Create Flowing Greenery!
Flowing Greenery has just been published as a part of Imagine Monthly, the on-going art journaling class. The two mini-courses are inspired by great artists. January’s mini-course Doodled Luxury was inspired by Alphonse Mucha. Flowing Greenery is inspired by another great artist from the beginning of 20th century: William Morris!
Like the previous one, Flowing Greenery is a technique-heavy course. It has great ideas especially for those who want to combine acrylics and colored pencils on the same page. You can still purchase Imagine Monthly and get immediate access to the two mini-courses already published. Sign up here!
Fun in February
Finland is definitely not full of greenery at the moment. The winter has been cold, occasionally so cold that Stella has had to wear a hand-knit sweater!
But even if I am not very fond of the winter season with cold weather, lots of snow and early darkness, I quite like February. Maybe it’s because February always seems to be full of events. My birthday is in February. I also like Valentine’s day and this year we will also have an old friend from the UK visiting us. (If you hear me pronounce some of the words more with British than Finnish accent, that’s her influence!)
With snow, there’s a lot of white in Finland at the moment. Whether it’s strawberries picked from the freezer or fresh oranges in my art journal, I crave for those colors!
Another February event – and also full of colors: Inspirational Drawing, my “the drawing class”. Whether you want to approach drawing from an artistic angle or learn more about the designer’s mindset, this class will make you enjoy drawing.
New Video Series: 14 Answers about Creating Art
To celebrate Inspirational Drawing, I am publishing a new video every day for the first two weeks of February! These short videos give focused answers to the questions that people usually ask from me. You can follow them via Facebook, via YouTube or by visiting this blog (already published: Question 1, Question 2). Feel free to share the videos and spread the word!
Video: Abstract Painting
I made this abstract mixed media painting last fall and it has been waiting in the queue ever since as I also recorded a video of the process and had no time editing it.
The painting is called “Wheel Mechanics”. It expresses my thoughts about how good engineering, design and art are connected together but maybe you see something else? With abstract art, it’s good to present a basic idea (in this case: “merging”) in such a general level that it leaves room for interpretations. That’s one of the main difficulties in creating abstract art, I think.
I was about to make a video introducing my online classes so I combined the two together. You can watch me painting + get info about the classes.
Inspirational Drawing is the next class!
It’s my “the drawing class” and especially good for you who wants to enjoy drawing without boundaries. See these blog posts for fabulous drawings created by the students of this class: Explore by Drawing!, Do You Have a Talent for Creating Art? and sign up now!
Having an Art Blog
With this blog post, I am celebrating 10 years of blogging! This blog started “only” about 7 years ago, but my first blog post was written in May 2005, over 10 years ago! So, this time it’s all about bloggging, what it has done for me, and what it can do for you as well!
One or Many Blogs?
I suggest that you only have a one blog and that you try to update it as regularly as you can. I have done the exact opposite at first …
My first blog was a knitting blog called “Päivi neuloo” (Paivi Knits). It was born at the time when knitting blogs started to become popular and when both local and virtual knitting groups were born. I was the founder of the first Finnish virtual knitting community, so of course I started blogging too. This blog doesn’t exist anymore, but I was able to create a screenshot from my personal archive.
Now when I look at those socks (my own design called “Ornamental Cabbage”) I can see the connection with my current work. But back then, I didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t very active blogger and often felt that I have more finished knits than single blog posts. So to release myself from the pressures of blogging every knitted item, I created a new blog “Sukanvarsi” which was focused on sock knitting only. Now I only had to blog about finished sock projects!
In 2008, I founded my first Etsy shop Kukkilintu. The shop needed a blog so I founded one. Updating this blog was much more fun even if I blogged in a foreign language, in English. I started to get followers from other sides of the world. Along showing the handcrafted projects, I tried to write something about my personal life and desires too. During this time, I became more and more interested in creating art again. So I founded a new blog called “Peony and Parakeet” It wasn’t meant to be much, just a place to post some collage art. One of the main reasons for its existence was that I wanted to participate in some challenges and be able to send links to my images.
But to my surprise, Peony and Parakeet started to get followers. To get Finnish followers too, I decided to start a new blog: Pioni ja Parakiitti, a similar than Peony and Parakeet, but in Finnish! For a couple of years, I blogged both in English and in Finnish, updated many blogs and wished I only had one! In 2012, I finally decided to have only one English blog and move to my own website.
If I could turn back the time, I had only stayed in one blog and gradually moved to a more narrowed focus and towards blogging in English. Building a new audience from one blog to another takes much more time than expanding the current audience. Every time I began a new blog, I thought that I would be a better blogger in a new blog. But now, when looking back, I only see gradual development, not that changing one blog to another had made a big change.
How to Find Focus?
The best way to build a great blog is to blog about three kinds of things:
1) things that make you really excited even if revealing them feels scary at first
2) things that resonate with your current audience
3) things that excite new audience as well.
When you manage to create blog posts that succeed in all those three, you have found your focus!
In 2010, I wanted to gain more audience. Blogging had become a regular practice and my new little Etsy shop, also called Peony and Parakeet, had also got some more customers. I examined digital marketing guides and realized that I needed to create a blog post that would be useful for my readers. So I did what was told, I wrote a blog post about creating hand-decorated papers and waited for a couple of days. During that time, very little people read the post. I felt disappointed and forgot the whole thing. But now, when looking back, it’s my most popular blog post ever! It only took some time for people to find it.
For me, blogging has taught that other people see me often more clearly than I do. Including art that didn’t look so great to me has been one of the best things that I have done. By reading the comments, I have learned so much and it has also, in turn, made me a better teacher and commenter. I think that it’s built on blogging that when publishing a new blog post, it feels nerve-wracking. I often worry about grammar mistakes and think that I must be the only person in the world interested in the subjects that I write about. But the truth is that the more you go into the core of your enthusiasm, the more you will attract others.
What Makes an Art Blog?
There are few things where I try to improve and hope that others will too.
1) Being a visual person, pictures are really important for me. When I see very small pictures and a lot of text, I turn away.
2) Having very little text and no personal images makes the blog more distant.
3) About the quality of artwork: the more the images communicate visually, the better. If the artwork does not embark imagination or only shows off technical skills, it remains empty.
With blogging, we can also add more meaning to our images. In the picture above, I am holding a painting that I made when I was about 10 years old. Our family is represented in flowers: the blue violets are my mother, the dark palm leaves are my father, the yellow flowers are my two sisters and the red flowers represent me. The second photo has been taken at my favorite spot, remembering the night when I made the art journal spread and enjoyed listening to opera.
10 Years of Blogging – Celebrate with Me!
Have a look at the new Gallery page!
Check the updated Create page!Tell me in the comments:
Do you have a blog? If not, are you planning to begin one?
Feel free to include a link to your blog!
Tribute to Finnish Art Rugs
I made this painting just before Christmas but as it has a special story, I wanted to blog about it later when I had more time to write. Actually, I didn’t even plan for creating anything in the middle of holiday cleaning and cooking. But I just had to.
Finnish Art Rugs
Namely, my husband bought a wall art rug (“ryijy” in Finnish) from an online auction and it happened to arrive just before Christmas eve. We had been searching for one for some time. It had to suit with the colors and style of our living room and not be enormous (as many of them often are). We had a designer in mind too – Ritva Puotila, a Finnish woman who has recently designed carpets for her own company Woodnotes. In 1950-60s, she used to design beautiful, painterly Finnish art rugs. The rug that my husband found was her design called “Fireside Evening” and I think it looks wonderful in our mid-century modern living room (which has a fireplace in the opposite wall).
As you can see from the close-up photo, the rug is not only black and red but has many colors to create the painterly effect. At those times, in 1950-60s, wall rugs were fashionable in Finland and especially these kind of rugs that are as much modern art as home textiles. Many women bought the patterns and sewed or weaved their rugs by themselves. My mother was one of them. She chose a rug design called “Ruutrikki” (a made-up word that resembles “broken squares”) and the designer might have been Päikki Briha, if I remember correctly. Here’s an old photo of me and my father showing the rug in the background. That rug also has a lots of colors. It was difficult to zoom in, but hopefully you get the idea.
While touching and admiring our new red rug, I got very emotional. My mind was filled with mixed emotions. I was happy about the new art textile that would bring a warm atmosphere to our living room. On the other hand, while browsing the old photos, I saw people that have passed a way, photographed in front of my mother’s rug. When I remembered that many of those art rugs were sketched with watercolors and then transformed to a grid pattern, I just couldn’t help it. I had to take out my watercolor set and start a new painting even if it was getting late and I felt pretty tired.
Creating a Mixed Media Painting
While painting, I didn’t think about anything particular, but of course, the rugs found their way to the end result …
The painting turned out to be some kind of still life with a dark vase and few sad-looking carnations. Carnations were my mother’s favorite flowers and my father used to buy them for her every year, at their wedding anniversary.
If you look at Finnish art rugs at my Pinterest board, many of them have some kind of melancholy in them. Maybe it’s caused by a combination of muted colors, high contrasts and simplified, abstract approach. These were the elements that used in my painting too.
I finished the painting with colored pencils and named it as “Ryijyneilikat” – “Rug Carnations”. They are imaginary flowers that grow downwards, that are not used to be centerpieces, that blend in the background. They enforce other elements of the still life to step up and go forward. Just like my modest mother did for her children.
Create midcentury modern designs from simple shapes!
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