After a fair amount of soul searching (and a communications class), I’ve decided to migrate my old blog from a freebie wordpress.com site to a real wordpress.org site I’ve built and setup myself in the cloud. It was a the first time in a while I’ve been able to use my technical skills at all, and the fact it was to do something for my writing gives me a warm-fuzzy feeling all over. My professional world and my writing world collided for a brief moment, with one making the other much better.
I’ve been bursting with ideas, but slow to get moving on them. My drafts folder is full of pieces I’ve started and not finished, each in a varied state of composition needing work. They run the gamut from a couple of sentences of an idea to an almost complete piece that sits on the balance between being self published here on my blog or getting submitted for more formal publication.
Before getting back to those pieces, and bringing them closer to fruition here or elsewhere, I’d like to share something fitting for a new start — a drawing. There is some back story to this. Several years ago when I started working in earnest with things from my traumatic childhood I started to draw. It began as a simple respite of tactile input, pencil scraping along paper. It quickly became more as images of the past full of joy and terror flowed forth. My subconscious taking form on the page. Memories moving into the world. I moved from pencil to crayon, to marker, to colored pencils, to pastels, then to gel pens experimenting and relishing the feel of implement meeting paper. For 3 years I drew, and colored, and sketched getting better with practice.
One image of a flower showed up over and over again. I came to see it was a form of comfort for some long suffering part of me that wanted our existence to be as happy and simple as the world we drew on sheets of paper in 2nd grade. There are dozens upon dozens of sketches and drawings of a similar flower. Then I mostly stopped my art for a while as my life turned up-side-down. Every now and then a flower sketch would show up in my bullet journal or I’d drag out a sketchpad and color a flower when I felt the need for comfort.
After a few years of keeping a bullet journal on paper, I bought an iPad and went digital using GoodNotes. It works well enough, and I can keep all of my notes with me all the time, not just what fits in the most recent book. Still, flower sketches showed up in my bullet journal in the margins of pages. After a couple of years of missing my coloring and drawing, I noticed a sketch & coloring app for the iPad. It’s given me the ability to creat art wherever I am, but I miss the tactile feel of implement on paper.
The first drawing I did on my iPad marked a new beginning, and it seems fitting to share it here for the new beginning of my blog.
