Quinn McDonald's Blog, page 80

Product Review: Strathmore’s Mixed Media Art Journal

Yes, there is a giveaway, there wasn’t room in the title.

I’ve seen the Strathmore art journals with the spiral binding, and I like them, too. But the spiral binding is a problem for me, because I like to travel with a journal, or even carry it in my purse. A wire binding is not only bulky, but in my purse, with a hard-case for glasses and at least one pen, the wire binding can get bent and distorted, making it almost impossible to turn the pages without tearing them. So when I saw these hard-bound journals, I had to order several. (Told you there was a giveaway.

Details: Mixed media art journal (also available in watercolor paper).

Paper: 90-lb text stock (190 gsm), Strathmore 500 series paper. Acid-free, 100 percent cotton.

Page size: 5.5 inches x 8.5 inches. (14 x 21.6 cm)

Number of pages: 64, on 32 sheets.

Price: Shop around for a good price, I’ve seen them vary from $10.00 to almost $30.00. When I couldn’t find them in any local stores, I went online and bought mine for about $10.00 plus shipping.

What I like: The pages of the Strathmore journal are bound with Smyth-sewn binding.  This binding (also called section-sewn) is durable and a sign of quality. Library books, which take a beating in use, are Smyth-sewn so they can be opened flat. The pages are sewn in signatures and the signatures into the binding, with thread, instead of trimmed and glued, as in most paperbacks.

The pages are sturdy, a slightly cream off-white, and unlined. Ready for a wide variety of work.

The cover is a leather-like substance that doesn’t scuff or mar easily. The pages for the mixed-media journal are heavy enough to take light watercolor washes, acrylic paint, pen, and Pitt markers. Alcohol markers, like Copic, will bleed through. Heavy watercolor work will cause the paper to wrinkle a bit. The area around the moon in the photo above, which I re-worked several times, is a bit wrinkled on the back. No problem. Let it dry, iron it down and the page is fine again. Strathmore makes good paper.

You can’t scrub them hard, but you can do most water media (particularly acrylic) with no problem and the pages stay flat. Big plus over some others I’ve tried.

The books are fairly thin. I don’t like 300-page journals because they are hard to manage, hard to work in, and hard to carry. The slimmer, 64-page (32 sheet) Strathmore journal is slim and portable.

What I don’t like: I was surprised that my Nano-Liner marker bled through a page. (You can just see it on the left side of the page, paler in this shot than in real life.) It is a 0.5, and puts down a heavy line of ink, but I was still surprised to see a slight bleed through.

The journal doesn’t have an elastic to keep it closed, which would be useful. I recycled the gold elastic band from a box of Godiva chocolates, and it works fine, although I have to remember to pick it up when I’m ready to close the journal. Not a problem at home, but in the park or at a coffee shop, I’m more likely to tuck the bag in my purse and leave, forgetting the gold elastic. I’ve had a crow steal the bright gold band right off the table, but that’s not the journal’s fault, it’s just made for a really odd look on my face.

There’s a lot to like with this journal. I’m also going to try their hardback watercolor journal (Series 400 recycled paper) and I’m a huge fan of their watercolor ready-cut paper. But I can see myself becoming a fan of these as a go-to journal.

Giveaway: Leave a comment if you would like to be entered in the drawing for the journal. I’ll spring for overseas shipping on this one, so anyone can enter. The winner will be chosen on Wednesday, 19 December. Closing for comments is 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Phoenix time. The name will be posted at the top of this post.

Here’s how I do the drawing: I divide the total number of comments by 6. I bring out the dice, and roll one to find the section with the winner (1 through 6). I repeat this action till one person wins. It’s more fun than the random number generator.

Disclosure: I purchased the journal, they were not donated. I am not being paid for or compensated in any way for this post.

Filed under: Creativity, Product Review, Reviews Tagged: giveaways, product reviews, strathmore art journals

Laying the Blame

It may be a few days before I get back to Facebook. Although I knew this was going to happen–in time of a tragedy, our natural reaction is to find someone to blame. Guns. Criminals. The mentally ill. The health care system. And finally, yes, it came down to: Mothers. “His mother was rigid.” “His mother was too strict,” the comments read on the killings in Connecticut.

Yes, there are mothers that don’t do a good job. Ones that probably shouldn’t have had children. But there is a much more pervasive problem here–a culture that demands that moms take care of kids, have money-producing jobs, take care of a house, make sure the kids have play dates and are in sports, music and summer camps. (And do it smiling in heels and coordinated outfits). Add to that the clothes and food shopping (better comparison shop or use coupons), homework supervision and religious education, and then, don’t forget yourself, so we can be the woman who has it all. And if you are not a mother, you better do a lot more, because there is an obligation to be a mother, as well.

You can’t have it all. You can’t be all things to all people. Not at the same time, maybe not all in your one lifetime.

The messages we get from our magazines (cook like the Barefoot Contessa! Be

Image from http://www.ebaumsworld.com

organized like Martha Stewart! Run a blog, take care of a farm and farm hands  like Pioneer Woman! Run an empire, write books and take coaches on training sessions like Martha Beck! Look and dance like Beyonce!) are constantly showing us what we are not and need to be.

Sure, some moms get help from the children’s father. As they should. But even with help, meeting all those expectations is impossible. The effort alone is exhausting.

We wake up and our first thought is “I’m late,” or “I didn’t get enough sleep,” or “I didn’t finish that report for work.” The first hour of the day, the one in which we are most creative, is spent giving ourselves messages of “not enough,” and “hurry up.” No wonder creativity gets shoved into a corner as a chore rather than as personal growth  No wonder we are tired, frustrated, and chronically at the end of our rope. The demands to be everything, have everything, and do everything is constant.

Instead, we are not enough of anything consistently. We take a dash at creativity by assembling a kit, we hand our kids a video game instead of reading to them, we put preservative-loaded food on our table and we worry about our family and our image all the time.

Playing along with a culture of perfection, fear and blame doesn’t make us perfect, courageous, and bold. It makes us shaky, angry and scared. It makes us look around for someone to blame when a corner of our world crumbles. “We have met the enemy he is us,” Walt Kelley wrote in the long-vanished comic strip Pogo. It’s time to change our culture, and it starts with you.

—Quinn McDonald helps people through re-invention and change. She is a life and creativity coach and far from perfect.

Filed under: Coaching, Recovering Perfectionists Tagged: anger, creativity coach, culture of blame, fear, perfection

For Newtown, Connecticut

As a blind man, lifting a curtain, knows it is morning,

I know this change:

On one side of silence there is no smile;

But when I breathe with the birds,

The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessing,

And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.

—Theodore Roethke, from Journey to the Interior.

Filed under: In My Life, Journal Pages Tagged: another shooting, memorial, Newtown

Quotes for Your Art Journal

Bougainvillea blossom blowing down the street, chased by its shadow.

People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work that it takes to make it happen.  — Donald Miller

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.  Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.   –Samuel Ullman

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement.   –Mabel Newcomber

-–Quinn McDonald is writing her book about the inner critic.

Filed under: Quotes Tagged: achievement, aging, creativity coach

Five Things NOT to Say to a Writer

All these statements are ones I’ve heard. Once was enough.

1. “Oh, you are a writer! Would I have read anything you wrote?” I have no idea where to start with that answer. How would I know what you read? Am I supposed to ask you that? Or just duck my head and say, “Probably not. I’m not famous.”

2. “Did you get a huge advance like [big-name celebrity]?” I always want to say, “Well, those of us who write our own books get a much bigger advance.” But I do not.

3.” You didn’t self-publish? You know, if you did, you can control your marketing plan.” I can do all the marketing I want with my publisher, too.

4. “Why would anyone not want to self-publish?” Because I’m not a distributor and my publisher gets my book into stores I didn’t know about.  Better than i could do.

5. “Oh, you write. Do you know E.L. James?” No, I do not know the author of 50 Shades of Gray. Or Janet Evanovich or Nora Roberts or even writers I’d like to meet like Anne Lamott, Anne Tyler, or Brené Brown. This brings back memories of when I went overseas and people would ask me if I knew their second cousin in Sheboygan. And were disappointed if I didn’t.

—Quinn McDonald is a writer. She hopes you might give Raw Art Journaling as a gift this holiday season.

Filed under: The Writing Life Tagged: questions for authors, Writers

Shibori with Paper

Shibori is a way to dye fabric by folding and dipping it in dye. It’s a lot like the paper dying technique–orizomogami– for fabric. Both are similar to tie dye. My friend and fabric artist Roz came over to experiment. Roz and I have the same attitude toward art–”Let’s see what happens!” Roz brought fabric dye, paper clamps and quite smartly, gloves. I’m a paper artist, so I work in inks that wash off with soap or alcohol. I may have a turquoise thumb for a few weeks.

I’d never worked with fabric dye, but Roz is an expert. She had made samples out of paper towels, and I was amazed at the depth of color.

Roz’s sample of shibori–on a paper towel. Vibrant!

My question had originally been, “can you do shibori with paper?” The shibori I’m most familiar with is pole-wrapping. In that technique, a cylinder of about 2 to 4 inches in diameter is wrapped with fabric, criss-crossed with twine, scrunched together and then dyed.

My favorite raw-art-journaling paper is Arches Text Wove. The paper is heavy but flexible, takes watercolor, inks (without bleed-through), colored pencils, amazing abuse and still looks wonderful. You can erase on it without problems, incise it, and do odd ink things to it–dripping, spraying, splashing. I love working on it because it is so forgiving. I once made a small accordion-fold journal and stuffed it in my pocket to sign for a package. I forgot the journal and it went through the washer and dryer. I didn’t notice it because there was no lint mess in either machine. When I pulled it out of the pocket, it was damp, but fine. I’d used India Inks so all it took was a quick ironing to make it look crisp again. Now, that’s a paper that’s easy to love!

The first experiment we tried was wet v. dry.  I did a fan fold and Roz did a triangle fold. Arches Text Wove is finished with a slight gelatin wash, which was easy enough for the fabric dye to penetrate. However, the multiple folds of dry paper resisted the inks, as they should have.

The wet paper was far more satisfying. The color soaked in enthusiastically and spread, so the only spot of white was the markings of the clamp. Having answered the basic question, I then decided to put the paper through tougher tests. I crumpled a piece and dipped various angles in different dyes. The paper creases absorbed more paper and gave a much more interesting color and texture for a book artist.

Shibori technique on Arches Text Wove. A cathedral-window result.

Roz had said the ink would not be waterproof, because we were not fixing it with soda ash, as you do with wearable fabrics. So I rinsed the paper under running hot water. The color did bleed, but not all of it. The color was pale and darker in the creases. But for this experiment, I wanted a full dye soak, so I re-crumpled the wet paper, dipped it in another dye bath and straightened it out to dry on a stack of newspaper outside.

The multiple-dyed paper gained a richness and delicacy of tone in the dye. I can now write on it with poster markers or other opaque pens. No spraying or too much wet glue, though, as the dyes will run.

Wet and crumpled, Arches Text Wove takes fabric dye perfectly.

We also tried Tyvek, the material that Fed-Ex envelopes are made from. It’s made from fine, randomly distributed fibers of polyethylene. (And, yes, there is a way to make it recyclable!) We knew this would be a surface decoration result, and it was. I could wash most of the dye out of the Tyvek. The most interesting result was that after I washed and crumpled the Tyvek, and re-applied ink, the ink worked through the fibers. It’s a breathable fabric, so the ink would eventually soak through–at least with the crumpling and washing we did.

After the papers dried, I ironed them to make them art-journal ready. Because I knew Roz was the expert, and she had warned me the dye would run if it got wet,  I spritzed a paper towel, put it over the dried paper sample, and ironed over the paper towel.  A barely-damp towel is all you need, as you can see from the result below,  too much water immediately soaks up color as well.

Color bleeding onto paper towel from too-damp paper.

I encourage every artist to experiment with their materials. Don’t just believe what people tell you, don’t just follow the directions on the kit–more great discoveries come from “Huh, I wonder what will happen if. . . ” than any other statement you can make!

–Quinn McDonald is an artist and writer who works with raw-art journals for people who can’t draw and don’t want to spend a lot of time writing.

Filed under: Creativity, Journal Pages Tagged: Arches Text Wove paper, artists date, orizomogami, shibori

Vulnerability and Courage

Talking about journaling to groups of writers, artists, or those who have never journaled is one of my favorite things. So, last Thursday, when I was talking to PaperWorks in Tucson, I was having a great time. I ask people about why they journal and what they write about. The answers are always so interesting–people don’t want their journals read after they die, people are afraid strangers might pry. Keeping a journal opens you to being vulnerable.

As I sometimes do, I talk about my mother–the angry woman who would challenge me with, “No one ever loved me enough, not even God!” When she was dying, and I was cleaning out her house, I came across her love letters to my father. They showed me another woman, one I had never met, and could scarcely believe existed, much less was the same woman I called my mother. When I tell this story, I tell audiences I will choke up, because I do.  I don’t cry, but my voice waivers and I have to pause and swallow. And when I did that, I saw several women look away. One was shaking her head, frowning.

We are not supposed to choke up, that’s a sign of weakness. How many times have you seen people interviewed after horrible, gut-wrenching tragedy and as they try to answer a personal question in front of a TV camera and they start to cry, they say, “I’m sorry.” For what? For crying in the face of tragedy? Shouldn’t the person jamming a microphone in the face of someone struggling with tragedy be apologizing?

So, there I stood, choking up, and suddenly realized I did not feel shame nor embarrassment. This was hard stuff I was sharing. “Vulnerable” comes from the Latin word meaning “to wound” or “capable of being wounded.” It’s brave to make yourself open to that. Shame researcher Brené Brown defines vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”  In her latest book, Daring Greatly, Brown says, “The profound danger is . . . we start to think of feeling as weakness. . . .It starts to make sense that we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we’ve confused feeling with failing and emotions with disabilities.” Then Brown says something powerful and important: “If we want to reclaim the essential emotional part of our lives and reignite our passion and purpose, we have to learn how to own and engage with our vulnerability and how to feel the emotions that come with it. . . .Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

It’s very hard to stand up and admit to being vulnerable. Someone could make fun of us. Someone could attack us. And that’s what our inner critic tells us–stay shut off, keep those emotions stuffed down. And the value of that? We become fearful, and that ignites the ancient fuse of fear-anger-blame-alienation.

Being vulnerable is hard. Admitting your complicated emotions is hard. Not running away from your emotions, sitting with them, facing your truth, actually talking to your inner critic–now that takes courage. Being vulnerable in front of friends is a risk, in front of strangers, well it may feel like eating glass. But I know from experience that when you are vulnerable you are powerful. Authenticity always is.

This doesn’t mean blurting out your entire life story under the guise of vulnerability. It does mean not going out in the world with your fists up so you can take the first swing before your imagined enemy swings at you.

If you are interested in learning more about the courage of vulnerability, you can read Five Insights from Brene Brown or watch her Ted Talk on the power of vulnerability.

—Quinn McDonald doesn’t always have the courage to be vulnerable, but she’s finding it easier every time she tries.

Filed under: Inner Critic, Recovering Perfectionists, The Writing Life Tagged: courage, owning your emotions, vulnerability

Coming This Week

I’m working on a post on vulnerability, but it’s not finished. And I’m too tired to finish it, so it will have to wait. Something is missing, and that needs to show up yet.

This week, along with the post on vulnerability (the good side of it), I am going to review Srathmore’s new hard-cover mixed media journal (not the one with a spiral). Hint: I ordered more than one.

Through the generosity of Linda Penny, one of the Tucson PaperWorks members, I have some new adhesive–a piece of Scotch brand positionable adhesive. (Photo on left)  Will it work on paper? Photographs? Fabric? A review  will be coming up this week, too.

Other fun items this week–I’ve heard from Featuring magazine that the new issue will be out this week–the one with my article. And a photo from the article is on the cover! (OK–along with a lot of other photos.). I’m really excited. I’ll order some and when they arrive, there will be a giveaway of those, too.

Should I order several and then sell them from my blog? It would save you overseas postage. The magazine isn’t cheap (about $10) but it’s a great read. Let me know what you think.

While I’m testing and writing, I have a question for you–what is your earliest memory of the Inner Critic showing up? Do you remember it from childhood? Middle school? High school? I’m curious. Leave a comment. No prizes (they happen later this week), just wondering.

—Quinn McDonald is glad last week is over. Today was the first day in 12 consecutive days she wasn’t working on something.

Filed under: Inner Critic Tagged: inner critic, preview, Scotch adhesive

Perfectionists: Take That Risk!

Every time you make a decision, you close the door to other choices. It’s a fact of life. If you are a perfectionist, this causes a problem. Did you make the best decision? If it is the best decision for now, how about tomorrow?

For those of us who are recovering perfectionists, I can cheerfully say, “Make a decision. Every one of them comes with a consequence. You can’t control your whole future. Risk!”

Perfectionists are excellent procrastinators. Putting off a decision means not making a wrong decision. Yes, that’s true, but it also means you are not moving forward. And not moving forward isn’t an act of perfection. The difference between a rut and a groove is the length of time you’ve spent there.

Here’s something I learned over the years: if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t taking enough of a creative risk. If you are doing everything right, you are doing the same thing over and over. That isn’t perfection, that’s the shortcut to insanity. Unless you are assembling a kit, perfection is not the goal.

Come on out in the open and try making a decision whose outcome isn’t practiced, isn’t certain. If you make a mistake, you’ve learned something. And learning something is a milestone to getting better. Perfection, on the other hand, is an impossible state that hates “better.” So it remains immobile.

Image: I took the photo without looking as I drove from Tucson to Phoenix. The phone slipped and I took the photo. A happy accident–I like it better than a planned photo.

—Quinn McDonald is spending the weekend taking risks with her new book. The Inner Critic is frantic and her Inner Heroes are gathering.

Filed under: Inner Critic, Recovering Perfectionists Tagged: creative risk, perfectionism, perfectionists, risk

Art Journaling Quotes

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.  –Samuel Johnson

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.              —Chuck Close.

Sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out what you can make with what you have left. –-Itzhak Perlman

Filed under: Quotes Tagged: inspiration, meaning-making