Fly to Your Inner World and Color the Emotion
This week, we take an ornamental approach to colored pencils! We will color freely, but so that we don’t start with a blank paper.
This is the piece I am creating in the video. The process is fun and the result is ornamental.
To get started, you will need drawing paper, pencil, eraser, ruler, and round templates, for example, plates or lids will do.
I hope this kind of ornamental coloring inspires you to start and keep going!
This week, I share my latest new media art and thoughts about my career as an artist. This is a sequel to the blog post called Beginner’s Video Art that was published last month.
The video above is my latest artwork “Unstill Still Life.” I have done this largely by programming. I have developed generative algorithms that create and alter shapes. I have designed the individual shapes with a 3D modeling program called Blender. The models and the code are put together with the Unity Engine which is a software environment for developing games.
With the artwork, I participated in the Finnish National Gallery’s Web3 community Alusta challenge called “Nature and Nourishment.” The Finnish National Gallery has many copyright-free images and the organization encourages artists to use them for creating new media art.
I have taken inspiration for the colors and surfaces, as well as the concept itself, from Fanny Churberg’s 1876 painting “Still Life with Vegetables and Fish.”
I love old paintings, so this challenge was made for me. It’s so interesting to examine the brush strokes and think about the 3-dimensional shapes that they are related to. And I have so much to learn in making generative art, that I need small challenges to keep heading forward.
I am still going to continue painting traditionally but I also want to start a career in new media art. I want to bring back my skills in programming from the years when I was a software engineer and use those for creating art. I also have a degree in Industrial Design that helps a lot with 3D modeling. The grant that I received from The Finnish Cultural Foundation has enabled me to develop my style in new media.
But all this is not only exciting but hard too. Do you know that feeling that comes when you have to start life over again? There is enthusiasm in the air, but also some “oh no”.
For a full-time artist, most opportunities are based on a CV.
That was not a problem when I graduated in software design in 1996. I thought: “I have plenty of time to grow my CV.” Then, when I graduated as an industrial designer in 2009, life seemed to be halfway over, but I was able to get quite a decent CV by combining some old and new projects.
When I started working as a full-time visual artist in 2014, I didn’t think about CVs at all at first.
The picture above is from 2015 when most of my art was in art journal pages.
But when I moved forward in painting, the reality hit me – it was very hard to get accepted to exhibitions and organizations without a CV. Mine was practically blank at first, and it has taken a lot of time and effort to add rows to it.
The picture above is from last summer at the exhibition organized by The Albert Edelefelt Foundation. See more pics in this blog post!
And just when I thought that life was almost over at the age of 55, this new media digital art came into my life and it hit me – I’m a beginner again with an empty CV. So, I need and want to participate in challenges, competitions, and exhibitions, to get accepted again. And I want to believe that I still have time to create this new kind of art, not only paintings.
I learn new things about generative art every day and I am amazed that I have been given this long life to experience it. Gratitude is the overriding emotion that emerges from this new beginning. I am lucky in what I have seen in the development of information technology and what I have been able to develop and be involved in developing in the past. I want my future CV to tell the story of a girl who wanted to become an artist as a child, who fell in love with computers as a teenager, and who finally has the artistic vision and the technical tools to combine the two.
If you have been following my blog for a while, you must have noticed that my blog posts are often self-reflective like this one. Visual art-making needs self-reflection too. It’s useful to go back and see how things have changed to make future changes and take steps forward.
With the newest course Liberated Artist Revisited, I invite you to paint with me – to follow directions from Paivi many years ago, and then create more with the current Paivi. At the same time, you can ponder, how your art-making has changed and will change.
Liberated Artist Revisited is a limited edition – only available for purchase until the end of March 2024! >> Buy Now!
This week, I have a video, but it’s different than what I have ever made so far.
A lot has happened in the last few months, and it has also changed my attitude towards life. I have come to believe in destiny. Usually, when I’ve looked back, I’ve seen my life as loose threads. I remember the words of a professor of control engineering from decades ago: “Miss Eerola, what are you aiming for with your studies?”
I finally have an answer for him, maybe he will read my blog from the afterlife and be pleasantly surprised.
Now I know why I have studied programming, vehicle navigation, robotics, control engineering, and industrial design with 3D modeling. Now I know why the boys playing computer games feel my tribe even though I don’t play at all. Now I know why the nerd in me didn’t die even when I was painting oil paintings day after day.
I have programmed this digital work using the Unity game engine. The video has two of my oil paintings in the background: Runaway Sun and Happy Earth.
I’m still quite clumsy in this sport. so this is more of a practice piece than a fine video artwork. But I have learned from all art-making that it’s ok to be a beginner. And it’s ok to share pieces that are not the best of you, at least when you look at them after a while!
When my husband saw the video, he wasn’t very satisfied with the outcome. But I told him that it doesn’t really matter if you’re going on a long hike if the first gas station serves a modest meat pie. The journey is long and there will be plenty of experiences – at least if fate works as it has so far!
Thank you to the Finnish Cultural Foundation for the grant, which allows me to make digital art for many more months.
This week, I have a treat for you – a free video about painting flowers. In the video, I claim:
“When you create art, sometimes it’s adventurous “bird time,”
and sometimes driven by the need for beauty and comfort, so “flower time.”
I believe that we are not only inhabited by an inner bird but also by inner flowers. At the adventure, the flowers are only seen as passive decorations. But when you get friends with the flowers, you notice that they are active characters who like to get together. The inner bird is a hermit adventurer, but flowers tell the common story. This togetherness is also what we need as humans.
“Janonsa sammuttaneet” could be translated to “those who have quenched their thirst.” In this painting, I thought about wallpaper and how its flowers jump from the wall to quench their thirst.
Everytime I see a bird flying across a landscape, I feel the need to paint something big, dramatic, and immersive. Art invites us to fly high and see far – to live the adventurous life of a brave bird. Imagination is our inner bird that wants to experience new things and move forward … Watch the video!
More instructions for flowers in watercolor: Buy my newest course Freely Grown!
I used to think of flower paintings as still lifes, but now I look at them as portraits. The delicacy of flowers makes my inner bird rest and roots me in a comforting life. From the inner bird’s point of view, there are always new sceneries to travel, and the world is never enough. But from the flowers’ point of view, it’s always good to look close to one’s heart and express that we are enough.
“Valosta voimaantuneet” is Finnish and means “Empowered by Light.”
Think about birds and flowers as symbols for two kinds of art – the other is adventurous and escape-seeking, and the other is easier to digest and connection-seeking.
What do you think of this? Do you have more “bird time” or “flower time?” Leave a comment!
