Under Maintenance

                                                          

It's my day off, I am tucked in bed, it's a grey spring morning and I have zero excuses not to work on my blog which, yet again, I have been neglecting.
As usual, life gets in the way, making you struggle, having you doubting everyone and everything, yourself first of all. With little inspiration, there are too many questions, but no answer is given, so you drag yourself, trying to light up that small flame left in you. Despite your efforts, you find yourself lost, crying like never before. I guess that everyone of us has had a moment like this, but I am firmly convinced that if you are able to transfer of all of the above on a white canvas, than you might perceive such emotions on a higher scale! In this situation, to establish some kind of a balance, you only need to look for the small beautiful things around you, but I am talking about such small things that when you are so wrapped up in your worries, it's quite hard to even see.
One of these beautiful things, even if it was not successful, was to take part in a small project with a fellow artist, my best friend, who actually had me coming out of that bubble I have been stuck in for too long. There were not many people, the ones that were present were not even into art unfortunately, so the lack of interest kind of put me down a bit, however, looking at the small beautiful thing I was talking about, I saw this as a beautiful gift, I took my canvas out of the cupboard and into the world once again. I did it while I was surrounded by the people I love the most and then it become a day of joy and happiness.
I haven't done much since, only one painting, possibly one of my favourite and I prepared the base for another one, which I will shortly be working on, So far that's it. I am pushing myself into looking at things under a different light, to be present and grateful, my artistic life, like everything else, is still under maintenance so just bare with while I get things right again :)

                                   



                                  



                                  


                                  


                                  



                                 

                                  


                                 

                                 Storm

As the days go by, I acknowledge that everything flows. Like water, everything flows. Everything moves. It doesn't matter how hard things can get, still they will move, eventually everything moves. This time last year, with lots of uncertainties, I decided to move to Oxford, opening a new chapter in my life. Things took a different direction. At the beginning I was blaming myself a lot, now with a clearer mindset I know that even though I have lots of things to work on as a person, it was not meant to be to start with. Things do happen for a reason, and in the majority of the cases we don't understand them at the time they do happen! Yet with time, everything comes to its place, and everything starts to make sense. It took me a while, but I know I am on the right path now. I am full of insecurities, questions, doubts, yet I keep moving to what is supposed to be the calm after the storm. I am a work in progress still, but it's ok. I know now it's ok. I am still a storm, but behind the clouds I see the few shy rays of sunshine. This uncertainty reflects in my art work, and for the past few months I have done absolutely NOTHING, which as an artist makes me feel very ashamed, ashamed of letting life take over me. Since I am coming to terms with this transition, and recently I was subject to lots of emotions, some of them very strong, unexpected and new, today I decided to connect again with my creativity. I used a canvas I tried to paint on a while ago. I wasn't sure of it from the start and left it to wait for me to go back to it for something like 3 months! I could feel it calling me, but every time I was pretending it wasn't trying to talk to me. Today was the day. I had to let go. And I did. And I felt great. I am the storm.

                                  The ignored

                            I am the storm

                Getting Creative
I have been meaning to try this out for a while now, but never got time to actually do it.
I have always liked this Hippy/ Boho/ Recycled style of clothes, and played with it more than once when little. The way I used to do it though was different, I used to make knots around the piece of clothing and then dip it in a mixture of water and bleach.
This time though, to achieve a better sort of result, I decided to look for tutorials, gather more info on how to get what I wanted, and I made a very interesting discovery, apparently you can also use food colorant! How weird is that?!
So, I purchased a dark green Dylon fabric hand dye, mixed it as the instructions suggest, with 250g of salt, stirred it well, got three white t-shirts that had few stains here and there, and then went out to the garden and looked around for stones and wooden sticks! :)
I used this technique I saw in a tutorial, to get a dip dye sort of effect, folding the shirt until the point where I wanted the effect to start /end, for the other two t-shirts instead, I got inspired by a tutorial I saw on Free People, next time I think I will use a blue shade <3 I am so pleased with the final result, I just want to make more! So the plan is to buy white or light colored dresses, skirts, trousers, and re-paint them <3

                    The raw material

                                 Mr Green
                                                           

 

  

  

The tools

          The process

                                                         
       The result, I am so pleased with them

                                                    
                                                 

                                                        
                                     The front

                                    and the back
                                       

To be continued :)  ....

#dyeclothing

#Hippystyle

#creativity