 If you’ve been reading my posts about Becoming an AuthorArtist over these last 6 months, you’ve been hearing… Play, play, quantum physics, play...play, play, play, play, play And rumor has it that some of you have played! So you may already know what I’m about to talk about! You may have learned firsthand, you may even know without knowing you know, the power of play. Play is a profound teacher. She can teach you as deep as a canyon and leave you without a word to explain the experience. So here are some words about the power of play.
And that this relentless power that wants to unleash and undo and free everything unites us
Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out this year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do!
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Play takes you all the way!!! Once upon a time…
She made sure they had color and books in their hands. Then cut them out and gave them something a little extra so they could stand up on their own!
 The woman longed to make more play things. Find more stories! And so it was that she was a children’s book maker. She allways remembered… to make books that children can enter and find themselves…  one must enter first and play, play, play. Big blessings on ALL your play! May you play your way right into making a great big book! 
Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out this year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do!  from the book, Just Like Me Cheat Please! OK, back to scooching ever closer toward the AuthorArtist position. Last month we took a break from the art and explored why Quantum Physics and being a children's book authorartist have everything to do with each other....so, how did it go? Did you become as clear as possible about what it is that you want to create in your career? Did you imagine it as if it's already happened? I encourage you to keep playing with those concepts from last month as we now turn back again toward some art making. This month I’m going to encourage you to cheatcheatcheat…now, I don’t really believe in cheating because of that whole second art rule of mine, “there’s never a right or wrong way to make art.” But technically, the kids always think of today’s project as cheating at first, until I educate them of course.  from Angels Ride Bikes To blow a big hole in the idea of cheating, I did a whole book using this photo technique - Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems by Francisco Alarcon. I also used this technique for my contribution to Just Like Me, one of my all time favorite books. All you do is take a photograph, you can even use one of yourself or your kids to practice on, or someone you want to honor, like Nelson Mandela or Frida Kahlo and make art directly onto it. Enlarge the photo in black and white on heavy cardstock. I like to use oil pastels, color pencils or acrylics. With acrylics you can actually paint it to the point that you no longer see the original printed image. With oil pastels and color pencils part of what makes it interesting is that you can still see the photo print showing through.  Toyomi Igus Go slowly and let your colors build up. This is a great opportunity to get a sense of the shape of the face, how shadows work, facial expressions. You don’t have to be tied to making it look realistic. If you like you could be blue. Your kids could have polka dots. You could accentuate the most simple lines of the image and take out the smaller details and create a more stylized or graphic image. I’ve shared a few samples I did of two AMAZING authors I painted years ago for Children's Book Press promotional materials and recently found in my studio, Toyomi Igus and Juan Felipe Herrera. Can you see the image underneath? Does it feel like I’m cheating? What do you imagine I learned by doing this? Personally, I love this technique. I think of it as pure play and revel in the fact that I can relax and know that the image is basically going to look like the person.  Juan Felipe Herrera If your goal is to become an artist that can create realistic imagery, this is a great chance to practice, play and imagine doing this without an image underneath too. What or who would you love to paint using this technique? Your dog, your kid, your mum, your favorite artist…just promise me you’ll have fun. Thanks! Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out this year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do!  Do you have a big creative leap you want to make? Like, being a children’s book illustrator or a writer or both?! Maybe you’ve been toying with some of the techniques in my blog posts, done some serious scribbling, maybe even bought some watercolors. But then you hit the wall. You feel overwhelmed. It all feels like too much. You hear the voices in your head saying I can’t or you get that heavy feeling that is the exact opposite of flow in your chest. Maybe you stay on track with your goals, but it feels hard and you’re not sure you have what it takes to make it work. You look for inspiration. You look for ways to keep yourself disciplined.  If this sounds like you, I want to encourage you to ask one question: What do Quantum Physics and becoming a children’s book authorartist have to do with each other? Two words. Absolutely everything. Back in the day when I lived in the woods, miles outside of a small rural town in Oregon, I knew two things. One- I create my own reality and two- I am going to paint full time. The fact that I had only been painting with acrylics for a few months and had nearly no art training or experience didn’t matter to me. I knew I created my reality and one way or another I was going to paint full time.  I had been working with the principles behind Quantum Physics for some time but I had never set my sites on something so big. I practiced everything I knew would help me. Still I had tons of fear when I moved to San Francisco to pursue my goal, but I did everything I could to remain focused and open. I paint full time I told myself. I Paint full time. I set up a work space and painted as often as I could when I got here. I had no money and barely any samples to show galleries, but I kept seeing myself as an artist painting full time. Overwhelmed by the big city coupled with my intense shyness at the time, I didn’t contact any galleries, but just kept painting and seeing myself as a full time artist.  One day a few months after moving here and needing some cash, I contacted an old account in the city to see if they wanted to buy any of my back stock jewelry. I had closed my business before leaving Oregon. Mixed in with my stuff there was a page of slides of what very little work I had. When I went in, the woman behind the counter was more interested in my paintings than my jewelry. I wasn’t even the one to show it to her. She dug it out and asked me why I wasn’t bringing her this? A cascade of events happened over the next few months and now many years later, I have illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books, my art is on the cover of major art books, I teach and have developed an art curriculum that is used by universities and schools, my art has shown internationally, and more! So much flowed from “I paint full time.” The power of this vision radically changed the course of my life.  It wasn’t luck, an accident or fate. It certainly wasn’t because I am exceptionally talented or had a great education. I consciously created it. I used everything I know about the nature of reality to make it real. I didn’t go through the formal, normal physical plane channels to make “my career” happen. Maybe that’s why I consider it more of a vocation than a career. It was a calling. Something I created out of the deep magic of my being, a magic we were all born with. I wanted to tell everyone how I did it and that they could do it too! But over time I learned to keep my mouth shut. I began to embed the truths that I learned in my curriculum instead. Talk of Quantum Physics and creating reality with your thoughts was not “appropriate” for remaining accessible and professional in the field. That sort of thing is the stuff of new age fluff, ancient indigenous wisdom, wildly imaginative scientists and Oprah. Not the stuff of children’s book authorartists dealing with school visits and literacy.  But now there’s a book that makes it feel like Quantum Physics has come out of the closet! At least a little bit! I would like to introduce you to E-Squared by Pam Grout. I am adding this to my strongly recommended reading list for all the classes I teach from now on. In her book, Pam gathers together many of the things I also cite in my work and support my personal interest in a new understanding of reality. In an accessible format, she playfully and scientifically introduces us to the fundamental elements of Quantum Physics, but more than that. She introduces us to how these can be witnessed in our daily experience and how we can effectively put them to use. This is science! Scientists are now understanding that everything is made of the same thing-energy and that energy is aware. We and everything we see are the same. Everything is energy. Because of this, we affect the physical plane through our thoughts. I love how Pam walks us through it. She provides 9 DIY experiments to prove that our thoughts create reality. This is a big shift in thinking…over the next decade we will come to understand that we do not live in a physically solid world. We live in an energetically pulsing one. This is huge. It will change how we think, how we live, how we relate to each other, everything. What makes this sort of thing a lot easier to swallow is a friendly face with fab charm and a lot of intriguing anecdotes. Pam is the kind of gal a lot of us can relate to. She’s really easy to listen to.  She’s written two screenplays, a live soap opera, a TV series and articles for Modern Bride, CNN, People, Huffington Post, National Geographic and more. E-Squared is her 16th book and it spent 8 weeks at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Like me, all this seemed like an impossible dream to Pam when she started. She tells a story half way through the book on page 79 that is very similar to mine. Except she was a journalist wanting to write full time. Things weren’t going well, in fact they were going terrible for Pam. So she took a writing seminar to improve her prospects. But instead of learning plot treatments or creating strategies to get an agent, the entire workshop centered on her inner world and addressing herself. And this changed absolutely everything. Don’t get me wrong. I believe it’s super awesome to hone your skills. Vital in fact--and super FUN. But it is not the only thing you could or should be honing. In fact, honing your art or writing skills may not even be the most effective thing you could do on your path to becoming an illustrator or author! So before I share anymore about actual art making, I would like you to do two things.  One, become as clear as you can about what you want to create in your career. For example, I wanted to paint full time. What do you want? What do you really want? Get this part as clear as you can. Taste it! Smell it! Make it as fully real as possible. Then start imagining that it has already happened. It is a reality right now. Done. In everything you do, all day, recall this new reality you are creating. It’s science! You can do this! And two, make this a priority. I guarantee that when you return to playing/art making with me next month, you will be amazed. In fact, you may be shocked. Perhaps as shocked as I was when a stranger walked up to me and not only bought a piece of art at my first show in San Francisco, but asked me if I wanted to illustrate a children’s book…all because I decided I PAINT FULL TIME. I believe! To learn more about manifesting your reality and using peace as a path in, feel free to join me for the entire month of January for my online course: Believing is Seeing: Daily Journal of Transformation. Start 2014 with focused intention to create the life, the art, the you that you want and see in your heart of hearts. I believe in you!  Release into the Power of Play... Last month I encouraged you to:
Ok, so this month, we’re returning to the glory of cutting and pasting. I forever find myself returning to this brilliant game. And once I begin it’s so hard for me to stop. Just playing for a long moment for this demo had me all charged up and dying to investigate further. Paper and pencils, glue and scissors-freedom at my fingertips! Something happens when we play. Just like when we were children, when we play, we learn. Returning to the tools of childhood provide us with a familiar door back to the creative wisdom we were born with.  Gather Your Materials This project is a great way to begin playing with the empty page. Cut out a bunch of elements and then play puzzle with them. See how things look this way and that. Experiment with layering a figure into place. You don’t have to have the whole body figured out. You could have legs and arms, and a head and a body and move them around or cut more pieces until everything feels just right to you. Create characters, explore background, experiment with style, show movement. The sky’s the limit! You can see, I like big hair and big dresses! I have since I was a wee nibble. So you too get to do whatever YOU LIKE! Maybe it’s the thing you always drew when you were a kid, like mine is.  Cut out shapes and patterns from anything that strikes you I got a little fancy with the cutting part. I whipped out my trusty die cut contraption. I have a Cuttlebug, which I love (It's that green thing in the picture above). I love the circle dies. I have hearts and scalloped ovals, but there’s something about the circles. They’re so round :-). Only recently have I found out about the tools that exist because of the new craft genre of “scrapbooking.” I love discovering this whole new world where “scrapbook” is turned into a verb and through the transformation is elevated to crazy heights of fabulousness. A far cry from my old photos in cellophane pages in a cardboard binder. I warmed up for this project by cutting circles in colored paper. This got my imagination stirring. I had an old art journal and the ever collage-ready National Geographic, which I barely used. I went through each page, ripping out whatever caught my eye. The art journal turned out to be the best because it had all this patterned stuff, (which reminded me of the great paper you can get for scrapbooking.) I cut arm-ish looking limbs and boots and dresses and a wig or two. I cut more than I needed. I cut until I felt done cutting.  I laid all the elements out on a piece of paper and scooched them around until something fell into place. Sometimes I had to cut something else out. Then I glued everything down. I used color pencils, a permanent black marker and a white acrylic pen over everything and I decorated the sleeves by putting holes in them with my multiple size hole punchers! On the one I above that I fully finished, the face is construction paper and the ear is cut from the page of a dictionary. I had so much fun. I loosened up and relaxed. I played. It was awesome. In fact I had so much fun, I’m thinking I want to illustrate a book using this style now. My mind is exploding with ideas. Join me? Got paper, glue and scissors? Then freedom is yours! You are an artist. I know. P.S. Did you gather images last month? Did you scribble? Both of those things will come in handy with this project!!! And let me know how it goes! Here's some more samples from my playing...(click images to enlarge) Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out next year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do! |
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