Yoga Week - Day 2 & Drawing Week Plan

Yesterday, I started looking at yoga resources through the library and YouTube. I put tons of books on hold at the library, too. But as the day progressed, and I started feeling kinda crampy from my regular, daily activity, I realized that I don't need to be doing something physical right now. Being pregnant is hard enough on my little body, I don't need to add in a lot of extra work.

So today, I'm going to start Drawing Week. I got a little drawing kit from my awesome cousin Amber that I'm going to pull out today and start using. I know exactly where it is, so it won't be a big deal to get it out. And I think it will be good to keep working on things that challenge me artistically, especially because I don't think of myself as an artist.

Yoga Week Plan & Day 1

I've settled on doing Yoga Week. I knew I wanted to do something more physical, but I am pretty limited by pregnancy and funds.

At first, I didn't want to do yoga because I was worried about it being boring to post about, and I might lose interest. I'm not new to yoga, I've been doing it on and off for several years now, but I've always done the same DVD. I figure I can use the library and YouTube as resources to expand my yoga knowledge and explore the practice beyond the one DVD I enjoy doing.

I have a book that I've talked about before, You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-Up Girls, and one of its badges is a yoga one. In the steps they have, you take A LOT of classes, which I don't have the money to do. I am thinking about using it as a guide to what I look for using my free resources. It has a lot of good resources for obtaining information and knowing what to do, so that should be really helpful.

My plan today is to read through/study the plan in the book, and then adapt it to what I want to do. I'm also going to do some research to find resources for exploring yoga over the next two weeks.

My plan for the next two weeks:

• I want to explore the different types of yoga - Iyengar, Ashtanga, Sivananda/Kripalu, and Aunsara
• After I've tried them all, I will pick the one I enjoy most and then explore it more deeply.
• I want to try to practice yoga at least once a day, maybe even twice a day. 

SMASH*Book/Collage Week - Days 11-14 & Final Summary

The last days of this hobby went pretty badly. I was given a new video game that I've been wanting for months, and I just couldn't resist playing it, which happened during the times I would have been working on the hobby stuff. I am a bit disappointed in myself for not finishing up the two weeks. It was really more than just wanting to play a video game that kept me from getting things done. My inspiration had felt like it "dried up" and I just couldn't figure out what to do next. I enjoyed what I did work on, and I plan to keep my stuff out so that I can work on pages and ideas as they come to me.

I still haven't figured out what I am going to start tomorrow, so that will be a nice surprise as I work it out in my mind tonight. I have too much trouble with decisions...

SMASH*Book/Collage Week - Day 10

I work on anything yesterday! Partly, I was too distracted by video games and stuff, but I also don't feel "inspired" about any ideas. I don't want to just quit in the middle of everything, so I want to work on something tonight, but it's kind of hard. Maybe if I start sorting through different things that I want to save, I'll get an idea....

SMASH*Book/Collage Week - Day 9, Part 2

This is the piece that I've been working on for the past few days. It's an idea that's been in my mind for a good 6 or 7 months, that I couldn't figure out how to get down. I had tried Photoshop at first, but I don't have the skills, and it didn't have the right look. This didn't come out quite the way I originally envisioned it, but I like the way it turned out. It's a representation of the way I feel dealing with my Bipolar Depression, Anxiety, and OCD.

I found the images on Pinterest months ago, and knew that's what I wanted to use. I didn't cut clean around the girl because I wanted it to look separate. The background and girl were both printed on cardstock; I had to brighten the image of the woods because on the first printing you couldn't tell what it was. I roughed up the edges by rubbing them on the sidewalk and scraping them with my fingernails; you can't really tell in the photo, but I like the texture it gives to it. I used my metallic markers to draw the glowing light/door thing at the end of the path. Then I went to work on the thorns, which took the longest of the whole process. I practiced on a scrap paper at first because I wanted them to look "just right," but I couldn't get them to that point, and I finally just decided to go with what I knew how to draw and adapt it. I've been drawing vines a lot over the past few months, so I did that, but instead of leaves and flowers, I add thorns. After doing it all with just the silver marker, it didn't look quite the way I wanted it to, so I went back and did all the detail work with one of Mitchell's fancy Micron pens that he gave me. Doing all those vines and thorns was pretty therapeutic. By the time I finished that, I knew what I wanted to call it. I looked up "fancy lettering" on Pinterest, then I just kind of improvised until I liked the way it all looked. The last thing I added was the stripes/arrows down the sides. On them, I wrote out the things the thorns represent, the things the light at the end represents, and how I feel as I'm "running" toward the end. I feel really good about it all, and I'm excited that I was able to create something that has so much personal meaning to it.

I'm considering attempting another collage of the same "type" for my next project. I'll probably decided as the day goes on.

SMASH*Book/Collage Week - Days 7, 8 & 9

On Monday, I was able to go get some metallic markers at Walmart. Then I got started on my collage project. I didn't take any process pictures because I just want to post the finished product of this one.

I was able to work a little bit on it yesterday (Tuesday), but not much because we were busy.

I was able to put the final touches of work done today. It was really just a lot of detail work, which is why it took so long. I just finished the page a couple minutes ago! I'm going to wait for daylight, though, to take a picture and talk about my process.

SMASH*Book/Collage Week - Days 5 & 6

I felt a little stunted the past couple days. Saturday, I decided to start working on one of my collage ideas, and I got a couple images printed out. I'm going to collage it onto one of the black pages in my SMASH*Book, though, so I need pens that will show up on black. By the time I realized this, it was too late in the day to stop by the art store.

Sunday, I couldn't quite get in the right creative mood for any of the other ideas, so I was struggling with what to do. I thought about trying a different collage idea, but there seemed to be too many distractions and too much need for my attention in other area, so I eventually gave up. Once most of the kids were in bed, I finally just started cutting phrases and such out of my big stack of magazines. I cut things that appealed to me at the time, but nothing with a strong theme. I figure they'll come to use some time in the future.

It was a bit frustrating that I didn't get more than that done, just because I wanted to do so much more, but couldn't quite figure it out. I'm going to stop by Jerry's Artarama today to see if they sell metallic gel pens, or something similar, in singles instead of big packs, since I only need a few colors and don't want to spend much money. I also need to find my little crafting caddy, which is in a box in the garage somewhere. It has my craft glues, which I'll need to attach stuff because my glue stick won't be strong enough for the cardstock I printed the images on. It's barely holding down the photos of Annabelle already! This feels like a lot of extraneous stuff that will get in the way of actually creating, but I guess that's just what happens sometimes.