Thing-a-day.com

This is dated the 29th, but it is actually my thing for the 28th (it was just after midnight when I put the date in I guess). We get one more last one tomorrow.

I created a short visit to Outpost for the express purpose of making this drawing, but the soy latte was a pretty sweet bonus. And I’ll take pretty much any excuse to visit Outpost.

February 22nd
You do all this big talkin’: Quote book

I decided to do something with one of my extra journals I had lying around that my friend bought for me awhile ago (when I looked at it in a store and went ‘ooh pretty’).

More photos of the quote book beneath the cut…

(more…)

It was suggested that I draw something I wouldn’t normally draw, and I couldn’t come up with anything better.

Yesterday’s Thing-A-Day: A descriptive list of my random quirks, which I shall copy & paste below. Read if you’d like, and let me know what you think about me. Personally, I like me, most of the time.

Today’s Thing-A-Day: I went to yoga. Choosing to partake in a yoga class is totally a creative thing, right? I feel creative doing it, so therefore it counts. If it doesn’t, I’m making supper tonight. So there you go.

Here is my list:

1. I startle very easily. At least once a week, my husband walks into a room and says something, and I scream bloody murder.
2. I go through phases where I am extremely lethargic, somewhat depressed, and can’t force myself to do anything that needs to be done. I’m in one of those right now. If these symptoms sound familiar to any of you, please help. I hate feeling like this. It’s about once a month. PMDD?
3. I have a tiny piercing-like hole on the top part of EACH of my ears, right where my the top corner of my ear starts and my face begins. They’re in the same place on each side. I was born with them.
4. I always, in some way, narrate my life inside my head. Usually this means thoughts that occur in a format very much like a social networking status update, but they also occur in “About Me” lists such as these.
5. I secretly crave stress and chaotic situations, and a part of me is thankful when they occur. When everything’s going well, I’m secretly bored and awaiting a disaster.
6. I like kids, but don’t want to have them, because I fear I would ABSOLUTELY LOATHE being a mother.
7. When driving alone, I have full, complete conversations with myself, out loud, and that’s when I feel the most like myself. That’s when I’m most comfortable. I’m my own best friend. But this only occurs when I’m driving.
8. I sometimes visualize my own death or the death of loved ones, just to see how they (or I) would deal with it. But I disagree with my former counselor who considered this a “suicidal gesture”. I do this with not just death, but also divorce, job loss, pregnancy, etc. It’s like mentally preparing myself for tragedies. And, yes, at this point in my life and level of maturity, I would consider becoming pregnant a tragedy. No offense to anyone who is a parent, it’s just not something I want.
9. I am very strongly for free birth control, and abortion if that doesn’t work, because it’s the poorest, most uneducated people that have the most unwanted pregnancies. I DAMN near think that abortion of pregnancies in poverty should be mandatory, if the mother is under 18 or already has X number of kids.  The stigma & difficulty of getting an abortion is creating more and more poor and stupid people. Sorry, but it’s true. I feel lack of sex education, birth control, and abortion on demand will eventually lead to the human race de-evolving to level of dumb beasts.
10. I feel guilty for buying bottled water for various reasons, but I like drinking out of bottles more than cups, so I make each bottle last as long as possible. Whenever I drink all the water out of a bottle, I draw one “X” on the label with a marker, then refill & refrigerate it. I do this until it has 4 X’s, then I throw it away.
    • I would wash the bottles, but the labels come off, and they get shaped funny, so it’s not the same. Plus, that’d mean me running my dishwasher more, so either way I’m using up some precious resource.
11. I think all drugs should be legal. Addicts or recreational users should not be considered criminals. I don’t think it’s any more wrong to smoke crack than it is to get drunk. They both have their risks. Smoking pot actually has less of them than using alcohol. So why is just one of them OK legally?
12. I love my job except for: I feel like my life is boring. I envy people who come home from work exhausted, sore and starving, because they busted their asses and didn’t have time to eat much that day. I want to not have time to sit still. Unfortunately, my job requires sitting still. I want to come home from work sore and SO FUCKING RELIEVED to be home.
13. Working from home makes you feel like you’re always at work. If you envy my job, please stop. It’s not that great. Even though it is funny sometimes to teleconference in the buff.
14. I am fascinated by medical anomalies….. The plights of people with two-hundred-pound tumors, disgusting facial deformities, primordial dwarfs, and the profoundly obese could keep me glued to DHC for hours. One of my favorite shows is “Mystery Diagnosis”.
15. I wish I didn’t own a TV. But I am married and my husband likes it. And I’m not a bitch wife who rules the house with an iron fist. I do like a lot of shows, but could live without it. My true addiction, of course, is Intarnets. I hate TV background noise.
16. Unless I am sleeping, I HATE being in a dimly lit room. Like seriously MOTHER FUCKING HATE. Ironically, my husband hates bright lights. This is one of those things we compromise on. So we sometimes have bright time for me, and dim time for him.
17. I love to paint. My favorite subject to paint is absolutely nothing. I just like to dip in my brush and mush paint around on the canvas. I hardly care what the end result looks like. My apologies to all my MUW art professors.
18. I’m a nosy neighbor. Yesterday’s highlight was sitting on the gazebo while the people in apartment 3 had their window open and were conversing loudly (and from the sounds of it, drunkenly, there was lots of use of the word “motherfucker”). I was hoping they’d see me sitting there, all lonesome, and invite me over, but they didn’t. They went into another room where I couldn’t hear them. :(
19. I live in fairly densely populated little area. There’s my two-building apartment complex, surrounded by a few houses, and a grouping of mobile homes (Ok, ok, TRAILER PARK. SHUT UP. It’s a safe neighborhood. I think.).  However, this does not stop me from changing clothes with the window curtains quite askew. Most people know me as very shy, and I certainly am at times, however, for some reason, I don’t really care if anybody sees me naked. It’s not that I think I have a smokin’ hot body (I high dislike it most of the time), I just simply DON’T CARE.
20. I would like to lose weight, but would not like to put forth the effort.
    • They say it’s easier if you don’t “go on a diet”, but instead make a “lifestyle change”… but to me, THAT’S even scarier than a diet! Diets are temporary, but a “lifestyle change” is just what it sounds like. Those are my connotations of the words, anyway.

Day eight was more quick-as-you-can scribbling in my paperback journal.  Like so.

This practice is really about getting me out of that vacuum of “I don’t want to make anything and would rather just stare at the TV since it is too late to make something anyway.”  Because, really.  How hard can it be to doodle for a few seconds?  And maybe  I’ll even be inspired by the doodling when I flip back through the book.

For February 7th, I created a trip to go get a haircut. Here’s some sketches I did along the way:

a friend of mine left her journal at my house so i added a couple of things to her wonderful collection of thoughts and drawings and meditations (she permitted me to read it, so it’s okay).

i gave her a quote that inspired my thing-a-day name, and i will share it with you too:

You are an infinite event. You think you end here, at your skin? You think this is you? You think you will be reincarnated? No. You are an event stretching out, out, out. You are an event without end. Isn’t that beautiful?

I made this in my page a day book today and I scanned several more older pages to add to the page a day set on flickr .

-Robyn (robayre)

Thing a Day 5 - something different

Originally uploaded by emberlexi

Took a break from drawing to work on journal covers. Here’s one I’m
really excited about. It got a coat of metal primer and now it needs
some paint to bring out the mushrooms.

I made this little book over the weekend. The paper block one day, and then cut the cover and assembled it the next. It’s roughly 4 x 5 inches, is filled with 50 pages of mixed paper types, and has a soft vinyl wrap around cover! It’s going to be a late birthday present for a friend. I hope she likes it!

I went to the park today (February 3) and spent several hours getting cold and making watercolors. They came out terribly, and I won’t show them to you. Later on I made this picture of my friends’ cats Lucy (on the left) and Linus (on the right), which I am quite happy to show to you!

So this year I’ve resolved to work on a page a day in a book I have. This is a page I did earlier today. The pages are in the same vein as Keri Smith’s morning collages, in that they are really just an expirament to keep creative juices flowing, and not too much emphasis put on the actual outcome. Normally my pages are done in the evening. I need to catch up on scanning in the pages, but there are a few posted here in a flickr set.

For February 2nd, I created a trip to Newark, New Jersey to see Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, and Gary Peacock. I made some sketches along the way:

Well February is finally here. You would have thought my first “daily thing” would have been so much better, since I’ve been so excited to get started. I just had to get organized for it! So I cleaned and rearranged my office for my first Thing. I know cleaning is not necessarily creative, but I felt pretty creative and inspired when I tackled this, and my Thing-a-Day Accountabilibuddy says it counts, haha. It was no minor feat - I stayed for 3 hours after work to finish:

After:

So okay, I know some of you are thinking the arrangement of office/drawer stuff does not = Daily Thing. Behold, this was journaled after midnight last night, so technically on Feb. 1st:

And there are two full pages in addition but I didn’t realize when I took the pic that the words showed up so clearly! *blushes* Anyway, that’s just a little brainstorming for ya.

And you know what?:

(And right behind my “start” lies Amanda’s on screen! Yay us!)

Now I am refreshed, ORGANIZED, and ready for Day Two!

A great new exercise for me has been to quickly experiment with lines, dots and repetition in an art journal I created from an old paperback.

See more on my blog.