neurodivergent artist and author
This is my new moon spread for Effy Wild’s Moonshine course. I originally created something similar in Procreate (see second photo), and now that I’m feeling more confident in my abilities thanks to my daily face practice, I decided to see if I could recreate it in my art journal. I’m really happy with the results. I used QOR and Daniel Smith watercolors along with acrylic paint.
For my Day 31 face practice and my Moonshine Full Moon art journal spread, I used a mix of watercolor and acrylic. I realized that I need to focus on profiles moving forward as even this small face took me way too long to create.
I was very busy today so for my face practice, I did a rough sketch of my full moon art journal spread. I will add color tomorrow.
I’ve been doing some extra faces during my 100 face journey. The first two are done in Procreate from my own pencil sketches. The next two are are extra faces in my sketchbook. And the final is done on pizza cardboard and is my interpretation of Cristin Chambers Moonshine 2019 lesson. I used stencils from Sarah Trumpp on the last piece.
BULLET JOURNAL – Two weeks ago, I was feeling INCREDIBLY stressed out heading into my third revision of the novel I’m working on. I was constantly asking myself where the day had gone, and consistently felt like I had done nothing all day. Time just seemed to get away from me, and I couldn’t figure out why. So, I sat down on a Sunday and spent the entire day refreshing my bullet journal. I had previously had a lot of success tracking habits and to dos in it, but I had allowed someone else’s opinion about it to usurp my own needs and had stopped using it. But, I had reached a critical point where I could choose to continue to wing it every day and let this person’s critical voice silence my own, or I could choose to do what I knew would help me get more organized. I decided what I needed was more important than what they thought.
I created a page with my editing/revising schedule for the novel as well as some tracking pages for other daily projects I was working on. On my daily page, I added circles for each 8oz water I drank, a time tracker, a mood tracker, and a space for a daily tarot/oracle card where I could put a brief description of what resonated with me from the message so I could look for patterns. Then I listed all my to dos. One column for daily items and one column for things that needed to get done but not necessarily that day. I also added a vitamin/medication/food log, and moved my gratitude/proud/preferences list that I’ve been writing out every night for 268 days now. For that list, I write three things I’m grateful for, three things about myself I’m proud of, and three preferences I would like to manifest in my life such as how I would like the next day to go, something I might want for someone else, a physical item I would like to bring into my life, or a resolution to an issue going on in my life (a practice from Mary Shores that I modified slightly).
Because of the changes I’ve made, my life has turned around dramatically in less than two weeks. I know exactly where my time goes now. I have a list of what I’ve accomplished each day. I remember what needs to be done because it’s all right there in front of me instead of whirling around in my head. Restarting the bullet journal is one of the best things I have done for myself this year, and BONUS: it silenced that critical voice of the person who kept telling me tracking everything was stupid and obsessive. BOOM!
MIRACLE MORNING – I used to do the Miracle Morning routine, and it was so beneficial for my mental health and my daily productivity. I would get up somewhere between 4:00 AM and 5:00 AM and fit in ten to fifteen minutes on each of the following: meditation, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and writing. It really filled me up. Well, the person who didn’t care for my bullet journal tracking also didn’t care for my early morning routine, so I had stopped that, too. (Side Note: that person is no longer in my life!)
When I was feeling so stressed out that Sunday, and trying to figure out how to get my life back in order, I remembered that a Facebook friend of mine had been posting in the Miracle Morning group, and it really inspired me to start practicing again. So, I made a plan, got my resources together, and started the next day, and I have been doing it ever since. AND, I absolutely LOVE it!
Here’s my practice:
NOT PULLING THE WEEDS – I usually spend a lot of time planting a small garden in my backyard. I’ve been really busy with the novel, but I’ve also been very frustrated by neighbors allowing their dogs to poop in my garden and tear it up and never clean up after them or even attempt to redirect them away from my garden. There has also been a groundhog each year that sneaks down and eats many of the plants destroying them, so it’s been a real struggle maintaining a garden even though it’s important to me. I’ve often thought there is a message in my experience with this garden and the fact that my boundaries keep being crossed no matter what I try to do to protect them. This year, I just let the garden go. I was tired of doing all that work only to watch it get destroyed. I had plans to pull out what I thought were weeds, and at least keeping the area clear. But, I got distracted with the novel revisions, and have not had the chance to get out to do it, and it’s a good thing I didn’t because it is now filled with beautiful flowers! Somehow, seeds I had planted three years ago, that I had completely forgotten about, just decided to bloom all over the garden. And I love it! It’s so beautiful. I love opening the blinds to my back door and looking at all of them standing tall among the weeds I didn’t pull. They bring me so much joy.
EFFY WILD – Another really good decision I made this year was to join Effy Wild’s Moonshine 2019 course. I loved the class so much, I joined her Effy 365 which includes all of her class offerings this year. I love her authenticity so much. I love that she does not sugarcoat anything. I also love that I can see so much of myself in her, and that makes me feel less alone, less alien, especially since she is so confident in who she is. She gives me hope that one day I will be able to just be me as I am without the constant need to intuit others needs and transform into who they need me to be. The reason I am loving on her so hard this week is because I was having a really bad day the other day, and I found solace and healing in one of her Wilderhood FB videos, and the rest of my day shifted into a wonderful, productive day. I love that I have access to the healing space and energy that she holds so that I can seek solace, and grow, and evolve at the pace I need.
ONE SMALL STEP CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE – As part of my Miracle Morning routine, I started reading this book that I had bought over a year ago and hadn’t had time to read. I love it so much. I am someone who has always believed that I had to make huge life changes all at once in order to see any results. I am also a person who has felt like a failure for most of my life because I’ve been unable to implement those changes long-term. I love the Kaizen Method author Robert Maurer discusses in this book. It is the idea that even teeny tiny steps can add up to big changes. For example, he suggested starting out an exercise routine by just doing something like standing or walking in place for one minute. Then you can add a minute the next week and the next week, and the next week. Doing this helps you bypass your fears and beliefs that keep you from moving forward. Basically, if you do something small enough, it will not trigger your fight or flight response, and eventually your brain will be conditioned that what you are doing is normal and will no longer trigger a fear response. I love this idea so much, I can’t wait to start implementing it into my life.
Below is my new moon spread for Effy Wild’s Moonshine 2019 course. I had a vision of a goddess pregnant with the earth, infusing it with magick. I’m not sure if I exactly captured that here, but I definitely tried my best.
For this spread, I used Daniel Smith watercolors, tombow dual-brush markers, Faber-Castell PITT artist pens, and white and gold acrylic and gel pens. The willow leaves were inspired by Effy Wild’s full moon lesson, and I used a crystal sticker from Sarah Trumpp.
I’ve been participating in Effy Wild’s Moonshine course since January. I love how it’s helped me become more aware of the moon’s cycles. I’ve noticed that since I’ve created a ritual around creating at new moon and full moon each month, I receive visions tied to them each month. When a vision comes to me, which usually happens a few days before new moon and full moon, I try to get down a rough sketch, and then I just let my mind work for the next few days on how to translate what I’ve been shown onto paper.
Below is my full pink moon art journal spread. It is a bit different than the vision I received. In the vision, I saw a woman curled up inside the center of a fully-bloomed rose which was encased in a full pink moon. For this spread, I covered the page with gesso. Once dried, I sprayed it with water and added several different colors of Brusho crystals. I then created a moon mask with cardstock and painted the remainder of the page with black and payne’s gray acrylic paint. I sprayed gold and white acrylic ink on the background once it was dry. I then applied a stencil from Sarah Trumpp with gold acrylic paint to add texture to the moon. Adding the curled form in the center was difficult. I ran into a lot of issues with pens that would not write on the surface, and so it took several tries to get her to a place I was okay with. I traced her image onto the moon using carbon paper, then tried to outline her with white which didn’t work out very well. So, I painted the image with black acrylic, and then tried once again to outline her with white. It still didn’t work out. I took a baby wipe and wiped most of what I had done away, and then added the same stencil image with gold acrylic as I had added to the moon. That left her looking a bit snakish. So, I took a gold gel pen, outlined her, and then started to outline some of the markings from the stencil, and that created an image that I was really happy with. Since this moon was a full pink, willow moon, I added willow leaves with a stabilo-all white pencil, so they would be less prominent than if I had used a gel pen. Overall, I really love how this spread turned out.
It has been a while since I’ve posted, but it’s because I have been really busy writing and revising. Yay! I had initially created this site to chronicle my journey into visual art hoping it would eventually bring me back to my first love: creative writing. I am happy to report that spending eight months focusing on visual art led me right back to the novel I had been dreaming of writing since 2011.
In October of last year, an artist I follow mentioned a live FB event with author coach Sage Adderley-Knox. While sitting in my car waiting for my son to get out of school, I watched Sage discuss her six-week program for writing a first draft. I decided to take the leap, and I’m so glad I did. For the first two weeks of the program, I was still completely blocked and just could not write. Then during one of our live meetups on FB, she said, “You are not writing this book for other people, you are writing this book for yourself. You must write something you are proud of. You cannot do that if you are writing for someone else.” Something about that clicked for me. I had been trying to figure out how to write the novel based on what I thought other people might want to read with a thousand different opinions screaming in my head. When I started to focus on the story I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it, the novel just poured out of me and onto the page. Six weeks later, on December 24, 2018, I had completed an 88,825 word first draft. I decided to continue working with Sage one-one-one, and I am nearly finished with the first revision of the novel I had dreamed of writing for seven years! And…I finally came up with a title that I love! What a miracle!
So, what else have I been up to? I’ve been making lots of art, too. I’ve been participating in Effy Wild‘s amazing art classes. In addition, I’ve been using an incredibly healing technique in my art journal called Cosmic Smash Booking created by Catt Z, and have been learning so much about some very freeing abstract painting techniques from Ady Almanza’s Abstract Dreams course. If you head over to my Instagram page, you can see more photos of what I’ve been creating over the past four months.
I am learning that I cannot just write or just make visual art. If I try to do too much of one without the other, I get really cranky. So, I am working on finding a balance between writing and making art. I hope that you will stay with me for the next part of my journey as I chronicle the art-making and novel-revising, and figure out what is next for me on this wild and wacky adventure.
Sarah Joyce Bryant 