March 8th: Creative Slack Time and... a Silly Experiment!
Even though painting mandalas are part of my personal "mental wellness program" — much like other people meditate or do Yoga — I have been slacking off, recently.
Hence, no posts for almost a week.
My "silly" departure from the usual...
For many of those who choose the "Creative Life" away from the indentured servitude of "Corporate" jobs in the mainstream there will always be ebbs and flows.
As well as just the natural cycles we experience, self-employment also has its unavoidable moments of drudgery. For me, those primarily come in the form of accounting and bookkeeping, with an eye towards preparing income tax statements.
I suppose I am paying a little more attention to the process this year because it's good to be "in the system," in order for us to get the next set of "stimulus payments" to be distributed here in the USA. Whereas I like independence and all that good stuff, I'm not so far "off the grid" that I am going to turn away free money... particularly at a time when all our creative incomes are — basically — taking it in the shorts.
Meanwhile...
So, the funny little character you see here grew out of finding a rock on the beach that looked very much like the body shape of a very round and woolly sheep.
I thought it was cute, but since I need a new creative sidetrack project about as much as another hole in my head, I didn't really foresee doing anything with it.
Anyway, I let the potential percolate for a while (this all started back in December), mostly getting stuck at the fact that the somewhat rough and nubbly granite rocks that make good "wool looking" sheep's bodies are incredibly poorly suited to being painted on in great detail.
But who says it has to be done "in great detail?"
So this is the first prototype for what I might call Chakra Sheep.
The idea is that she has a mandala painted on her back in the seven basic Chakra colors, and then I painted a cartoonish face and added little black pebbles as feet.
Not as detailed as my usual work, but I'm OK with that... I think.
As you see this here, it lacks some color intensity because it doesn't have a "finish coat" applied yet... that'll change the appearance a bit.
The feet turned out to be quite a challenge because the actual point-of-contact is tiny and I really didn't like the idea of having huge gobs of hot glue everywhere. At this point I'm using some extremely "vicious" universal contact cement... which seems to hold pretty well, but definitely would not stand up to the grandkids "playing farm yard" with it.
I'll have to work on that part, down the road... but I'm thinking these are more "adult" than kid's toys.
Haven't yet decided if I'm going to pursue this further...
Part of the challenge is actually finding the right sorts of "fat sheep" stones; once I started looking for them, they turned out to be rather scarce!
I had the idea of not only making them the way pictured here, but also in a "flock" with each sheep painted with the colors of each of the seven primary Chakras.
I'm going to let this percolate some more...
In the meantime, thanks for visiting!
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2021.03.08 AS-TXT-051/017