Time to get to work...

… I have hardly done anything since my last post,

apart from some blind contour drawings for Carla Sonheim's LifeBook14 assignment, and a first attempt at a Princess for The Year of the Fairy Tale.

Below the Princess, and her Cat, you find:

a Zebra
Flowers in a vase, and a House (oops, these are contour drawings, but they are not 'blind'!)
another Zebra

Another work in progress...

This is the first step of another LifeBook assignment (second week of LB12).

The Earth Goddess

Here are some pictures of the Earth Goddess… I have not finished the assignment yet, but that may take weeks….

Really poor quality photographs, sorry about that. 

I rotated some of them, but they flipped back after copying them to my blog (I am clueless about how IPhoto works, and the help function doesn't help at all - because there is nothing in it - or is that my cluelessness, too?). 

But I promise I am going to learn how to Photoshop (I shall have to now) - it is one of my New Year Resolutions: no more crappy pictures on my blog!

Anyway, the Earth Goddess does look rather earthy now, with these artificial light colours…. in real life the collage is less green.

I Created...

Oh, yes, I did it: the First Assignment of LifeBook2014! And I am so proud of myself!

After signing up for many, many online courses the last six years (at least) - many of them Carla Sonheim's courses (and if she can't get me going, who can? - I Love Carla Sonheim) - never doing anything apart from watching the instruction videos and feeling utterly depleted and tired afterwards. Not to mention the Guilt I was feeling on spending money on courses and not even getting started.

And now, I realise that all this signing up, and watching, and dreaming - oh yes, I did that: I so wanted to get started… - has been part of the healing process. That all the art making I watched so intensely for so long, somehow planted the seeds for this 're-awakening', as I would like to call it. That I hadn't been doing nothing, but that creativity had been gestating, fermenting, growing all this time.

Looking back I can now see how old wounds were healing slowly, how I learned all over again that being creative is not about hard work and failing anyway. That creativity is about exploring and discovering, about letting your soul roam free and follow it wherever it chooses to go. All the while paying attention to what happens. Just following and paying attention.

There are some final details to be filled in, and then I will share some pictures of it here.

…………………………………...

Also, synchronistically, I picked up a small stone from the beach, a few weeks ago. It had such a pretty shape, I thought it would make a nice talisman for something or other.

A few days before LB14 began, I was fiddling about with a collage I had started. Adding some shade here and there. And found it was kind of looking like a cave. A nice place to create a shrine for some sort of Earth Goddess. And I remembered my beach stone: it was just the right shape for an Earth Goddess, so I made a little drawing of her in the cave.

LB14 started with a meditation exercise. We were to picture some sort of Guide to protect us from harm and (our own) criticism during the LB year, and then the meditation led us along a path that ended at a place of shelter. A place where we could find our Guide.

Not so surprisingly, I ended up in a small cave, where I found my Earth Goddess.

I love this, when two projects somehow lead me to the same place. It gives me this reassuring feeling that I am on the right track.