Kat Johnston Body Art: This is what happens when I get given a body to work on, and a packet of prettily coloured sharpies.
Finally! Finally I get to play around properly with prettily coloured sharpies… all over someone’s back. Started with the heart and went out from there. It grew!
I’m actually really loving playing around with sharpies on people doing these ‘sorta not really permanent marker tattoo’ thingies. It took a little bit to get used to the way the coloured sharpies work and blend, but I think I’m starting to get the gist of it. When given the chance, I think I have a far better idea of how I’m going to draw a phoenix on a certain someone – though they’ll have to give me a bigger area to work with this time! Please?
In celebration of working with pretty pretty markers, I’ve created a new category for such things, entitled ‘Body Art’. That way they don’t just get thrown straight into the ‘Sketches’ category and that’s it. I figure that my friends will lend me forbearance for a while longer to draw all over them, so there is a fairly decent likelihood that I might post more pictures of them here. Yay for friends who tolerate my eccentricities!
I think that’s about it for today… enjoy the picture, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Phew!
The past few days have not been great post-wise, have they… it is a statement, more than a question, for I already know the answer were it posed as one. Trust me to do months of good solid posting, even when I wish not to, only to let it come to a hiccup and not let it recover straight away. No matter. I sit here typing in a rush as it closes on the midnight hour, in order that I might again return to a semblance of normality and renew my simple pledge of a creative product a day, no matter what stands in my way. While the first hiccup was nigh on unavoidable, I should still have had something up yesterday… complacency is not a friend.
And so, as per the day before last, I offer forth two pictures instead of the customary one, in order to atone for my lack of posting, lest you think me unrepentant.
I shall speak to you as I have drawn them – rough, unhewn gleanings sought though a half-glazed stream of thought as I’ve put my pen to paper. Indeed, no thought runs true when it comes to this way of thinking… I desired only something to show that I could continue as I have begun, and so these pictures have been produced.
A night blooming flower, plucked nigh the hour of the midnight toll.
First, a midnight bloom, plucked from the vine ere the toll of the dawn. It flowers only in the shade of darkness, its beauty resplendent only for those who look in the purity of the deep velvet gloom of the evening’s blanketing warmth. Its scent is heady and strong, though with a delicacy that laces the air with only the most pure and pungent of perfumes. Any glow of even the most dimmest lit torches would cause it to shrivel, its gift plunged into the light turning sour and sickly… even the petals simply withering to die before any eyes may take in the glory of what it was within darkness. Learn to view by the hazy light of the moon, but do not sully that which was not meant to see the breath of daylight’s kiss.
Born of the wind in the breath of the light, so too must the darkness have its counterpart.
As dark has its light, so too must night have its counterpart in its daytime companion. Thus, another blossom sets forth, held far apart from its night blooming cousin, reveling instead in the touch of the sun’s tender warming caress upon its petaled form. However, this bloom also carries its own saddening curse. Destined to burst forth at light’s first touch, the shadow destroys what once was light – lean in too close, try to sniff at the tendriling plumes, one miscalculation and all is surrendered. So it is as with light, so it is with the darkness – either destroyed by the other’s touch, yet radiant within their own elements, the night blooming flower and the bloom of the daytime shall forever more be destined to their solitary existences… one once a maiden, the other a man, a Goddess cursed union forever to be kept apart by the very means of their continuing existence. Yet they bloom. One in light, one in dark, forever hoping that the next bud set forth may meet their lover in the short life to come.
Ok… so that is enough rambling for one evening. That’s what the pictures asked of me, and thus I have told their tale neatly, if roughly, in the hour allotted to me before the bell of midnight strikes. Good eve.
Kat Johnston Sketch – hmm… I don’t think this flower is feeling all that chipper.
I rather love doing the little crosses for eyes on things. My favourite would have to be the bunny, yet it works on such a variety of items… from flowers to toaster ovens. Thus, my oh-so-brilliant sketch for today, while simple, is still awesome in my books. Yay for crosses for eyes (which funnily enough, doesn’t mean that it is cross eyed at all… just dead, or at the very least, passed out).
On a little personal note, not feeling 100% today, so not going to write anything too long and rambling for the post. Just what was written above. Have a great day!
Just a random flowery thingie inspired by the outfit I’m wearing.
Today’s post is a little later in the afternoon than I usually post… I blame it on the fact that it is a Sunday. Another picture drawn in green biro: its becoming a habit. Its actually because its the only pen on my actual computer desk at the moment, save for my wacom pen… which, while useful, doesn’t actually draw on paper all that well, being as it only works on the wacom tablet.
Anyhow, today’s picture is just a little something whipped up quickly to go up on here – it was inspired by the dress that I’m wearing today. I’m slumming it around the house in something I’d like to refer to as ‘bedsheet couture’. In other words, light, loose, comfortable and severely unflattering. That said, I, my husband and my brother-in-law are the only people who have to see me in it, therefore, I’m all for the comfort over style! I have the air conditioning on, a light breeze wafting through the room, a good book to get back to… life doesn’t really get much better than this.
Hope y’all are having a great weekend too, I have a book to get back to!
A quick note on the picture above, before it goes into the hugely long post of today. I’ve entitled it ‘Dandelion Dreaming’ and it currently occupies a place in one of my ‘real’ sketchbooks. Please read on – the site has been live for a month today, so it is a bit of a long post to kinda reflect on this fact.
Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. A word first coined in this post. It may not be a ‘true’ phobia, but it is certainly something a lot of us must face at one point or another. Ever sat down to write a hand-written letter and been scared to start because you just know that you are going to misspell something? Atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia.
Whilst the above example is certainly pertinent, the more common one for me has to do with sketching in a nicely bound, beautifully presented sketchbook – not the spiral-bound cheapies, or the lecture notepads… with those, you can always just turn another page, or even tear it out. There is something special, something exquisite about a sketchbook that is just waiting to be a showcase of the things that flitter around on the edge of your consciousness, works in their own right waiting to be committed to a journal, which, while rough and underdeveloped at times, you would be proud to hand to someone else and go ‘this is mine’.
Having a ‘digital sketchbook’ such as this blog may go a way towards battling this, but I am able to, as with the ‘cheapie’ sketchbooks, pick and choose what I display here. I can toss away the incredibly bad bits and pieces and just throw up the ‘this is passable’ stuff. It just isn’t the same.
Thus, I’ve started trying to draw in ‘actual’ sketchbooks now and then. It is something that I have seemingly avoided for quite a while – it does actually scare me. I see pictures of people’s sketchbooks and I am in awe of the things they produce, page after page of perfection – or at least, that is how I see it. How can I live up to that? Sketchbooks such as these are creative works in their own rights, no matter how much people may argue to the contrary. Whilst they may not have the centre-stage such as a well-worked painting under spotlights may have, I find them to be just as interesting, just as relevant, just as fascinating – perhaps even moreso at times because it is so raw and often unfiltered.
Anyhow, this roundabout post is kinda just trying to point out that I am trying to do something about this silly fear I have of ruining a perfectly good sketchbook. ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ is the old saying, and I’m coming to realize that it is a saying I should pay more heed to.
On May the 16th, 2008 I started a little blog on the spur of the moment, thinking ‘if not now, then when?’. It was updated only semi-regularly, though the goal was for a once-a-day sketch as it is now. It was frequented only once in a while by a few friends, some family and so on. I never did anything to promote it, beyond telling a person or two.
Then I had a chance to do my major assignment for my coursework on a subject of my choice. This website became that project. The saying ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt’ did occur to me, but I had been doing that forever – if no-one ever sees your work, then they can’t point out that its not great, right? But nor are you going to get anywhere or move forward. Whilst I don’t generally go in for the whole ‘self help’ mantras, this one has always rung true for me: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ (Tony Robbins, in case you were curious… I had to look it up). So I did it anyway. I could have gone with a safe project, and written an essay, but instead I decided it was time to promote me.
On the 29th of August, after weeks of learning css on the fly, modifying wordpress themes and making a place to call my virtual own, KatJohnston.com went live. As of the moment I write this, I have had 1,293 visits to this site, ranging from people I know, to people that I certainly hadn’t met before this project went underway. I’ve been putting myself out there on social networking applications: facebook, twitter, delicious and more, actually trying to get people to see what I do, who I am, even if it is just the rough sketches and flittery thoughts rather than the refined works. I’ve been consistently throwing up at least one sketch a day, even when that sketch is barely more than a few flicks of a pen to say ‘there, I’ve done a sketch, now I need some sleep’.
Before I started out on doing this, I wasn’t drawing consistently. I wasn’t doing something day by day, every day and I certainly didn’t feel as if I wanted to be in my studio every waking moment. Right now, I cannot wait until my time at university is over. I am still working strong on assignments with another month ahead of me, but I’m almost counting down the days until I am done and will have time to paint and draw for more than a minute here, or an hour there. Believe it or not, doing this has actually made me enthusiastic about something that has fallen to the wayside for far too long: creating.
Perhaps it is the fact that people are actually seeing my work, or the fact that I have people now who I know check this site day by day to see what I have drawn. Perhaps it is just that I can scroll through these pages myself and go ‘you know, I actually like what I do’ in a way that can’t really be done with scraps of paper scattered from one end of the house to the other in a dozen different books and places. It isn’t life-changing stuff, its just random thoughts, random sketches and things that make me smile – but it has made a real difference. I’m showing my work to people, risking ‘failure’, rejection and more by throwing the good up with the not-so-perfect, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m also starting to sketch in sketchbooks now. Yup, I am a little scared – I think I always will be when it comes to this. But I’m doing it anyway.
Something has been ventured: everything has been gained.
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