Category: mandala

I always think “I’ll blog more soon” and then I don’t

~ Ari October ~ 2 Comments

Sorry to all who follow this blog with genuine interest- I’m so bad at remembering to do things! Even things I like doing!

Although a lot of the time it’s not just a matter of forgetting, it’s also a matter of a mental wall that makes me not want to do things even though I actually enjoy doing them. I think this is what a lot of people call art block. For me it is also a product of my neurodiversity, from the executive dysfunction. My combo of ADHD and autism makes it to where I don’t want to do anything that isn’t the easiest thing a lot of the time. Art can be hard, so my brain likes to prevent me from doing it, even though I usually very much enjoy myself when I actually get around to doing it. Blogging is never really that hard per say, but it does require me to actually take time to use the computer and write, and a lot of the time I just can’t be bothered.

So anyway, here’s an update. In the past several months I’ve been playing around with different mediums.

For example, here is a Molotow acrylic marker painting I did on a wood cutout from The Dollar Tree that I did for my partner’s dad. We have a very limited number of colors in Molotows, and he’s a veteran, so I figured it was a good excuse to use a color pallet I don’t use very often: red, white, and blue. He likes to garden too, so the flower shape is also fitting.

Despite the simple design, this mandala took me about two weeks to complete due to perfectionism and procrastination. Most of the work was just trying to decide what pattern to do next!

Another medium I’ve taken up lately is a collaboration with my mom!
She likes to do “coloring page stained glass” crafts. She’s not much into drawing herself, so she generally just traces free-to-use coloring pages. I create free-to-use coloring pages, so I offered to do the tracing part of the project for her of some of my pieces! I love to do elaborate designs on my mandala which were a little intimidating to her, so doing it myself allowed me to have a piece of the action and let her just color the piece stress-free!
I consider any instance of someone coloring one of my coloring pages as a collaboration between myself and the person coloring, so it was especially meaningful to me to have my mom be one of those people.
The first one I did for her was April’s Mandala, which she colored, backed, and framed for me as a gift. It now hangs on the bedroom wall in memory of our lost daughter.

April’s Mandala coloring page stained glass craft: A collaboration between myself and my mother.

I have done several more of these for her since then, and I always find it very enjoyable. Retracing my line art is very soothing and nostalgic for me, and I have the opportunity to correct tiny mistakes I made in the original line art which is so satisfying!

I am now getting back into watercolor and I’m in the process of creating my own palette using a nice little tin I picked up off amazon with empty half pans and tube watercolors mixed with glycerin. I don’t have much of anything to show for it yet, as this is quite a recent development. It is getting closer to September so my anticipation for autumn is building, I think I will be doing some seasonal pieces soon.

Our rainbow daughter is due in October (yes I know, how perfect!) so I think I may create some autumnal birth announcement cards to send to the extended family members. I want to get on that sooner than later so that I don’t have to think about it postpartum! I am sure I will not have the energy for any sort of creative endeavor for quite a while following her birth.

That’s all for now folks, I’ll try to update you again at least once more before Birdie gets here!
No promises though unfortunately, hahaha.

Better late than never! Inktober prompt 4: “Radio” and 5: “Blade”

~ Ari October ~ 1 Comment
I actually quite like this little doodle.
If it’s not obvious, this one is inspired by a saw blade 🙂

I fell behind yesterday because I was busy, but I’m happy to say I’m all caught up!

Edited later to add: If it wasn’t obvious from the lack of subsequent posts about Inktober, I ended up giving up.

Okay, I did it. I drew. Here’s #Inktober day 1: “Fish”

~ Ari October ~ Leave a comment
Edit: Broken image? I will fix this soon when I have some time

I’m quite rusty after a few weeks of not drawing, but something is better than nothing!
He’s based on a butterfish. I think they just look much like the quintessential fish to me.

I’m going to be doing all my inktober sketches in the same small sketchpad I’m bringing with me on my trip to Texas later this month, for consistency, and because the small format is less intimidating given I’m just now getting back into daily drawing.

I will probably continue to do small doodle-y things like this, nothing too fancy because I’d like to complete the monthly challenge for once and if I try to be too detailed every day it’s going to wear me out. Which is exactly what happened last year, lol.

I’m proud of myself for pushing through the very strong feelings of not wanting to draw and making this little guy. He’s cute.

“Ex-Planner” Sketchbook – the fastest I’ve ever filled up a sketchbook so far!

~ Ari October ~ Leave a comment
My favourite spread in this one is actually the first one 0:
If you’d like to flip through this sketchbook yourself, check out the Google Drive folder!

As the name implies, this sketchbook was originally a planner.
I wanted to do something like a bullet journal for the conversion classes I had been attending but I didn’t realize how difficult that is to do without a dotted notebook.
I gave up quickly, and the book sat in my shelf for a long time. I realized that paper planners aren’t really for me anyway, I do just fine using my phone’s calendar app.

In October 2019 I started drawing in this sketchbook, but the 1+ page per day challenge wasn’t started until late December 2019(?), most of the sketchbook was filled between January and February 2020. 133 days total, from very start to finish.

But here are the rules I lived by for this particular sketchbook challenge:
>I, Ari October, had to fill at least one page per day with a drawing.
>Other people could help me fill pages, but those were bonus pages.
>The drawings didn’t have to be good, they just had to get done.

So not 100% of the works are mine, my partner also assisted me in my goal to fill this baby up ASAP 🙂 You can tell which are hers because she signs them as Jasper or Jazzy.
And quite a few of the pages in this one are just lazy plaid patterns and other very lazy pattern doodles, because it was a good and safe place to experiment with color pallets.

This time I didn’t include 100% of the pages like I did in the last sketchbook folder, because many of them were just journal entries that would not be of interest to anyone but myself. I included pretty much all the doodles though.
There’s a page where I left the journal entry visible because of the placement of the mandala doodle, but you can easily just not read it. I don’t mind either way.

I had a lot of fun filling this guy up. Not so much fun taking pictures of every page though, my legs went numb @__@ Had to make use of that morning light though! It’s the only way for me to take decent enough pictures of my art without extensive editing of each image.

About the butterfly

~ Ari October ~ 2 Comments

Content warning: miscarriage & suicidal ideation

I made this butterfly mandala coloring page in memory of our daughter, April, who passed away long before she would ever have been born. I invite anyone who is interested in doing so to color it as they see fit, I would love to see your work ❤ Here is a link to the full size image via google drive.

On April 30th 2020 my life turned upside down.
Our baby, a gummy-bear-sized embryo measuring 7w4d was found to be dead at the 8 week ultrasound. No heartbeat, a few days behind in growth, irregularly shaped gestational sac. I never dreamt that a cluster of cells would wreck me to the core.

It didn’t hit me right away, part of me expected this. I didn’t begin my descent into sobbing and despair until I was scheduling my follow-up appointment with the secretary that I checked in with an hour prior.
I had always said I expected my first pregnancy would miscarry. I heard it was common, and having EDS I assumed I might have fertility issues.

I quickly spiraled into an extremely dark depression. The kind I used to experience through ages 12-21. The kind that left me obsessed with death, chronically suicidal. My emotions were an absolute roller coaster. I have never flip flopped so drastically before. Some days I was filled with hope and determination, only to fall into hell again at a moment’s notice.

I made this butterfly mandala on May 18th, desperate to create something of value out of the tragedy that had occurred. Obviously it did not heal me, it could not save me, but it gave me something to look at and made our child’s existence more tangible.

On May 27th I also made this piece that I typically avoid showing people because it is so much more straightforward than the butterfly:

“Life is messy” glitter gel pen + my fingers as a smudge tool

It’s the closest thing I could create to a portrait of our baby.
The embryo is actually pretty much to scale with a real 7 week old embryo on the physical copy. It’s actually pretty cute, I think, as cute as a weird blob can be.

Please remember that all people experience grief differently.
Some people do not outwardly grieve miscarriages at all, others react even worse than I did. Most fall somewhere in-between. Grief is also something we don’t just “get over”, it is something we move forward with. Grief is traumatizing, and it is a trauma very few people get to avoid.

However you experience grief, whether you grieve an unborn baby, a child of any age, a sibling, a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend, acquaintance, a beloved pet, a place you cannot return to, even an enemy or a stranger…

Please remember that grief is a bizarre, hard-to-define thing that we all experience differently and you are not weird or wrong for grieving whoever and however you naturally do.

May the memories of those you love that have gone before you bless you always.

Discovering the joy of Posca paint markers…

~ Ari October ~ Leave a comment

We recently acquired some Copic markers and a Posca paint pen, I really love the Copics and have been using them a lot! But the Posca marker has a lot of novelty factor for me because it’s a more unfamiliar art supply. I’ve used alcohol markers before, but never acrylic paint markers. I love how you can draw and write on just about anything! I’ve been drawing hearts and faces on random inanimate objects around the house, and even labeled my ceramic coffee jars with it.

I will probably post a big “art dump” (or several separate smaller art dumps?) of what I’ve been doing in my sketchbook pretty soon, once I get some quality time with the computer. My partner has been playing a lot of Roblox with “the boys” (her three nephews) and the WordPress App leaves a lot to be desired so I don’t bother using it.

Rainy Mandala – A “collaboration” with my cat.

~ Ari October ~ Leave a comment
This is what I get for leaving the paint water out while the cats are in the room…

Not going to lie, when my cat Rain Rain suddenly ran across the art desk and got paint water all over my multimedia sketchbook my immediate reaction was to cry and curse god. So after saying a few regrettable things and getting snapped at by my partner for doing so, I went to take a shower to get away from everything.

While drowning my sorrows in soothing hot water, I remembered the story I heard about a woman who let her daughter draw in her sketchbook and called it a collaboration rather than a mess.
I also remembered how Rain Rain’s birth mother, Sula, used to bring me moss from the roof. It irritated me to no end! It was so gross!
But eventually I realized that one day Sula would leave me too soon as they all do, and that I should cherish these gifts she is bringing me out of love.
Now because of that realization I still have a ziplock bag of the roof moss in my closet, despite my practicing minimalism it’s something I chose to hold on to for now. (Sula ran away when the kittens were 3 months old. It’s been 2 years now and I still think about her every day…)

Remembering my vow to tolerate mistakes, and out of love for my cat-daughter, I decided I would take Rain Rain’s idea and run with it. I would turn something painful into a sentimental memory… once I dried off the sketchbook of course 😉

Miraculously this was the only painting that was damaged in the whole sketchbook, the one I had just finished that day. I thought to myself “maybe this doesn’t look so bad after all” and I added more water to it for a “rainy” effect. The irony of her name and the resulting mandala does not escape me.

I now have plans to frame this piece and hang it on our bedroom wall 🙂

Momdala

~ Ari October ~ 2 Comments
My mom works with kids so she collects a lot of coloring pages, so I decided to turn this one into a coloring page before coloring it myself.
The finished watercolor piece that is now hanging in my mom’s bedroom 🙂

This piece is from October 2019. I made it for my mom in celebration of her 22 years of sobriety on November 19th 2019 🙂 She loves burgundy and silver so I knew I had to incorporate those somehow. I used primarily watercolor but the silver was done with gel pen.

24 Steps

~ Ari October ~ 3 Comments
two black white and gold mandalas
two framed mandalas side by side.
My first works to ever be hung in a public establishment!

I owe my life to the 12 step programs. These mandalas were gifted to the recovery club where I began my journey to a new way of life without the use of recreational drugs.

My art cannot be divorced from my journey through addiction and recovery, which is one of the reasons I maintain anonymity by using the name Ari October.

I understand that AA and NA are not for everyone, but if you struggle with addiction yourself I hope you find something that does work for you so that you may lead a life free from compulsive addictive behavior!