I want to try giving more background context, and to replay through the creation process with this.
Part of the fun of abstract art is developing motifs of form. I've been settling on the line segments, circles, & points as basic elements. More fundamentally, I view these all as 'nodes' or 'strands' - a strand can be coiled into a point or connected to itself in a circle. Then, elements can be combined into 'molecules' or 'components' - like concentric circles or line-segment stacks, or like, three line segments into a triangle or four into a square. One of my go-to motifs is a circle with a line shooting out at a right angle around one of the cardinal directions. This is where I began with this drawing, with the pacific blue (outer ring) & cadet blue (line that goes from the top off to the right). Then, I made the ring concentric, with the forest green, carnation pink, & scarlet center, then finally the grey to bridge the pink/scarlet.
I've been often using a constraint of making every stroke a unique color - it seems both artistically challenging and enables aesthetic rainbow-y results.
I then made the color stack to balance on the cadet blue, from the bottom to top. Drawing line segments is less stressful & easier for me than other motifs like the curvilinears, though one common issue is the crayon tip 'exploding' at the beginning or middle of the line, that can create artifacts that at best can be worked with like knots in trees.
I made the yellow-orange perimiter stroke next, then thought it went too far to the right so made the color stack below to (chromatically) balance it out. Then, a looser corresponding green stroke seemed natural to fill the space there.
I like making an ice-like color by layering white + cerulean + white, and did this below the concentric circle. This sort of pushes the unique color per stroke constraint into a 'unique color per component', viewing these ice-drips as one - the goal isn't necessarily to fulfill the original constraint, though to make the best art.
I then wanted to make a 'muddy' color-stack below, beginning with the chestnut & brown; the orange seemed a natural 'ornament' & counter to the upper-left yellow-orange; olive + indigo to complete the 'terrain'. Then, I made the secondary, more vibrant 'terrain' below.
The empty space remaining in the middle-right seemed to call for color pencil curvilinear circuits. The light blue toward the bottom of this is faint in the scan. I'm inspired by local Hohokam petroglyphs, by the way, which scatter motifs like dot / circle / concentric cicles / curvilinears across the rock surface. Then, I added the red and some crayon strokes above, which blend the curvilinear section & the color stack above. I decided it was ok to add apricot twice qua unique-color exception; when viewing afterward, I noticed it created a color-correspondence between the bottom color-stack which are juxtaposed within the colors from the apricot to the green meander below.
That's the creation-process recap. I'm also re-establishing a set of kriya yoga programs (from the book A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya) that I've been struggling to progress through the past few years due to a myofascial (muscles + tendons) injury; am about two weeks restarting the first chapter's program. E.g. as a programmer, I've spent a lot of time constrained within a computer chair + typing position throughout my life. Recently, I've formed the goal of switching to using a floor-desk setup, now that I'm able to sit in Vajrasana pose and am getting closer to being able to sit in full-lotus long-term. For using the computer, I currently have a floor desk (plus this floor chair, which doubles qua ground padding). I like to draw outside, and currently have a desk & chair that feels ergonomically terrible/painful for my knees; a future goal is to get another floor desk & cushion for outside to replace the table. The floor table would also be more ethically eco-friendly to take a lower seat given that the small apartment backyard space is functioning qua micro–wildlife refuge.
Anyway, so I want to limit to maybe a drawing once a day or in a while for now, for the sake of healing the myofascial injury.
Thanks for reading/viewing,
May all beings be swiftly liberated from suffering.
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