You know, I’ve watched soooooooooo many art business advice videos. One of the main things that I’ve seen many of them hammer in is that “consistency is key”. You got to post often, you’ve got to make content weekly or daily, and just keep going and going.

Consistency is something I’ve always had trouble with. I’m a bit of a tired person when I get home from work so having the energy to make content beyond recording myself going wild on a canvas can be a struggle. But hey! I might be getting somewhere.

Perseverance is continuing to do the thing even when the going gets tough. But sometimes I think perseverance can also be powering through even when things are going your way and resisting the urge to call it good enough. I’ve had a lot of success recently but finding the energy to keep going can be difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying to burn yourself out. I’m saying to keep striving for opportunities and keep going at a pace that’s manageable for you. And that’s what I’ve been doing my best to do.

After successfully block printing t-shirts for the first time, I started my first pre-order that is entirely run by me! Setting up the form and watching the orders come in has been really exciting! Learning how to do shipping and managing orders is something I’m unfamiliar with, but it’s exciting to learn!

In some other very exciting news, I got into another gallery! I’m participating in the Mosaic Art Collective’s Full Circle Exhibition. The piece I entered was “Returning Light”, which I’ll talk about a bit more in the next segment. This is such an exciting show and I’m thrilled to be included.

In this segment, I want to talk about the creation process I went through for the piece “Returning Light”. This was a piece made specifically for the exhibition Full Circle, so it was a bit different then me randomly slinging paint at a canvas.

I took inspiration from the name of the exhibit and decided to create a piece that I felt represented my personal creative journey. This piece specifically represents the change in my art from high school to now as a recent college graduate.

Back in high school, I got to take one art class a semester, so most of the time I would just make art that fit the assignment and I didn’t really have a favorite or specific style at that point. I suppose I still don’t, but I think my work has a specific feel or that it seems similar when you compare the pieces. In high school, I created a painting that always stuck with me. It was a realistic painting of a morning glory and it won a Silver Key in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.

My art style now, or rather my painting style, has become rather abstract recently which you might have seen. This really funny because I had a strong dislike for abstract art in high school, which has mostly subsided at this point. I knew I wanted to create a piece that combined the important memory of the realistic morning glory with my current abstract skills. I also had a couple circular canvases laying around and the name was Full Circle so you I had to use them.

I had recently taken a photo of a morning glory, which you can see below, and I decided to incorporate for my realistic morning glory element. I really loved the pink and white lines at the base of the flower as well as how the vines curl around each other and the metal.

I started with the flower and then grew the design from there. I love the horn shape of the morning glory, so I decided to emphasize it with geometric lines that spreads from inside the opening and and also tie in my more abstract designs. I wanted to contrast the geometry with curling vines that frame the flower and the edge of the canvas. You can see the first sketch I made below.

Next I sketched directly on the canvas. During this iteration, I made a few changes such as adding a morning glory bud and seed pod. This is to represent the past, present, and future of my art. I also added a few more vines and finalized their positions.

The first part I painted was the flowers and blossoms. I probably should have started with a wash of the background color, but I hadn’t picked one at this point. It was hard getting all the hues and details right, but I’ve had a bit of practice with realistic flowers so I got through it. After that I finally decided on a background color and did a blue green to white gradient. This came after a lot of deliberation because I wanted the geometry to be bright and pop but if the background was dark, then the flower wouldn’t pop. The blue gradient ended up being the perfect choice to me. It represents the sky and makes the flower pop because it’s more red than blue.

After that, I got into the linear portion of the painting. The vines came first, I did my best to get them where I wanted after covering up the original pencil lines. Oops lol. I then used various shades of reds, oranges, and yellows to create the geometric lines and then filled in the areas between the lines with runic looking details. After that I went back to the organic side of the painting with a dark green and used more fluid detail lines to fill in the vines. This created a contrast between the geometric flaming rays of a sun and the rolling organic curves of the earth.

And here’s the final piece! I hope you enjoyed the story of how I designed it and the meaning behind it! This creation will be on display at the Mosaic Art Collective until September 26th in Manchester, NH, so go check it out if you have time!

This week’s newsletter has been about perseverance and consistency and what they mean to me. I’ve also talked about exciting things that have happened recently and broke down how I came up with my latest piece. Let me know if there’s anything you specifically want to hear about in the next letter!

Thank you so much for reading! Writing this newsletter is very fun for me, so I hope you also have enjoyed it. See you in the next edition!

-Adrienne