I’ve been dying to tell you about this since last month and I’m glad that now I can…

I’m delighted to announce that the last Craftypod of 2007 is an interview with me. It’s pretty interesting, if I say so myself, and Sister Diane did a fantastic job in editing our long conversation so that I sound reasonably coherent!

Many thanks to Sister Diane for her great editing, her insightful questions and for being kind enough to ask me in the first place; I very much enjoyed being interviewed by her and what a great way to round off my year of drawing.

Kirsty Hall: Diary Project Envelope from 10th December 2007

In the early hours of yesterday morning I finished a mammoth update of The Diary Project blog because I thought it would look really shoddy to Craftypod listeners if the blog was still stuck in November - it’s helpful to have a bit of a kick every now and then. Apparently I’d had a long enough break from writing about drawing and I was able to do it again without banging my head on my desk. I’m nearly up to date now, I just have a week’s worth of envelopes to write up and then I’ll be all caught up. It’s so nice to be ending the year without that hanging over me.

Wow, I can’t believe that I only have 3 days of the project left to go, it’s a very strange feeling and I’m still processing it: it feels quite unreal.

I’ve just discovered the sculpture and steel jewellery of artist, Megan Auman. I don’t know how I’ve missed seeing it before because she’s been mentioned by Cally, whose blog I read regularly.

Long Leaf Necklace’ by Megan Auman

Isn’t this fab. Despite studying and making silver jewellery, I’m not much of a jewellery wearer but I’d make an exception for this. I particularly love that it’s made from steel instead of a precious metal, that really adds to the aesthetic for me - the stark black against the white makes me sigh with visual lust. I’ve been playing around with lots of colour in my new art journal lately but apparently I’m not over my monochrome thing and honestly, I don’t want to be - colour fills a certain place in my soul but black and white will always own my heart.

I had already noted the resemblance of Megan’s work to my own drawings but I was amused to discover that she also did a smaller series of daily drawings in 2007. Megan also has an interesting blog that’s worth a look - apparently she’s going to be making a life size sofa out of metal, I look forward to seeing it.

Clicking on the tab for Up All Night Again, the thought flitted quickly across my mind, “I wonder if there are any new posts?” Er no, dear, not unless you actually bother to write them!

It reminds me of the time that I accidentally hit backspace while surfing and wound up at my own Livejournal profile page. I glanced uncomprehendingly at my own interest list and thought, “hey, this person sounds way cool, I should friend them - oh, wait a minute…” Still, I guess the fact that I instinctively liked the look of myself is probably positive.

It’s been a hectic week. My 40th birthday was on Saturday and my family threw a rather fabulous party for me complete with mountains of healthy yet delicious gluten-free food. We had about 30 people there and I was very touched that so many people, some of whom had travelled quite a distance, came to celebrate with me. I thoroughly enjoyed it and have decided that I should have birthday parties more often (although probably not every year).

The chocolates are all gone and the many bunches of flowers are starting to wilt but I’m still happily playing with several of my presents, which included a pile of books, a full set of Sakura glaze pens and a very cute, tiny set of travelling watercolours with a little water brush. Art materials - the gifts that keep on giving!

Unfortunately everything else is in flux at the moment because as soon as we got the party out of the way, I had to empty my study so that it could be decorated. I can’t think what possessed me to arrange two such major events within two days of each other. I am temporarily installed in the living room and connecting to the net through the X-Box cable. The painters finished this afternoon but I need to buy a carpet and have that fitted before I can move back in. I also need to have a rethink about where everything goes and what I need to store. Oh, and buy a new desk because this Ikea one has bowed drastically in the middle, which is rather worrying in a piece of furniture that’s holding a heavy and expensive Mac!

Continuing the decluttering and organising theme of the last few months, I’m using this an opportunity to get rid of some stuff. I’ve drastically culled my art magazine collection - I gave away about 50 of them and have another huge pile to donate to the art college where I do my jewellery course. I’ve kept the ones I still refer to but it feels wonderful to pass the rest onto people who will actually use them. And as an added bonus, it frees up a lot of storage space on my shelves. Next I have to tackle my many folders of saved articles and images.

I’ve come to understand that having too much stuff weighs me down and makes it far more difficult for me to create. I had the realisation about a month ago that it didn’t matter how many neatly labelled boxes I had, if I simply had too much to store, then my shelves and cupboards were always going to be an impenetrable mess.

So lately I’ve been tackling The Cupboard Of Doom, a huge walk-in cupboard that we’ve thoroughly filled up with stuff. I’ve been systematically clearing it out; going through boxes, throwing things out, visiting the dump, filling up our weekly recycling bins and giving away hundreds of items on freecycle.

I’ve even surprised myself by being able to give away some art and craft supplies: usually I hold onto those for dear life but sorting out my studio has helped me to see what I already have and what I no longer use. Having too many supplies can actually be a disadvantage when making art because you can suffer from a sort of mental paralysis when faced with too many options. In addition, having vast quantities of supplies makes it harder to find the things you actually want to use.

Decluttering may not seem like it has much to do with art, but it feels as though what I’m really doing is making a much bigger space in my life for my art.

Lately it seems that most of my art conversations have been happening inside the computer. However, yesterday afternoon I was fortunate enough to meet up with artist, Camilla Stacey for tea and cake.

Camilla and I used to work quite closely together when we were both curating shows over at the Here Gallery, the artist-run space that Camilla was instrumental in founding. We haven’t seen as much of each other lately because we’re both taking a curating break and we live in different towns, so it was great to catch up over cheesecake and hot chocolate. The conversation ranged from our lives to our work and back again; we talked about whether I need to continue with obsessive repetition in my work and Camilla explained the rationale behind her latest ceramic pieces.

Because it’s my birthday on Saturday, Camilla brought me these fabulous thistles - she said they reminded her of my Diary Project drawings and I can see what she means.

Having people who ‘get’ your work, whether in real life or in the computer, is such a gift for any artist and I am blessed to know many people with whom I can have these sort of deep conversations. I hope you all have real life friends that you can talk art and eat cake with.

I spent some time in my local yarn store today. Sure, I needed yarn for my next couple of projects but much more than that, I needed an hour to soak up some colour and texture. I could have ordered the yarn from the shop’s website and saved myself a trip in appalling traffic but I knew that I needed to go: something in me was craving that experience. I wanted to wander around, picking up the yarns and squashing the skeins in my fingers. I needed to feel the softness, the springiness and the resistance of the different fibres. But most of all, I needed to marvel at the myriad of colours. I needed to see the ways in which different dyers had married shades together, to notice how some tones zinged and jumped, while others were muted and subtle. I spent some time holding balls of yarn next to each other, testing to see which would go well together and which were jarring or unpleasant. I didn’t have a particular project in mind, I just wanted to see what worked and what didn’t. You can learn a lot this way - maybe art teachers should stop bothering with boring old colour wheels and just take their students to a fantastic yarn store instead!

I’ve never been brilliant at colour, I don’t have the instinct for it that some artists do, but I still occasionally need a bit of colour therapy. Sometimes my muse (for want of a better word) craves time spent in art galleries, libraries, parks or beautiful buildings - and sometimes it just needs to smoosh some yarn!

I left with the yarn I’d planned to buy and only one extra thing (a bargain skein of very beautiful sock yarn) but more importantly, with my heart contented and my inspiration levels rising.

We all need to spend some time inspiring ourselves, otherwise our art will eventually run dry. What have you done to inspire yourself lately? Do you take yourself out on regular ‘artists’ dates’, as Julia Cameron recommends? I often forget and only realise that I need to once it becomes a desperate craving. If you’re in the same boat, then I hope you can take some time over the next few days or weeks to recharge those artistic batteries by doing something that’s just for you. It’s especially important to do this if you’re caught up in the seasonal madness. It doesn’t need to be much and it doesn’t need to take long but I think it’s vital to remind ourselves that our art is every bit as important as buying presents, baking cookies, decorating trees, placating relatives and all the other traditions that we may have encumbered ourselves with.

And if you don’t celebrate anything at this time of year, then maybe you can indulge in your own personal art hibernation while all around are drowning in festivities? Get a pile of good art books from the library, stock up on some exciting new materials, shut the door and spend a few days just losing yourself in play. Mmm, sounds good to me!

The Decorated Journal by Gwen Diehn is a book that focuses on art journalling.

The book is divided into sections, the first is an extensive exploration of the different materials used in art journalling including paper, pencils, paints, pens, glue and other commonly used materials. This section is, to my mind, the strongest in the book. It contains handy tables that show the advantages and disadvantages of different types of glue, a section on the paint colours you’ll need to be able to mix a good palette, lots of information about the different grades of paper, explanations of the properties of various different materials and clear advice on what to buy and why. There’s even a page on making your own ink and paint from naturally occurring pigments that you’ve gathered! I also like the way she emphasises investing in a few well chosen, quality materials rather than getting suckered into buying endless new products that are actually quite limited in scope.

In the second section of the book, Diehn describes different types of journalling. She categorises journals into 7 different types and provides techniques that she thinks are particularly appropriate for each. I wasn’t totally convinced by her categories and most of the stuff I objected to occurred in this section.

The third section of the book is called ‘Pages In Stages’ and Diehn splits the working process into ’starters, middles and toppings’.explores how to work with the different levels of the page through techniques like layering, collage and using text. This is one of the shorter sections in the book since it’s basically reprising things that have already been described in earlier sections.

The final section of the book deals with some basic bookbinding - Diehn is a big fan of making your own journals so that you can control the size and type of paper and she demonstrates how to make several simple handmade books plus how to customise existing journals and reuse the covers from old hardback books. I have several other bookbinding books already so there wasn’t a whole lot here that was new to me but the information seemed clear and competent and it’s obvious that it’s something she’s passionate about.

Although there is undoubtedly much of value here, this is not a book that I can wholeheartedly recommend. The main problem I had with this book was Diehn’s tone, which I found overly lecturing and didactic. It’s very clear that she feels there’s a right and a wrong way to do things - for example, she assumes that paper buckling is always to be avoided but personally, I’ve found that buckled paper can be an interesting design element on a journal page rather than a problem.

Sure, it’s important to learn ‘the correct way’ to do things and I can understand her desire for ‘good practice’ but I also felt she could have recognised that art journalling is an expressive, experimental and free space for the artist, where the rules don’t always need to apply. It’s not that what she says is necessarily wrong - I agree with many of her opinions - but the way she says them invariably seemed to get my back up. Reading her words made me feel as though I was back at art college again. This isn’t surprising since Diehn is a tutor at an art college but I didn’t find it at all helpful or inspiring. Since I’m currently trying to unlearn quite a few of those art school conventions, I don’t need this approach. I took particular exception to her saying things like “you have to earn the right to draw the details”: I think that’s a staggeringly unhelpful thing to say to anyone, whatever stage of drawing they’re at.

In addition, I wasn’t particularly blown away by the journal pages shown; they often seemed to fall into a particular style and I felt there could have been a lot more variety. There also frequently seemed to be a disconnect between the illustrations and the text and it was sometimes hard to work out why a journal page had been selected to show a particular technique or idea.

However, many people might find her ‘voice of authority’ reassuring and comforting rather than invasive and irritating, as I did. If you want a book that tells you to ‘buy this colour’ and ‘don’t do that’, then this would be a good book to invest in because, despite my personal reservations, there is a huge amount of good information in here. In particular, if you’re new to art or art journalling and want to know about different materials and to be talked through the basics, then this book has a lot to recommend it. I just didn’t like the feeling of being talked down to but I’m well aware that this may be my personal hang-up. Certainly the book gets generally positive reviews on Amazon.com and elsewhere.

I borrowed this book from the library and while I’m glad that I’ve read it because I did learn some interesting new stuff, I was even more glad that I hadn’t bought it or added it to my Christmas list because personally I would have been disappointed. That said, I’m sure that many people would find it invaluable but I’d advise getting it from the library or checking it out in a bookshop before you buy to make sure it’s right for you.