Yield #3

This is the last one of the three I started for the Illustration Friday topic "yield." These are all people "yielding" to reality. Perhaps it's not a reality that you can see, but it is the spirit of the universe, the currents flowing through them. I hope it's obvious that there is a certain amount of joy there, or at least peace.

Frankly, I am glad to be done with these three. I actually had an IDEA, and figured out a way to express that idea, but I've really missed having reference materials. My "out of my head" faces just aren't as "real" as the ones I draw from either life or photographs. And because these started out basically as the light and dark swirls, bodies fit into those patterns more or less. It WAS fun to work on these--this last one I did most of the work on last night while my partner was repotting all of my cacti and succulents, on HIS birthday, no less--but I am looking forward to working on something more "solid" somehow soon. After I finish grading at least a minimum of the gazillion things I brought home over spring break to grade.

Shades in your Mind

What do you see when you close your eyes? What anxieties and worries are always there, preying on your peace of mind, that you don't notice when you are busy? But when you take a moment and shut your eyes, they clench at your stomach, and twist your mind, and the world seems an impossible and tangled place indeed.

But if I remember to breathe, I can feel the strain dissipating, the shoulders relaxing, the world becoming calmer. When I remember to breathe, I am more aware of the here and now, the place where I am right now, and nowhere else, and this is where I need to be when I open my eyes as well.

Illustration Friday: Yield

Okay, so I didn't make it before the next week's topic was posted, but I STARTED it during the proper week. Parent-teacher conferences just took too much of my time.

But "yield"--I think of all the times in one's life when one has to just stop fighting and go with the flow. Childbirth is one of them, but there are a whole lot more where resistance will get you no where. You have to just let go. That's what these two people are doing. They are flowing with the universe. It enters them, and they channel it through their own uniqueness, but they're not controlling it at all.

I seek to be more like that. More here in the "now" and going with the flow of the moment. Resistance causes stress. Stomach-aches and head-aches. And it's pointless, because the rest of the world will just go on the way it was going in the first place. Of course I believe that what I do makes a difference, that the world is a better place because I am here, but I am aware of my sphere of influence....

But is this better as a vertical or a horizontal?

Illustration Friday: sink

Okay, I made this picture just for this topic. It was supposed to be someone sinking back into a swirl of negative thoughts, a miasma. I am totally swamped with end of the semester grading, and trying to sort out all the messes I've let accumulate all semester, and feel like it would be all too easy for me to succumb. My model actually looked desperate, like there was no helping him.

But somehow he turned out looking positive, like he's totally enlivened, invigorated, by tapping into all the wild craziness around him, so it's not fitting my idea of this topic at all. And now that I think about it, that's the way I probably am too. I may feel desperate, and all too susceptible to sinking into the morasse (however you spell that word), but it just won't happen. I put on the emotional brakes, and ignore it, and pay more attention to other things--like the web of tree branches against the gray sky outside my window.

This picture also reminds me of my very first picture for illustration Friday, that I posted in January of 2009, almost three years ago. I've really come a long way since then, and made a lot of pictures.

Illustration Friday: Deja Vu

*******I am totally ignoring the topic this week, because I REALLY wanted to post something. This is actually the second "real" drawing for the resolutions topic--to LIVE so that when it comes time to die you won't find that you haven't lived at all. These folks are LIVING, which is what we should all be doing, all the time. Living in the moment, because this moment, NOW, is all we really have.

It's funny, though, how some moments seem like we've lived them before. There might be some kind of biological, or biochemical explanation for that feeling, but I don't remember it. It seems somehow, in my mind, tied to dreams.....

Illustration Friday: Dip

Here, finally is an Illustration Friday submission, even though I'm hard put to explain it. Something about the everyday dipping into the eternal and/or the eternal dipping into the everyday. Both directions result in profound changes. Somehow it seems appropriate that I finished this (if you can call it finished) on Easter Sunday.

Illustration Friday: Flying

Their souls are flying from their bodies.

It looks like this scan is way too light...yup, it is. I don't know what happened. You can't even see the purple in the picture. But I'm too tired to try to rescan it, so this is what it is.

Illustration Friday: Craving

All she craves is to be in contact with the currents of the universe.

That's what I crave too.

It seems that a lot of my favorite books from childhood on take that as a kind of basic premise. Think about A Wrinkle in Time--Meg and Charles Wallace are fighting the nothing that blots out the joy that all of the universe, from the stars down to the mitochondria feel in the dance they make together.

As far as the picture goes, it's one I started a couple months ago for a different Illustration Friday topic, but never finished. It was watercolor and water-soluble painting crayons. I couldn't find the original reference for the woman, so I had to wing it. Today I drew over the original with ink. It was just a little bit too wide for the scanner, so it's cut off on either side.

I think that I will print out a copy of this to put on a card for yet another friend who's turning 50. She's is one ALWAYS to celebrate the currents of the universe.