Long post about art and creativity and trust

Back in 2016, I bought this sketchbook. Others like it, by the way, can usually be found at places like Ross or Marshall’s at deep discounts. The first page inside the sketchbook explains why I bought it.

The first thing I drew was a rendition of my Take Your Action Figure To Work Day, Mad Magazine’s “Spy Vs Spy.” Past that, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with the book, but then I went to a fundraising night at a local tea and coloring supplies shop. We could take pages from multiple books they’d laid out on tables for us, and when I got home with one and a half colored pages, I decided this sketchbook was a good place to put them.

I don’t like to color IN coloring books. I tear out the pages, put them on a clipboard, color them, and then add them to the sketchbook. For this reason, I also don’t like coloring books that use both sides of a page. More on that later.

Ultimately, by coloring while waiting for appointments (Debby’s and mine), at jury duty, and at home (including on craft nights), I filled this book with 81 pages that I colored from March 2016 to December 2020. I also started sketchbooks to store other people’s coloring pages if they wanted to leave them at Houndstooth Hall, and Lynne brought her own book to leave here for her coloring pages. It contains a few, but she has more at home she’s done during the pandemic that I hope get added to her book one day.

As 2021 began, I reached for another blank sketchbook.

I did a collage on the first page, and then input my first coloring page that I finished on New Year’s Day 2021. Between then and a few days ago, I put 109 coloring pages into the book. So it took me four years to put 81 pages in the first book, and only a year and two months to do another 109 pages! That’s because my job was a pandemic fatality, providing me more time to be creative, and coloring became my go-to activity when I needed to think about writing. In 2021, I believe I THOUGHT about writing more than I wrote, a consequence of allowing other people to impair my novel writing efforts.

Lesson learned.

By the end of 2021, as new writing picked up, coloring fell off. I’d thought I’d fill the book by December. However, there’s no deadline for coloring.

I post most of my pages to Instagram, where there are many other people who color, and some of them are AMAZING. I’m all just let me stay inside the lines, and they’re turning other people’s drawings into art. I get inspired there all the time, not only to color, but to remember how important it is for a person to respect her urge to create. I’ve watched one artist go from coloring to creating sketches of her own electronically to finally picking up paint and brush and creating art old school. What a great thing to see an artist’s journey as her confidence grows and her vision sharpens.

I’m also inspired by Lynne when she texts her new coloring pages to me. She’s better than I am, just a statement of fact. I love her color choices and the details she takes on, and I recognize that along with her gifts, she has a characteristic when she’s creative that I often lack–PATIENCE. My Aries self wants to hurry and finish.

Lynne’s always been this way; the reasons why she can sew and crochet and embroider and garden and do cross-stitch, all beautifully, are because she’s gifted and patient. She will say about me that I’m a storyteller and she is not. I’m not sure I agree that she’s not; she’s definitely a person whose imagination, and whose support of my imagination, helped me grow in confidence as the writer my mother and uncle encouraged me to be. She was my first creative collaborator and paved the way for me to trust Riley, Timothy, Jim, and Timmy as partners, and to have the courage to finally let other people, beginning with Tom, and then Amy, Lynn B, Rhonda, and Lindsey, read my work.

There are others, of course, some of whom encourage me even without reading my writing. There are people through the years who’ve liked my poetry more than my fiction. All of them are a reminder that eventually, you need the courage to enjoy sharing your creative efforts with people who want to see or read or hear them. I hope those of you reading the blog know the impact that your comments and reactions to my paintings or novels, and even what I post here, have on me. You have no idea how many times a supportive comment from you has kept me going. Thank you.

Now it’s time for a new sketchbook for my coloring pages. For those coloring books that put drawings on both sides, I can scan and print the reverse sides to save for later. Below is one of my favorite coloring books that’s too large to scan in, so I bought two copies.

The challenge is those pages are also too large to fit onto an 8.5×11 book like my first one, or a 9×11 book like my second one. The pages I’ve already used from The Look Coloring Book have had to be creatively cut. I decided to solve the problem this year by grabbing an oversized sketchbook bought on a whim long ago and never used.

It needed a good cover. Another collage! This collage contains a lot of me but especially a lot of a couple of characters. It began with a center–a card sent to me by Marika sometime just before or early in the pandemic, that’s a lot more glittery than you can see in this photo: You bring such passion and spirit and creativity to life. She was saying it to me. I am saying it to my muses and inspirations.

Now the new book has its first coloring page, completed today.

Thank you for reading all of this. Perhaps its length helps you understand how I managed to turn an old novel I wrote in the 1970s, and rewrote in the 1980s/’90s, into 4.5 books and counting since 2019.