Meditation and the part time painter (EMG Zine)

I’m the first to admit being a stress bunny. Some days I thrive on it, other days it near wrecks me. In my everyday life there came a point where I needed to sit back and start learning how to relax. One of the relaxation tools I learnt was meditation. I’m not great at it, I get distracted easily, and I don’t do it anywhere near as regularly as I should. However I did find that a nice side effect of relaxation and meditation was the improvement to my creativity.

Now this is nothing new. Meditation has been linked to the arts and spirituality for centuries. Sumi-e is a way of meditating through calligraphy/ brush painting, the Mandala is a geometric pattern (often circular) used as a focus for meditation, even the architecture of temples and churches enhances the ability to relax and attain a higher sense of tranquillity and peace. Many artists talk about ‘being in the zone’ when they get so engrossed in a painting that everything flows and they lose track of time.
Meditation can be as simple as:

• Listening to a CD of yoga, tai-chi, or meditational music. Any type of music that helps you relax, brings down your heart rate, and contains no jarring lyrics or noise is good (normally I find music without words is best for pure meditation, but I like some New Age music with lyrics for relaxing and getting me into a painting mood. That being said, I don’t paint to meditational music very often – only when I’m trying to chill out or go for a particular mood in my painting).

• Learning breathing techniques. There many techniques available, I use some simple ones such as ‘The Relaxing Breath’ (sometimes called the 4-7-8) a lot. It takes only a few minutes and has been called a natural tranquilizer – which is great in stressful situations. Other techniques include things like Autogenic training (where you focus on a particular part of your body, relaxing each bit as you go).

• Doing guided meditations. This is where you either listen to someone describe a meditation. They may tell you how to breathe, may describe a place you’re visiting or describe how you should be feeling. This is my personal favourite kind of meditation because it’s a visual experience. It’s like travelling without leaving your house.

• Focusing on an object such as a flame, crystal, religious icon or Mandala as you breath. You may have music or silence. I have a set of beads I wear. When I get stressed (and need to get my emotions under control) I use them as a focusing tool, rubbing my finger over the surface and focusing on the feel of the stone, or just counting them as I slow my breathing down.

• Tai chi and yoga also utilise breathing and movement to achieve the same relaxation and peace.

• It could even be sitting on a beach or your garden by yourself.

Meditation is about being in that particular moment and remaining focused and calm.
So what are some of the benefits of meditation in regards to art and creativity?

• It can help focus the mind before you start painting. If you’ve got home from work, are wound up about some incident with the fax machine, it’s a way to relax, calm you down, get rid of some of the negative energy you’re carrying around. This all sounds very ‘Zen’, but it’s very simple – if you are thinking about what happened at work, you aren’t thinking about your artwork.

• It can kick start the muse. Meditation is a great source of inspiration. Put on some soft dreamy music, lie back, let your mind take you to far away beaches, jungle paradises, marble halls with huge sweeping arches and columns running down one side. Guided meditations are often great for this as they may have sound effects such as running water, waves crashing, bird calls, thunder, all atmospheric elements to take you to another place.

• It has health benefits. It improves your focus, can help your posture (depending on the type you do), can help your general well being and ability to cope with stress. Different kinds of meditation will do different things for you

• It reduces your stress and helps you cope with life better. If you are relaxed and coping, that spilt paint on your carefully detailed painting becomes an opportunity for a warrior to suddenly get a new costume!

Some people may say that the art of painting is like meditation. You know when everything just flows and you’re ‘in the zone’. But if you’re having trouble getting into the ‘zone’, need to unwind, or just want a way to unblock your creative energies, meditation or any of the associated meditative practices may help.

* Please note that this is not a guide to meditation. It’s simply a summary of some of the types of mediation I’ve tried and how it has helped me as an artist.

Links Shout out - Pattern Tap

"Pattern Tap is here to satisfy and encourage the inspiration needs of my interface design peers and peeps. We aspire to be the one stop pattern shop for your next inspiration need." (from the website)

Split by functionality, this is like a scrap book of design elements. Navigation, backgrounds, buttons, lists, icons, headers, tables etc, there are about 45 categories to browse through. Great for when you are trawling for inpiration, trends, or just really awesome designs to ooh and ahhh over! 

http://patterntap.com/

Links Shout out - Phoenix online graphics editor

Anyway, always the hoarder of cool links, there has been an increase in the number of online image editors available and this is one of them. It can be integrated to some online image galleries like Flickr, Facebook and Picasa, plus there are a stack of tutorials. It has a number of advanced features like layers and cloning tools. Of course it's no Photoshop, but if you're on the road and don't have access to anything but the internet, this kind of tool could be invaluable.

Phoenix online graphics editor

As always, make sure you read the terms and conditions on the site.

Links Shout out - The Beautiful Necessity

I like pretty sites. I like sites that have variety around their focus. The Beautiful Necessity is a site that looks at The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and features links to everything from sales of the original paintings, products and artwork inspired by the movement, costume design, films and tv, artists and a whole series of articles that may inspire, or just move you to drool :)

http://thebeautifulnecessity.blogspot.com/

How to prioritise competing tasks

In a previous column, I briefly mentioned working smarter, not harder. One of the things that I find difficult to manage at times is what to do first. You get so many things on your plate, you only have so many hours in the day, yet you are expected to complete everything NOW! When you have conflicting commitments and you can’t really drop them, how do you work out what to do first, and what to push to the bottom of the list?

First and foremost, have some way of keeping track of everything you have to do. There’s nothing worse than finding an email you forgot to answer... a year or two later. I’m guilty of that, in fact I know I’ve got a couple of way overdue tasks on my list! This is my way of working things out.

• Paid work should always come first! If you are a professional, you need to treat your paying customers like gold. They are your bread and butter. Being slow is ok, as long as you keep communications open and tell them you’re going to be slow. But never take money and renege on your contract or sale. It’s going to be hell on your reputation, and nothing travels faster than bad news!
• If you have two tasks of equal importance and one’s been in your in-tray longer, that’s the one that probably deserves your attention first. However, if it’s hanging around for ages – like months - maybe you should reconsider doing that task at all.
• The job that pays more bills is the one with the highest priority. Being an artist is important to me, but my day job pays all the niggly things like my mortgage and for food– so I’m not going to screw up that because I was up all hours painting! (Says the girl up til midnight painting on a ‘school night’ *ahem*).
• If a task seems too hard or you know that you are never going to get to it, you are entitled to boot it out the door. Don’t keep it on the list, there is seriously no point.
• If a task looks like it’s going to suck the life out of you and take forever, see if you can break it down into smaller tasks. An hour of sketching is a little more manageable than having to draw 50 line art pieces.
• Stuff you’ve bartered for should be treated the same as paid work. No one hates another artist who receives a trade and reneges on their promise. It’s just not cool. Don’t do it.
• Do fun tasks after you’ve done the ‘work’ stuff. Use it as a proverbial carrot (or in my case chocolate). If you do all the fun stuff first, you’re only left with boring, tedious things that will seem to take forever and ever and ever and.... so try and organise your tasks using this theory.
• Do 5 minute jobs NOW! Don’t procrastinate. Knock them over and get them out of the way.
• Be able to live with your decisions. Recognise that in order to do things well, you have to focus on one thing at a time!

And above all, learn to live with the fact that there are only so many hours in the day, only so much work one poor little trooper can do before they keel over, and that you are not in fact a superhero that can do 12 things at the one time. It just isn’t possible! As much as we would like it to be!

If you are interested in tools to help organise yourself a bit better, here’s a previous post I made on creating and using todo lists
http://parttimepainter.blogspot.com/2008/03/organisation-1-todo-lists-and-part-time.html

Link shout-out - I Draw Girls

Links shout-out! A great collection of digital tutorials/ walk throughs that don't just focus on drawing women (despite the name). Even though this is mostly centred around fantasy & games art, there's plenty for any digital painter. There are zombies, ninjas, mecha, life drawing sessions, studies of old masters, free brushes, backgrounds and architecture. Worth losing yourself for a couple of hours. Check it out!

http://idrawgirls.blogspot.com/

5 online photo editors

Digital editing doesn't require expensive software. You don't even need to be home to access you desktop editor. Simply hook into the Internet and have a look at the 5 best online image editors (according to Lifehacker readers)

http://lifehacker.com/5307419/five-best-online-image-editors