if you want) going over what
happened in the past year. I think it serves as a good summary to look back on,
for me at least, and starts me back up again with posting on this blog!
In terms of this blog, I posted 29 times, compared to 41
times in 2016 (though it should be noted that during the summer of 2016, I was
posting twice daily). It’s a shame I didn’t manage to post every week, which is
what I fully intended to do, but I think lack of planning in advance got the
best of me. My focus for this year is to have more posts prepared earlier so I
am not working week to week all the time, which hopefully means if something
does happen which prevents me from working on my blog, I’ll have a post ready
to go.
My favourite posts of the year were:
This was such a fun idea I had. They are fairly quick to
make and are great ways to use up the scrap paper you might have laying around.
I have made a few more of these journals since this post, notably my Positive/Negative Journals.
I have, through much trial and error, come to accept that I
am not good with daily challenges. I just can’t make myself create when I don’t
feel like it. That said, these two projects were so fun to do. They made me
experiment more with mark making and incorporating different media into my work,
and now I have two cute sketchbooks that I love to flick through.
In all honesty, I wasn’t completely sure how this would turn
out, but I was pleasantly surprised by the results. There was one
particular piece of fabric I made that I really liked and I am still in the
process of trying to figure out how to add stitch to it to bring out the image I
see in it.
I used this technique to make a book cover for my Making A Side Bound Notebook with Handmade Recycled Paper book.
This ended up being a really successful project. I added stitch to
three of the pictures I created in this post and still have one more left to
finish off. I then made another two more recently, with one of them still left to
finish. I really love this technique and the surprising results I have managed
to produce. The pictures, when mounted and framed, look striking and I am so
pleased with them, despite how unsure I was at the time. This is something I can
definitely see myself using and expanding on in the future.
It was a lot of fun revisiting this source of inspiration and
getting to play about with the embellisher again. So much so that, since writing
the blog post, I did some more work on the project. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet
been able to complete a final piece, but this is definitely on my ‘to-do list’ for
the coming year. I’d also love to try wet felting again as it is something I haven’t
done since school. Hopefully, if I get around to doing it, I’ll make a post
about it.
This was a really fun project to work on, because it came together
so quickly and was something very different to my normal work. I had a lot of
collected scraps that I had been collecting for a while that I wanted to work
with and, in this project, I managed to use (most) of them.
I continued to work on my Etsy shop and made progress in that too. I added lots of new products and new
types of products to the shop and there are even a few that I haven’t finished
photographing and listing yet! Outside of Etsy, I carried on with my weekly
market that I started attending at the end of last year, and did a few more
other craft fairs. I hope to carry on doing craft fairs in the coming year; I
just need to get organised!
Perhaps more excitingly though, was that I put on an exhibition in
August with three other artists. Some of the pieces I exhibited were from my Making Art with Angelina Fibres and Plastic Food Wrappers post (as mentioned above), my Mixed Media Collage Art Project post, my Concluding Projects post and my Decay Art Project post from last year. It was such a huge step for me to exhibit
my work publicly for the first time and I got some really lovely feedback from
people. I also manged to sell a couple of my abstract paintings which was a
lovely bonus!
This year ended with my family going on a lastminute trip to the
Lake District again for the holidays. I didn’t do another sketchbook (but you can
see my summer one here) as I didn’t
fancy the idea of sitting out on the hills and painting in the snow! I did take
a few photos on my phone, so you can see how beautiful it was.
Instead, I went to a print exhibition at Rheged, near Penrith,on cold day when other more intrepid family members
braved the snowy hills. There was such a beautiful range of work, in a variety
of styles and techniques, which has definitely made me want to do more printmaking
this year and also want to find a way to incorporate that into my other artwork
more.
I don’t really have many plans for the coming year. I want to keep
progressing my artwork and trying new things, whilst also, hopefully, finding
my voice in art. I’m sure that’s something far easier said than done, so we’ll
see how well that turns out. I want to finish more work as I would love to
exhibit again, but also because it is so much more satisfying knowing a piece
of work is complete. I’d like to work more from specific sources of
inspiration, in particular using my Lake District sketchbook from the past two
years and my Iceland sketchbook (and photos) from this year, to create artwork
that responds to those places. I want to focus on designing and composition and
making artwork that is more intentional, rather than producing work by luck.
Obviously, if I managed to update this blog once a week for a
whole year, that would also be really great!
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