Keep the Goal in Mind: Focus

Tags

100 Mandalas, acrylic paint, Altered book, art, art journal, collage, coloring, encouragement, focus, goals, Mandala

The prompt for Journal 52 this week is Sweet Treats. I started off painting lots of papers in pastel (for me) shades of acrylic paints and exploring interesting textures and effects with the paint. I did this on all kinds of paper scraps and copies of previous work. I loved how the circle stencils with the light blue paint turned out and included a few on the page. This use of paint was inspired by the art of Il Sung Na.

So here is my dining room table full of lots of different papers with layers of paint and collage on them. I kind of had the robin’s egg malted milk balls in mind for my candy. The egg shapes around the blue circle are my “candy” mandala. They didn’t really turn out looking anything like the candy, but I really like how they did turn out. I’m really having fun exploring acrylic paints. I had planned to focus more on watercolors this spring, but now I’m not sure. Good thing I do yoga – I’m flexible.

I had the song “I like candy” going through my head while I was drawing the word “sweet” and something about writing that down above the phrase “keep the goal in mind” clicked. I think it is going to be my last week participating in this challenge. I think it may be distracting me from my goals. It is like art candy, fun but not feeding what I need right now.

I have continued drawing a small mandala or expanding an existing mandala and writing down my thoughts/intentions/to do list most mornings with my coffee. Because of this practice I was the featured participant this week on Kathryn Costa’s blog. She showed this journal page from last week on her blog and posted a link to my blog. Thanks Kathryn!

This year my art goals have become pretty clear to me and participating in challenges is fun, but it does not always move me in the direction of my goals.

The 100 mandala challenge is moving me toward my goals in 2 big ways. One of my mandalas was used for a call to art for art for the collaborative coloring book Kathryn is assembling. I am also creating another mandala for the book. I hope to have enough coloring mandalas by October to sell sets of coloring pages for the holidays. That is one of my big goals for this year and I feel like I am making real progress toward it. The little sunflower mandala on the top page is one of the coloring mandalas I have drawn. This one was copied at 50% and I think that is too small for fun coloring of this pattern. The other way that the 100 mandalas challenge is moving me toward my goals is that I’m really excited to create art every day. At this rate I will have a nice body of art to start selling!

Is what you are doing moving you toward your goal? What help do you need? I’m finding great encouragement in the blogging community and on facebook. What do you use to keep you on track?

One more note about this weeks gratitude journal entry, the green writing on the far left side of the page is from something I have started to do at night if I am having a delay in falling asleep. I thinking of something for each letter of the alphabet that I’m grateful for from that day. This is a list of some of them. I almost never make it to “s” and I don’t think I have ever made it all the way to “z” so I added those on my journal page. So much to be grateful for!