Messing About

I had some time this weekend to work in my journal and thought I’d share a page with you. Since I’ve been blogging I’ve had to do a crash course in technology. It’s going OK. It’s a time sucker, with a steep learning curve. I still need to learn at least Photoshop Elements. I have figured out how to use my scanner, but I need to learn a little more about color correction. The two images here, next to each other, look pretty different. Even though it’s the same journal page.The top image is one I did on my scanner and the other image is one I did with my camera. Which one do you like the best? I’m trying to decide how to share my journal pages – scanned or photographed or both. I can’t decide. Oh jeez, this sounds kind of self indulgent, but I guess blogging is a bit that way. Anyway, I’ve been keeping a visual journal for a couple of years now and I’m trying to incorporate more drawing into my collages. This page happened kind of accidently as I was working on a couple of other pages. These scraps were laying on my table and they kind of jumped onto the page. I love it when it happens like this. After gluing them down I decided to just pick up my pen and start playing and this is the result.

This kind of leads me into thinking about style. Personal style. As I’ve been journaling I have begun to notice that my own personal style is emerging. I think if we were all given a big heap of journaling materials we would each create a journal page that was distinctive in a personal way. That’s what I mean by style. As I’ve been thinking about this, I came across this amazing illustrator and artist, Yuko Shimizu:

She has some interesting things to say about personal style. I still call it “style”, but I really like her point about how we all have a natural and comfortable way we approach our own personal work. Here’s what she said in a recent Illustration Friday interview:

How did you find your style? Has it changed since you started?
“I don’t personally believe in word “style”. If viewers see something in my work that they think of as “style”, I probably draw that way because I cannot do it any other way. I am not trying to say I don’t know how to paint in oil or draw with shading, but what I am trying to say is everyone has something we do naturally and comfortably because that works best for us, and people see that as style. But actually style is not about how it looks on the surface. It is what makes your work you because you do it naturally and that natural to everyone is so different.”

“As an artist I believe you should change, not force yourself to change, but change naturally. Your experience, influences and thinking affect how you work, so you make gradual change over the years. You kind of never know what you would be doing five years from now. That is part of fun being an artist, which is completely different from how corporate world works.”

You can read the whole interview here at Illustration Friday and peruse more of Yuko’s beautiful work at her website, here.

What’s your style?