Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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  • Tag: doodles

    • 30 Days of Painting, Day 25: Monochrome Doodle

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on September 25, 2014

      Welcome to 30 Days of Painting! This month, I’ll be painting a little each day in order to turn my hobby into a comfortable skill.

      Day 25: Monochrome Doodle

      I didn’t really have a plan for today, so I just grabbed three colors, a couple brushes, and started to doodle. I used black, white, and gold, and the result came out ever-so-slightly paisley-ish. I kind of like it, actually.

      photo

      Not my most ambitious effort, but sometimes it’s just relaxing to swirl paint around on a canvas aimlessly. And it’s also fun.

      Posted in Series | 1 Comment | Tagged acrylics, art, doodles, painting
    • 30 Days of Painting, Day 1: Floral Vine and Lace Doodles

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on September 1, 2014

      For the month of September, I’m doing something a little different with my blog. For 30 days, I’ll produce one quick painting, with the goal of expanding my limited artistic skill set and grow in comfort with – and command of – the paint brush. I take my inspiration for this project from the blog Of Robots and Whales‘s series “30 Days of Python”. Watching Robb (the author of the blog, with whom I share a home office) work at his projects in an accountable way made me want to do the same. Painting has always been a hobby of mine, but I’ve never really taken it at all seriously. I don’t really intend to take it too seriously now, but I’d love to be able to illustrate some of my stories for myself and my family, and that requires more familiarity and fluency than I currently possess.

      Most of my paintings look something like this:

      photo

      And without further ado: 30 Days of Painting.

      Day 1: Floral Vine and Lace Doodles

      As long as I can remember, I would doodle vines with leaves and flowers in the margins of my notebooks and on my paper bag book covers. I wanted to give it a try in acrylic and see where it took me. I thought to either do a stationary border in the style of Rifle Paper Co., which also has a number of gorgeous illustrations to look through (this one is my favorite) or a pattern, like the artist Bouffants and Broken Hearts, which you should definitely check out if you’re into whimsical yet edgy and vintagey patterns – Kendra is incredibly talented.

      Now my work will be far, far below that caliber, but I thought it was a good point of inspiration. I also wanted to start with something simple which would allow me to just play with different kinds of brush strokes. Mainly, I wanted to practice mixing clear outlines with layers of color in an illustrative style, and to see if I could get my painting to feel just a little bit like a crayon drawing.

      I did two tiny pieces, trying out two different techniques. With the first, I put down layers of color to create a wash effect of flowers, and then when it was dry, came back in with my detail brush to add the lace overlay. In the second, I put down alternate layers of detail and a light wash to see if I could create some depth.

      photo

      And that’s Day 1. Check back tomorrow for my next project, as I’ll be posting (almost) daily for the next 29 days. Not everything will be worthy of a long lasting post, but I’ll try to keep the highlights up for anyone who wishes to follow along.

      Posted in Series | 7 Comments | Tagged 30 Days of Painting, acrylic, doodles, flowers, illustration, painting
    • One with the Pen and One with the Page

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on July 28, 2014

      A few weeks ago I came across two articles on the importance of external physicality of thinking, dreaming, and writing. I always feel a little silly and archaic spending my time writing things out by hand and drawing little pictures in the corners. A serious writer would work straight into the keyboard, and a serious teacher would make a neat powerpoint, but no, for me it’s all illegible scroll and funny little doodles.

      According to Maria Konnikova from the New York Times Science section, handwriting matters. It makes learning easier by allowing us to physically symbolize what we’re thinking and make a more solid record in our minds:

      “When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

      And this contributes not just in memorization, but also in creating new ideas, even if – especially if? – you have to write the same thing over and over again.

      The second article is from the WordPress Blog Standing Ovation, Seated which states that Doodling is Dreaming. I like to visualize my characters, even when I’m doing philosophy. I think in stories, and pictures help.

      Kids get down to drawing right where and when they start dreaming, be it wall paper or floor boards. Most of their artworks get destroyed by angry parents who can’t understand why their daughters and sons could not use proper paper. Because paper was ten feet away from the place where and when the dream “happened”, that’s why.

      I suppose this makes a little more sense when I’m writing children’s stories, but it’s good to know that my handwriting and doodling serve some higher purpose.

      Posted in The Waste Book | 4 Comments | Tagged articles, doodles, handwriting
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