This week I have a video that is made for all who love art and love creating art. It’s about my artistic journey from painting to digital 3D art. My new digital creations move and change color on screen and in virtual reality.
3D Art – Watch the Video!
I am currently making digital artwork in a three-dimensional world. I have received a grant for it from The Finnish Cultural Foundation. The project will continue until September 2024, but it has progressed to the extent that it is good to gather thoughts and show some results on a video.
The artwork is not finished yet. The most important thing that I need to do is the interaction with the viewer. I will also include sounds. Fortunately, the project still has five months left. The project is part-time, but on the other hand, breaks are good, because the ideas have time to grow.
Traditional 2D Meets Digital 3D
I understand that I am only at the beginning of everything that technologies make possible and where my artistic thinking can go. It’s exciting. For a long time, I have envied how the students of my painting and drawing courses have great enthusiasm to learn new things. Now I have this situation with digital art.
I am grateful to have been born in an era where all this is possible. With digital art, we have something Rubens and Kandinsky would envy. It would be wonderful to show them all this, even if it would be only just this video. I think a certain da Vinci would like to join Rubens and Kandinsky! There have always been artists who have wanted to see into the future and go on a journey to an unknown land. I think this attitude doesn’t break the tradition but keeps it alive.
I haven’t used acrylic paints on a canvas for a long time. But now I wanted to paint faster and not wait for the layers to dry.
Painting Freely
This painting took me a couple of long evenings and I deliberately left it abstract, because the subject of the painting is not about the flowers, but about the power rising from the ground.
Here’s how the painting started: loose strokes and juicy colors.
It’s easy to fall in love with colors, but when you want depth, you also need muddy colors: browns and greys.
I like to use several different brushes in one painting, and my favorite brushes are very thin.
The title “Muutosvoima – Driving Force” sums up what I want to tell with this painting. Muutosvoima could also be translated as “power of change.”
I believe that the best power of change is not the hype created by others, but the inner enthusiasm that has a grounded tone. Because isn’t it so that flowers only bloom when the earth warms up? Sunlight alone is not enough.
Belonging Somewhere – The Good and The Bad
I’ve been thinking about togetherness lately. It’s a wonderful feeling. For example, last week when many people commented on my post, I felt happy that this blog brings us together. One of the best things that has come with the internet is that you can be pretty weird and still find like-minded people.
However, the sense of belonging has its danger. Art is about walking your own path. Encounters are important, but you also need to go in the other direction to create something unique. As a teacher, I have often thought about how I could better guide people in their own direction.
Art is like a pot that you have to break first and then put together again. The pot can be broken in many ways and at best, you find your own way to put it together. You need a driving force to break the pot and then persistence to rebuild it.
Finding Your Places in the Art World
In my career as an artist, I have often wanted to be like someone else. I have envied popular artists and then later realized that I wouldn’t want to create the kind of art that they do. I realized that I would like to be popular in creating something else and somewhere else.
With experience, the art world opens up. Instead of one hall, you begin to see numerous smaller rooms. What is popular in one room can be overlooked in another. Being an artist requires a lot of self-esteem and the power to move from one room to another.
When you find one room that feels like your own, the sense of belonging is at its greatest. However, it’s better to move between several rooms and find many groups. At best, the artist acts as a bridge between different things.
My Word of the Year – Do You Have One?
My word for 2024 is Integrate. This year I have allowed myself to do more diverse things, but on the other hand, I have tied all the pieces together so that one benefits the other.
Have you chosen a word for this year? How has it been realized?
This week, I have something very different than before: cross stitch! Buy my first commercial design Primavera from my Etsy shop called Needle and Peony!
There are two main reasons for designing this pattern. The first is the need for creative play and the second that I couldn’t find anything like this from other designers: a fantasy woman’s facial portrait that wouldn’t be a huge project.
Playing and Drawing in the Stitchly App
My need for creative play comes from being very serious with art this year. I have spent a lot of time in programming computer art and I have been painting a bit too. It’s all great but I started to miss drawing, and especially, making something that is purely illustrative and not so abstract and artistically challenging.
So because I have had cross stitching as a hobby almost all my life, I bought an app called Stitchly and started drawing there – on lunch breaks and such, a few stitches at time. First I just doodled freely with the Apple pen to get to know the app.
Stitchly is easy to use and with the pen, drawing is fun and the squares get filled nicely. Of course, you can also import a photo and let the app create the chart automatically. But to make the image look realistic enough, the stitch count needs to be high and the design … well I don’t think it would be a design anymore, just a pixelated photo. So, when I design, I like to draw with the pen and if I use references, I only use them as inspiration and draw every square myself.
I also like that you can have a custom palette in Stitchly. I have made a palette that has all the DMC colors from my stash, so I can also check the real color when designing.
Drawing and Stitching Faces
When people begin drawing in adulthood, they often start with faces. Eyes, mouth, nose too. Facial features create a connection to the person born on paper. It’s also fun to draw hair and add decorations there.
So, one day it hit me that even when doing cross stitches, I can get company from the character I am stitching. However, couldn’t find a cross-stitch pattern that was a reasonable size and where the character was naturally asymmetrical, but still sparked the imagination.
My stitching time is lonely time in the evening. I clean the studio if I have been painting, and then pick extra glasses and while stitching, watch other cross stitchers’ videos on Youtube, so Flosstube as we cross stitchers call the channels.
So when I wanted to stitch a facial portrait of an imaginary person, I decided to draw it in Stitchly. After making the chart, the fun started – I was stitching my own pattern!
Primavera can be stitched in the colors I suggest in the pattern, but since there are only 11 colors, it’s easy to change them as you like.
Although Primavera means spring, by changing the colors you can associate a different season or different theme with the character. The decorations are designed to be so general that they don’t limit the character you create.
The hair has three colors of different darkness, the skin has four. The hair band has two colors close to each other. It is easy to change the accent colors of the mouth and eyes, and also the colors of the decorations.
You can buy the pattern for Primavera in my Etsy shop!
Needle and Peony
It feels nostalgic to have something on sale at Etsy again! Long before I became a full-time artist, I opened the Etsy shop called Kukkilintu, then later changed the name to Peony and Parakeet. That little shop had a major impact on my career and life. Most of my customers lived outside Finland and I started communicating more and more in English.
Maybe some of the current readers of this blog were my customers over ten years ago when I sold folk bags (currently available as a knitting pattern), handknitted doll clothes, hand-decorated papers and cards!
Now I changed the shop name to Needle and Peony and intend to add some charts over time. Maybe some slow stitching ideas also, as I have some of them too. Last week, I set up an Instagram account called @needleandpeony to show my cross stitch projects – also what I have stitched from other designers.
While designing Primavera, it hit me that I have a pile of drawings that I have made for classes and that could be turned into cross stitch patterns. When I browsed them, I couldn’t decide what to choose next, so I now ask you – what would you like me to design next? I have picked 5 drawings to choose from, leave a comment and let me know which one is your favorite! Which one of these would make a great cross stitch design?
I have often wondered why I am an artist. The first answer that comes to mind is creative freedom. “Creative” and “freedom” seem like easy words at first. Everyone wants to be creative, right? And who doesn’t want to be free?
But creative and freedom are also difficult words. Especially if you think of creativity as the opposite of traditional or familiar, and freedom as the opposite of safety and stability.
I find many things in myself where I love tradition and security. You could call me a homebody, that’s how much I love being at home. If I had to choose between a museum of historical art and a contemporary gallery, I would definitely go to the museum. And I love decorative items and anything small and cute. Also, my studio is always super clean – not what is expected from an artist!
But I still want to be a liberated artist, create a mess, break the formula, and then discover something new out of it. Crafting, or copying reference photos, or drawing the same things year after year, has never been enough for me. I have wanted to blow up the lump inside me, which has accumulated from creative energy that has not been able to get out. That’s why my courses also have a lot of creative freedom.
The idea of the course Liberated Artist Revisited is not to create an image similar to what I do in the videos, but to solve a puzzle that we first create. Creative freedom begins when you realize that there is not only the art of creating but also the art of seeing. When you highlight what you see, you become a liberated artist.
