creative re-cap

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time writing down my thoughts each night before I head off to sleep.  It’s a wonderful way to relax, unwind and to also allow those thoughts and meanderings to make their way to paper to respond to or develop later before they’re lost.  I always have last-minute thoughts, ideas, questions and so on while I’m brushing my teeth or checking my boys.

I used to be able to completely switch off from work straight away and head to bed, clear minded and ready for peaceful sleeping.  However, since I began my creative art journey all that changed.  Hmmm, maybe, just maybe that has something to do with finding my hearts joy and passion.  Now I just dream the most wonderful dreams of colour and imagery and wild wonderful playful worlds of nothing but shared love and happiness (o:

So where is all this going?  Well I was writing one night and found myself scribbling out a plan for my blog postings and what they could contain and I now have some wonderful new things to implement over the coming weeks.  One thought was to dedicate Fridays to highlights of my creative adventures enjoyed throughout the week.  So here’s some snippets of creative mind chatter and images of what’s been happening here on my desk and in my studio this week, enjoy!

I enjoyed drawing some colourful mandala images for Flora Bowley’s Brave Intuitive You e-course this week.  It was a fun little creative exercise that then got me thinking about some images that I’d sketched in my sketchbook late last year…

I’ve drawn lots of lovely detailed circular motives and had been thinking what I could do with them.  I’d done a few of these little gift tags…

The gift tags were still a little lifeless and probably not as beautiful as they could be.  For a long time I’ve kept my love of colour for my paintings and my illustrations have remained black and white.  However, that may be all about to change.  These are still a little rigid and scale wise not right, but I’m working with some concepts for a new series of prints that will be available in A4 and A3 size when completed.  I would love to hear your thoughts…

As you know I’ve had female forms and figures popping up as imagery in my paintings of late and also while looking back over my sketchbooks a lovely image of a stick figure with a billowing skirt caught my attention.  I’d been sketching her here and there recently and thought she could also make for a lovely collection of prints perhaps at A4 and A5 size.  I’m excited to play around some more with her skirts as I have visions of beautiful full skirts with my detailed illustrations and colour shining through almost like a stained glass window.  These illustrations would still be predominantly black and white but with pops of vibrant colour.  What do you think?

I also spent some time working on my paintings this week.  There are quite a few in transition at the moment and they’re all still pretty ugly and unrefined with little or no imagery appearing in them.  These are just the larger canvases, there are also about 6 mini canvases in progress too!  Just keep working, keep working, just keep working…

It’s such a testing time when you’re at this point.  I love the first stage of just playing with paint, getting as much colour and variation on there as I can.  But, then it suddenly gets very busy and overwhelmingly strong and in my face.  I know at that point it’s time to start looking carefully at each of them and making some intuitive decisions about what areas I like, what colour combinations I like and where to take them next.  Sometimes easy, sometimes not…

As you can see there are lots of little areas of interest.  Sometimes they’re so little or minor that I often forget about them and end up painting over them anyway.  My work can still change so much from this point on.  It’s certainly nothing like Architecture where I always had a clear image of what the end result would be.

Wow, this post somehow has become BIG!  I guess that means that even though it sometimes appears there’s not much going on over here in the Liza Zeni Studio, that there actually is.  This has also been really good for me to actually see that I am making progress each week.  Sometimes it’s slow but I can now see that I’m working my way along many different projects that should come to fruition at some point.  It’s been fun, so I’ll keep these posts coming each Friday (o:

Wishing you all a fun weekend.  We have a 4th Birthday party for Tully and his little mates from Mother’s Group tomorrow which is always lots of fun.  4 though…OMG!  At least Tully is the youngest in the group so he’s officially got another month of being 3.

Liza xxx