My Life As Seen Through My Phone: April & May

It’s time again for more of My Life As Seen Through My Phone. I’ve been doing my best to keep up with my New Years’ resolution of drawing something everyday and it hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I have to play catch up. In order to keep up, some of the drawings I do are fast, crude, and simple. Many of which do not make my monthly recap posts.

But I’ve started using some of these quick doodles, texture sketches, and abstract-based drawings in my collage/mixed media pieces. In April and May, I used images and instagrams from previous months and combined them with some of the drawings to create the images I’m sharing today.

April

The first image is based on an instagram I took in February and a drawing I made in April. I used the drawing as a mask to the photo and inverted the photo to remove it’s visual references.

The image was made using the following instagram combined with the following drawing.

A photo posted by katharinefriedgen (@katharinefriedgen) on Feb 22, 2015 at 8:50am PST

May

For May’s collage I went back to using portrait photography. I created a solid color mask based on several brush strokes of paint from my sketchbook.

The original image is from a trip to San Francisco, where we did a wine tasting:

For April and May’s pieces, I don’t consider either of them “finished works”. These are more explorations of combined works. A large part of what I’m enjoying about this series is seeing what textures, lines, graphic images mix well together and how they can. Below is a print I’ve work more into with graphite and pen.

When you speak to anyone who works in a creative genre – you’ll notice they never feel that their work is ever truly finished. Musicians will perform the same song in 100 different ways. Writers will go through innumerable drafts before their satisfied. Actors will play a role tweaking every nuance to find the right blend for the right moment.

Most of the artists I know use their sketchbook as a place to explore and make whatever comes to their head regardless to whether it will end in a finished concept or piece. To me, this is an invaluable part of the creative process. You have to hit a few walls before you can burst through to the other side.

But I’d love to hear from you: What do you feel is the most important part of the creative process? Let me know in the comments below.