Do you like Koalas?

**“When you focus on you, you grow. When you focus on shit, shit grows.” - Dwayne Johnson**
Who’d have thought this super cute quote by The Rock would be the one to get through to me?
One thing I have found really difficult since pursuing my art is holding myself accountable, and time-management skills.
If you don’t already know, I am not a morning person… I love my sleep and I have been described as ‘*the Grudge*’ many times in my life.
So having to find the self-discipline to get in the studio early every day with no one to answer to apart from that little voice in the back of my head, has proven harder than I thought.

I’m sure any of you fellow self-employed will know what I mean 🥹

So, this week my mission was to get into that headspace. I started by reorganising and getting new storage for the studio… is a trip to Ikea productivity or procrastination? Another issue I often succumb to 🤣

…I also set myself the target to get up at 6:30 every morning, get in the studio with an ugly green juice, and prove to everyone (mainly myself lol), that I could be a new woman!

I have lots to get done over the next few weeks, and not enough time. So the only solution is to get up early, say no to all the crap and focus!

It’s mark-making week baby!

First task of the week, was to create a painting in an impressionist style like the old master, *Van Gogh*.
This technique is more challenging than you’d think because the point is to layer marks on the canvas, but with paint straight from the tube - no mixing colours on the palette.
And there’s no mixing on the canvas either - you have to optically mix the colours by laying two colours next to each other.

For example; if you wanted to create green, laying blue and yellow paint down next to each other would fool the eye into thinking that you can see green. By laying two complimentary colours next to each other you’d make a neutral colour, and so on.
I started with big brushstrokes for the background and then moved to smaller brushstrokes for the details and the foreground.

This was going reasonably well until I realised I needed to make grey not brown, which requires mixing two colours plus white, and then I started to struggle…
I popped a process picture on my Instagram story asking if people knew what I was painting… and someone kindly said **my Koala looked like he was on LSD.**

I may have then cheated a little bit and bought grey paint, so I could then use it straight from the tube without my koala looking like he was thriving in the 60s - but I did most of the painting the optical way! 😆

Not too long after finishing the piece, for a bit of fun, I took him for a little photoshoot in the woods and stuck him in a tree so he could be in his natural habitat…

I think the photos turned out pretty cute!

You can view the little VLOG I made of this photoshoot here 🥰

For the drawing task this week, first I had to create a ‘white-on-black’ drawing (one of my favourite drawing methods).

I chose a gorgeous photo of a chimp who had been caught off guard while lost in thought, and got started with china marker and white charcoal.

lauren hawkins china marker drawing chimpanzee.jpg

Another optical play here because I had to ignore my instincts to draw in the darks areas - the white on black is basically drawing inverted to how you would usually.

I love him 🥰