back in the saddle again

Finally, I'm back to making art on a semi-regular basis. So far no long sessions in the studio, but I'm getting there. It's a good thing.

This is a piece I painted a while back that I'm playing with now. The black is two of the stamps I carved a while back. Being of the impatient ilk, I used a pigment ink pad that was sitting in the same bin as my stamps--not really caring about permanance. So today when I got around to ironing it, I decided to see if the ink was permanent--it's not so much. But I got some cool effects by spritzing it with water and ironing. It's not like it's ever going to get washed...

But this is what I need to get back in the swing--the chance to play with stuff, not caring about the outcome, flexing my artistic muscles. I have been keeping an artistic journal most of this year (with major gaps during moving), where I do a small piece every day and fuse it into the book. I was looking back through it today (one of the main reasons that I continue to journal both this way and in writing--love to look back at what I was thinking), and there's some promising compositions in there...so maybe my next step should be to make art starting with those pages...