The daily watercolor sketchbook sits on a table in my studio screaming my name from its bindings. “What will you paint today,” it calls to me. As I sit in the other room playing with our daughter, getting another tissue out of our dog’s mouth, and thoroughly enjoying myself…I ponder in my mind what shall paint during nap time? Knowing I still have to write my blog from Monday, post a reel on Instagram to stay relevant on social media, and the most important, be ever present in our daughter’s life. Walking in two worlds is hard sometimes and doing daily artwork is even more challenging. The most rewarding experience of all my days is being a mother. Yet, I must transition here back into my art brain for this blog. So here I sit, about to describe my latest sketchbook entry, all the while thinking of what voice to give to her next stuffed animal. As mentioned above, walking in two worlds where the creativity gets highly expanded and melds together.
My recent art project comes from our family trip to Valley of Fire. I drew my husband while we all sat inside a little sandstone cave in the desert. The crawl space was big enough for all three of us and a dog with room to move around, lay down, etc. The colors on this day were unworldly. The orange illuminated my mind with thoughts of a fire burning bright around Christmas time. I chose to emphasize his hat with the color green to represent the evergreen of winter. I thought this would be a nice contrast from the deep orange, red, and bright yellows I was trying to capture from my memory. While working on this piece, I decided to film it on my phone. I just wanted to see the difference from Time Lapse to regular speed. The results were quite enjoyable and I was able to clip several shorter videos for my social media demands which was nice. Finding time to be creative is quite a challenge. This being said, I am always creative, what I mean is…trying to find time to put these creations down on paper is the hard part. Also, there is no time to watermark this little work in progress so…honor system! I hope you all find time today for a little relaxation. Thank you for reading and happy Tuesday!
-Karen Hilliard