Jacqstar- a month in the life (part two)

Week two of Create and Thrive's a month in the life 

(see week one Here)

The lovely Jess from Create and Thrive  has organised an Instagram challenge for handcrafters called 'A Month in the Life' in which we post a picture each day of our businesses based on a different theme each day, so I thought I'd share my photos and my stories behind them:

Day 8: Branding

My Brand 

The top is how I sign my paintings, and a friend digitized and tweaked it and made it into a logo for me. My key colours are peacock inspired - teal blue, green purple and gold. 

The bottom is my business card. I wanted something that represented letting loose creatively and looked arty. 

Day 9: Me

The many sides of Jacqstar

These are the many sides of me. Silly, quirky, fun. I love a dress up party and tend to strike a pose whenever a camera is produced. 

Day 10: Inspiration 

Hands up...

I find my inspiration everywhere and at the oddest moments (in the shower, grocery shopping etc.) But I'm really out to help inspire others to being out their inner creatives.For this purpose, I'm working on a series of 'butterfly ladies' drawings to help others find their creative wings and to soar to new places.

Day 11: Assistants 

Murray and Edith Head

These are my ever faithful assistants, Murray and Edith Head (though I suspect Murray is a bit of a girl). They've modelled all sorts of hats, beanies and scarves for me and have never complained. They don't eat much either! 

Day 12: Favourite

Tree of Love

This is my 'tree of life' painting and would have to be the favourite painting that I've done so far. It encompasses some of my favourite things. I love drawing / painting curly branched trees- there's something about the curves that I like and find soothing. And I'm using some of my fave colours- pinks and purples. It's also finished with some shimmery paint and I love all things shiny and glittery! 

Day 13: Post Office 

My local post box

I don't often need to post my stock as I mostly sell to friends (and friends of friends) and at the markets. But when I do, it's just a leisurely stroll down the end of my street to the post box. 

Day 14:  Vignette 

Vignette

The definition of vignette is: a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, idea, setting, or object. 

This one was a hard one for me. I needed to provide a snapshot of what my business is, but I have interests in so many things and I really don't want Jacqstar to just be about crocheting. I love to paint, share my photos and my sketches and mostly to inspire people to be creative. 

A couple of years ago I was worried that I had to only pick one thing and stick to it but I'm eclectic in my tastes so I've made my business just as eclectic!

Stay tuned for week three...

P.S. follow me on Instagram http://instagram.com/jacqstarcreations/

Love,
Jacqui xx

Jacqstar Creations - behind the scenes

...But She had Wings...

Recently I met up with my mastermind group of incredibly talented ladies from Leonie Dawson's Amazing Biz and Life Academy. Our mission for the day was to creation a vision board for how we see (or want to see) our businesses.

I've been giving a lot of thought to what I want the direction for my little biz to be. I've jotted down lots of words, ideas and feelings (both what I want to feel and what I'd like my customers to feel), and then found pictures that seemed to convey those thoughts.

It got me really thinking about where I'd like to be in a year or two or 5 years down the track, and what I can do for my customers. It's all about what I can do for you.

What Do I Have That Can Help You?

Now I'm a bit of a hippie tree-hugger save the planet,  ooh

yeah I love dolphins, rainbows and unicorns kind of girl, and so I really want to integrate that into the future of my business, so that's the kind of ideas I wanted to put into my vision board. I love peacock inspired colours and just colour in general, so there's an element of that.

I've also added inspiring words and snippets from song lyrics (can you pick the song?) that fit into my theme. I'm Allowing my business to be successful and giving myself Permission to receive all the abundance that comes with it.

I want to do my little bit to help the planet, so I want to

use Eco yarns that are Earth friendly and sustainable, don't use fossil fuels, have gentle dyeing processes etc. And I've added those images to remind me of where I want to be and why I'm doing it.

I've also added lots of butterfly and wing images which are aligned with my Butterfly Lady range of inspirational sayings and drawings (which I've made into a series of gift cards) and a snippet from one of my favourite quotes at the moment: 

'When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.' 
-Dean Jackson

OOH I love that quote to bits...

Thanks for letting me share this vision board with you and my vision for Jacqstar. What do you think? Did you spot the song lyric? Have you ever made your own vision board or have wanted to make one? Let me know...

Love always,

Jacqui xx

Express Yourself!

Hello Lovely Peoples,

Today I went to an expressive painting class held by an Art therapist. I think I was expecting to learn 'HOW' to paint expressively, but I suppose that sort of defeats the purpose. Instead we first took a few deep cleansing breaths, and cleared our minds of the distractions of the day. We were then asked to listen to the music playing and choose the first colour that came to mind and that would be the colour/s of the background of our painting.

Mine was purple. I had a flash of purple and green so that's the way I started heading, but soon it started looking like seaweed or fish or something that I didn't want it to be. One lady there said, 'oh it looks like little fish swimming through the seaweed'  (I had no preconceived idea what I wanted the painting to look like - I just didn't want it actually looking like something - I was going for a purely abstract sort of result) 

So I then dripped some water onto it to blur the lines a bit, and I kept turning the canvas around so there wasn't an  up or down, and smudged the lines a bit with my fingers - I did a lot of finger painting today  and playing with different tools; the green bits were done with pallet knives  :) 

 I then tried a different tack - I splashed some yellow across it in an attempt to get away from the 'under the sea' theme.

This was the point when I really started getting into it (about an hour and a half into the class - what can I say - I'm slow to get going), trying to get as many different layers as possible into the painting - It was starting to take shape in my mind; the purple and green background were to be the first in (hopefully) many layers in this work.

Now, I just can't seem to complete anything in one sitting - especially a painting. It needs to develop at its own pace , and just as I had a clear vision, the class ended.

So - here's what I've got so far:

I love the curve in the yellow red and orange dots (flowers???) and I'd like to do some writing / collaging around that curve, with an inspirational quote. I'm in an art journalling / collaging kind of mood at the moment.

The question is which way is up?

So did I get any therapy out of it?

I suppose in some way I did. The overwhelming feeling I had throughout the afternoon was that of frustration. I was frustrated that what I saw in my head didn't translate exactly onto the canvas; Frustrated that I wasn't getting as 'into' the class as some others were; Frustrated that some of the other paintings were amazingly beautiful and pretty much completed by the end of the class, whereas I'd hit a creative brick wall and just stared at the canvas for ages waiting for it to tell me what to do next.

But all that in itself taught me so much about myself.

I was painting with my head and not my heart;  I wasn't just letting it happen. I'm used to making a painting look like 'something' so in this class I was all about making sure it wasn't looking like anything, when the natural flow of what I was doing lent itself to looking like fish or seaweed or whatever, and I should have taken that as my cue.

I was also looking around at what everyone else was doing to gage how I was going in comparison (and to be truthful, looking for ideas), when some people got so 'into the zone' that they later said they didn't notice the people around them or how long they had been paining.

Anyhoo, it's Art: there is no right or wrong way. It was just interesting to see myself in that light, AND I've got the beginnings of a very cool painting.

I'll keep you updated as it progresses.

Let me know what you think of it.

love,

Jacqstar xx

Anatomy of a painting

This painting was completed during two, three hour lessons with Patrick at his Ryhill Road art studio. The flowers and stems were drawn with fabric 'puffy' paints, although Patrick has since perfected  the use of acrylic paints put into squeeze bottles to get the same effect.  Lay the canvas on a table, making sure it is level.

Once the outlines are dry, spray the whole canvas with water using a spray bottle. Apply fabric ink to wet canvas with a brush, doing one colour at a time. If canvas starts to get dry, spray with water again, but spray upwards allowing the water to fall onto the canvas from above. Don't spray directly onto the ink or it will mottle the ink, unless that's the effect you're after. 

Depending on how steady your hand is when you're drawing the lines, there may or may not be bits where the line is thin or missing. This is where the ink will seep through and make the beautiful effects. I think I did too good a job on lining some flowers, so I had to purposely allow the brush to stray into the white lily to allow some colour transfer.

The ink comes in most basic colours but you can mix the colours beforehand to make a new colour.  I also added one colour over the other straight on the canvas. The plant stems I firstly painted  green, then added a bright yellow over the top to make a yellowy green, but it also  made it mottled when I sprayed it with water, so both the green and the yellow were visible.

The colours available in the ink are beautiful and bright, but I went back over them several times to get some really strong colurs - especially the yellows and the purple.





What I love about this technique is that it's quick (but I'm such a fuss pot I had to keep going back over the colours to get them just right), and it's meant to be a bit rough and messy. The colours are supposed to bleed into each other, so if you're not steady handed (like me), and make a bit of a mistake with the lines or the colurs, it makes it look even better :)


And here's the finished result...

I'm hooked on this technique, watch out for the next one...