garbage collectors

The second message for Day 13 came at the end of the practice, when we put our feet up for waterfall pose, which is not one of my favorite poses, but it felt like there was a message for me in the pose when I looking up at my toes. When I’m craving rest and stillness, I turn to doing yin or restorative yoga very late at night with the lights off. So it was just my feet, looking like I was stepping on my ceiling, in the dark. My feet had a message for me, and I wasn’t sure…

I didn’t go with the prompts for Day 12 and 13. I got the messages for these two days when I was doing yoga last night, trying a restorative yoga class with a new instructor online. I wasn’t used to her style or even her voice, which kept it interesting for me. “The other side is unimaginably beautiful” came directly from the instructor. In the moment, I thought she was talking about the pose, but I couldn’t get it out of my head after I heard it. It felt like a whisper or a secret, like she was showing me…

I wasn’t sure if I could hear a different tone of voice for my message, and I didn’t want to overcomplicate it. I got some new sketchbooks and watercolor pads because they were on sale. I was really eager to start working through Mel Armstrong’s Floral Patterns in Gouache class, because it comes with a 30 days of sketchbook floral prompts so I spent most of the day painting flowers and small patterns using gouache. As I was getting tired and wondering if I should make more art to capitalize on the momentum, I randomly heard “steady as she goes”…

For day 10, I’ve recently been working through not bottling up my feelings, or shying away from feelings I don’t want to experience fully. I’m always trying to dissect my feelings, like “why do I feel angry,” “why am I anxious in this moment” and so on, I think as a way to avoid them or to put them away. So my reframed affirmation was that I want to feel my feelings. Aaaand I ran out of room for the S again. It looks like a flourish for the L…

For day 9, I settled on something generic because I had a hard time coming with something a good friend would say to me that I wanted to translate to a drawing. I am very good at negative self talk and putting myself down but I’m getting better at being a good friend to myself and having self-compassion. A lot of what I was feeling was someone cheering me on from the sidelines so I stuck with “You got this”. I spent more time focusing on the painting. I wanted to try to play with getting really opaque white lines,…

Not much to say for this one that I didn’t say for Day 07. I did a little collage for the word “rest.” I made some collage papers a while back that I haven’t figured out a use for, but the yellow one I thought would fit nicely here. I like how dark the ink looks against the gouache background. I might try that more, especially to ink in some letters or phrases. I’m really happy that I didn’t mess up writing “dream.” I used the bends on the cardboard as a guide for the letter height.

I did Day 07 and Day 08 one after the other. I was a little worried that I wasn’t going to give myself enough time to hear my intuition (but I also wanted to catch up). I think the prompts for these two days went well together: giving myself permission and saying “it’s okay…” felt complimentary. The message for both came readily: I want to give myself permission to dream and I want to tell myself that it is okay to rest. I think I’ve in a “dream and rest” state for a while, working on reclaiming my creativity and…

I usually just start drawing and see where things go for this challenge, so it was different to spend time today thinking about what message could be. I came across a number of things that resonated with me (a big one was something along the lines of “don’t let overwhelm steal your joy”), but I settled on “Be Seen” after I start painting and filing up the cardboard. I pulled the trigger and decided to enroll in the “Leverage Your Art” course with Stacey Bloomfield (which is where I heard the overwhelm line), and that’s been giving me a big…

I did today’s piece after some yoga and meditation. While I was meditating, I saw a lotus flower towards the end, but when I sat down to paint, it didn’t really manifest. I think I had too much of a plan for today’s piece. I wanted to clean my palette so I can make room for new colors, so I was set on using up my old paints. I ended up making succulent colors? I really like some of the shades of greens that I got and I wish I paid more attention to which colors I mixed (brown, yellow,…