Catching Up on Creativity

Since yesterday's rant, I have been working on my mental attitude. I mean really, this whole studio phobia can be summed up as me being down on myself. Self worth and I have had a tug of war for ages. Today I am going to fight back for a while!

I knew I needed impetus to be happy in my studio again. I have watched several movies that gave me the old feelings of creativity. The movies were The Corpse Bride (I love Tim Burton's animated movies), The Bridge to Terabithia (the boy's sketchbook is quite inspiring), and Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider??? Well, yes, because the main character (a skeleton on fire) reminded me of the book To Ride a Pale Horse. I love that series of books by Pierz Anthony. They make me think about life differently.

As I have been very actively searching for inspiration I made myself go to the zoo on Thursday with my son's second grade class. I thought (and hoped) I would get some cool photographs and be inspired. As it turned out, it was a nice outing but I wasn't very impressed by anything I saw. The neatest thing I did see was the bird aviary where they had these exotic birds that let you get very very close to them.

Yesterday's rant included some commitments I needed to take care of. I have scanned all THREE of my Creative Prompt words here today. The first word was TREE. We have nine mature oak trees on our city lot. I wanted to try to capture their beauty. When I put pen and pencil to paper however, it didn't want to work. The first try produced this drawing of our patio door looking over our backyard:
There is a bird feeder, dog dish, dog ball, rug, white wrought iron railing around the deck, one of the trees in the yard, the old shed in the yard, and some of the greenery along the back fence all depicted in this drawing. The biggest thing I learned from this was that a charcoal pencil will leave charcoal all over my hands and will smear a lot. :)

By the time I was thinking about trying to do something better for the word TREE, the word QUEEN was posted. That was quite appropriate as that Friday that the word QUEEN was up, we were headed out to a renaissance faire to perform our music at! I SO wanted to capture a regal Queen Elizabeth for that word. I couldn't do her justice though.
This is ok. I never was good with faces, which is kind of odd considering I often get compliments on my dolls' facial expressions. I guess I am better at sculpting than drawing. lol Oh, I almost forgot the "Christmas Tree" as my son called it. That is to represent the Tree of Life quilt block. I was still in my funky mood and didn't really do these words justice.

Which brings us to SQUARE, yesterday's word. I am much more pleased with how this word turned out. I could relate to it in quilting terms with the Square in a Square block pattern, the Irish Chain block pattern, and the Snowball block pattern.
GOALS: I did work on a schedule for studio time. I have not committed to it yet, but made so much progress that I am happy with what I wrote down on paper. I also DID yesterday's goals of posting my creative prompt pictures. My goals over the weekend are to straighten out my studio just a little bit as I have let it go and used all the horizontal spaces for storage of mundane items. I am also committing to spending one hour today and one on Sunday to sit at my sewing machines and work on any one of a number of UFO's I have available to me. In fact, I may try to make a goal list or UFO list on my sidebar after posting this or later this weekend.

You know what? I actually feel better. Berating myself yesterday and seeing how silly all my excuses were, has helped a bit. In the back of my brain, as I have been typing this all, I keep thinking about a wall hanging I have. Maybe I will try to add something to it today. :) Oh, and a side note to self...every new quilt I make does NOT have to be king sized just because that is the practical size to make a quilt. lol

Have a great weekend everyone!!!