Stephanie's Studio

I always knew that being creative requires space—preferably well-lit, roomy and comfortable.  The workspace needs your personal touches and it needs to be welcoming. I have worked in grand spaces, such as my ballroom studio, and tight places, like on my lap by a window, in hospital. Now I’m seeing that creativity has another distinct and demanding requirement—simplicity. In the case of creativity, the type of simplicity required is deep.  You need to be as drama-free as possible. You will need work/life balance, wherein you can leave you work at work and at home you can find space for your creativity in the studio. My creativity also requires quiet—sometimes complete silence, especially when I’m writing.  Most importantly creativity requires time. Time must be set aside to create fertile ground for creativity to flourish and mature.  Time is the most costly of creativity’s requirements. I’m not sure why it took me until this age to figure this s...

I have been in fast forward.  I thought when I wrote the previous post about preparing for Imbolc that Imbolc was today, instead of next week.  I had projected forward in time and actually believed the beginning of this week was January 30 th .  Then, I woke up this morning sure it was Friday.  What on earth is going on?  My internal clock is usually so accurate that I don’t need to set an alarm.  I guess I just got really excited that a new Sabbat was coming up. Yesterday was a day of positive messages.  I received a great deal of positive feedback about my teaching and my classes from a variety of sources. When something like that happens, not only do I feel great but I take it is a spiritual message. I know messages are sent to us all the time from the realm of the spirit.  It is up to us to interpret them but first we have to slow down long enough to receive these messages. I have been moving fast and in fact I have been projecting myself ...

Something’s afoot in the studio and outside.  It’s still cold outside, snowy even but I can feel the quickening of conception, growth and the birth of new ideas and new life germinating beneath the frozen surface of the earth.  For many months I have worked hard on a few different series of ATCs.  Now it is time to trade those and put aside the making of the cards.  The cards have stirred many ideas for other media and formats.  I may even be teaching it in an afterschool enrichment program for children.  ATCs are a way of working I hold dear and I know I will soon return to them.  I have blogged about how they remind me of working with metals and how that similarity makes me yearn to return to cloisonné. That is one of the new mediums it has spurned—something I am eager to explore in 2012.  I also want to return to one foot square patterned mandalas. This time though I am going to use some of the ideas I learned about in a workshop on aqueous...

I felt pretty good about my studio endeavors recently.  Bumbling along, working intuitively had been paying off.  My work ethic has been good and I’m putting in about 25 hours per week on my art.  Then yesterday, I had this seemingly brilliant idea to go to Michaels and buy some new stamps.  The rubber stamps weren’t marked down like I thought they would be so I was on to other things.  I checked out clear stamps and acrylic blocks but that was pricier than my budget.   Then I gravitated over to stamping embellishments and found some walnut ink sprays.  I have worked a lot previously with walnut ink in the manner of watercolor with my mixed media work and thought the sprays would be convenient for ATCs.  I did buy an almost filigreed design of a tree that is quite delicate.  I thought I followed the directions the way they were presented.  I stamped with the special quick dry ink called Versa, and then sprayed on the walnut ink....