FUN AND EASY IS VALID

I love doing these abstracts. They are basically the only things I draw that are extremely intuitive and based on a feeling or mood - I don’t stress about their composition, the colors, or how they may be perceived. Which makes them……fun. And…..easy.

©Nicole Miazgowicz LLC, 2021

Which of course means, in the strange mind of a creative, I often think they aren’t really valid as ‘real’ art. They don’t go with anything else I do, I make them quickly, they involve zero prep other than a few decisions about color and shape, and I find them much too enjoyable. Clearly they can’t be that good if no angsty feelings were involved! No sweat or tears or endless hours of brainstorming involved means they are not to be taken seriously! They deserve to sit in a box, only to be shared (maybe) every once in a while when I have nothing else better to share.

©Nicole Miazgowicz, 2021

I’ve talked about this with other creatives and it seems we all have some version of this. I have no answers on how to get over this or change my thinking on it - no helpful tidbits I’ve learned on overcoming the feeling that what is fun and easy is not valid. And honestly I kind of feel two things -

1) They are fun and easy (therefore invalid) and I feel silly even thinking about putting them out into the world as a way to make income. I’d have to redo my whole vibe! Who would want them?! Are they just for a gallery? Retail? Can they be done as illustrations?! Can I do something with them and still do all the other stuff I do?

and

2) They are fun and easy and while it would be cool to make money at something so fun and easy, maybe they feel like that because I’m not trying to do anything with them?! Maybe they give me meditative moments to just draw with zero angst and suffering involved. They feel like journaling in a weird way. Maybe they are just for me. Is that okay? What does it mean if I do release them one day? Will they still be fun and easy and meditative after I release a few?

©Nicole Miazgowicz, 2021

So, much like the process of making these abstracts, I’m just trying to go by my intuition. Right now, I kind of just want to make them and put them in a box, only to share them when I have nothing else to share. I feel happy looking through them and I feel comfort knowing I can turn to making them when it’s a little too hard to make anything else. I’ll keep doing this until I have a little voice that tells me to think about putting them out into the world as a financial or professional means. And I’ll try not to be fearful of their validity when that voice comes.

©Nicole Miazgowicz, 2021

See you next month,

♡ nicole

Start to Finish: Painting on Wood

Painting on wood takes quite a bit of prep to make sure chips, scratches, and Support Induced Discoloration doesn’t happen. SID happens when you paint on a porous surface and the paint eventually soaks into that surface and fades, cracks, or discolors. Sadly, I learned about SID from experience!!! Sorry to everyone that bought my first round of ornaments, because I’ve seen one and……..well, it doesn’t look great ;). Luckily, I figured it out pretty quickly and found a bunch of tutorials online to properly prepare the wood I’m painting on. I also use this method to prep terra cotta pots - a surface that is new for me, but seems to be working and holding up!

Here is a video I made a couple years ago of me painting a wood ornament with acrylic paint - I normally don’t love using acrylic, but for whatever reason, I don’t mind using it on 3-d objects. It takes to surfaces well without drying too quickly (like acryla gouache) and I can get a more nuanced painterly feel if I want.

This was a video I put on my reels a couple years ago on Instagram. As you can see, I changed my mind a lot while painting, trying to find the right colors as I hadn’t planned this out before hand. You get to see my thought process in real time!

Steps to painting on wood:

  1. Sand your surface if it’s not already.

  2. Prep with your primer. In the video, I’m using Golden’s GAC 100 acrylic primer & extender which I like a lot. Golden now recommends using their Gloss Medium general purpose acrylic fluid for this purpose instead so I’ve switched to that when painting terra cotta pots. It’s definitely more of a plastic-y feel than the GAC 100, so I might still use the GAC 100 for my wood ornaments. I’ve had ornaments for four years that I used with that primer and they haven’t faded one bit.

  3. Do this 2-3 times, sanding lightly in between each and letting the fluid dry in between each. This ensures you’ve created a barrier between the wood and your paint. Tip: Don’t use great brushes for these stages! The wood kind of wrecks havoc on your brushes, so I always use older ones I don’t mind messing up.

  4. Top with 1 layer of clear gesso - I use Winsor and Newton, but any brand will do. This creates a ‘toothy’ surface so your paint can have something to grab on to. If you use the Gloss Medium as your primer, you definitely need to use this, otherwise your paint will just slip around. I’ve found it isn’t super necessary when you prep with the GAC 100, but I still like using it as yet another barrier between the wood and paint. Let dry.

  5. Paint! Like I said, I prefer acrylics with the wood, but acryla gouache also works well especially if you are doing a more graphic, shape oriented design. It dries really fast and is matte.

  6. When you’re done and the paint is dry, it’s time to varnish and seal it all up! This helps cut down on scratches and chips. I really like a Matte Varnish (series E) by Holbein for my ornaments. You can also get Gloss Varnishes as well if you want more of a sheen. 1-2 coats is all you need and voila! You have a finished piece on wood that should last for a really long time without fading or chipping.

As always, if you have any questions, drop them in the comments!

♡ nicole






RE-FRAMING OUR GOALS

Well, it’s been a minute since I found time to make a blog post. Honestly, I’m still trying to find a rhythm with writing my newsletters and I always forget that if I’m doing a blog post as well, it takes about triple the time! My goal is to do 10 newsletters this year, so you’ll be getting a newsletter every month the rest of the year and a blog post with the majority of those. Little side note: These photos literally have nothing to do with art or goals. I went to Maine recently and just thought everyone could use some fun travel/nature photos:)

Bar Harbor, Maine

Speaking of goals….I think about them a lot. Then I try to not think about them so I don’t get overwhelmed. And then I try to think of different ways to think about them so I actually work towards them. And then sometimes I throw the goals out because I made way too many for a normal human to possibly achieve. And so on and so forth.

I also talk about goals all the time because I have daily check-ins with two friends who, while not visual artists, are also creative entrepreneurs who mainly work from home. Every weekday morning, we text each other a little list of what we’re hoping to get done for the day. We end our days with a quick phone call where we talk about how our day went - we get to share in good news as it happens, pump someone up when they have to write a hard email, celebrate a ‘boring but productive day’, and vent about frustrations and struggles of simply motivating ourselves to do the damn thing. This leads to a lot of interesting talks on what it means to be a creative and run a business based on that creative outlet. It’s a constant balancing act of bringing two seemingly opposite things (admin vs. creating, body vs. mind, intuition vs. organized thought) together to reach a common goal.

Two big things these talks have taught me, specifically about working towards goals:

1. As the three of us begrudgingly say with a lot of groaning every time it comes up ‘it’s the small actionable steps’. Small actionable steps are boring. They don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere. Until all of a sudden, you’re chipping away YET AGAIN for a boring hour at your boring desk with your boring coffee and your boring cat and I guess your entire boring life and you realize…..you’ve made it pretty far. You’ve actually almost reached your goal. You can tell your skills have improved. You got into a couple things you didn’t last year. And then you share how far you’ve come with your friends and all of a sudden you love your cute little desk and man, you make good coffee, and how lucky are we that we get to spend our lives with cute little animals under our feet and that you get to do ‘x’ for a good chunk of your days?!

2. There will never be a ‘perfect’ way to work or a ‘perfect’ way to make goals that you stick with your whole life (as much as my all or nothing brain wants to believe). It’s really just finding the perfect way for you to work right now. Make small tweaks rather than throwing out everything and trying to find an entirely new system. And sometimes that way of working right now may only last a week and next week you need to make another tweak or go back to how you were doing it before. Sometimes, you need one way of working for your good/high energy days and another for your not so great days. And that’s okay.

When I started the year, I had two major goals for myself - land 10 (non-family/friend) client jobs and make $x amount in art income. Pretty reasonable on both counts. But then the beginning of the year was slow, spring was spent focusing on my gallery show, and June was full of travel and some non-art related theatre work. I started feeling a little anxious that I had been away from working on my portfolio and submitting my work for so long -how on earth was I going to reach my goals when the year is already half over? I had only secured 2 clients and barely made 1/4 of my income goal. I thought about years past where I didn’t meet my goals and how frustrating it felt to be in that spot of simultaneously pumping myself back up to try again yet also trying to make myself feel okay that I didn’t meet them - often left wondering if I needed to ‘dream smaller’ next time around. Oof.

During another check-in not long ago, I brought up these feelings of anxiety and disappointment about how far ‘behind’ I was. We started asking questions - What happens when the small actionable steps still don’t result in you reaching your goal and how can we stop feeling like a failure when that happens? How can we hang tight to our big dreams while tweaking how we go forth achieving them?

We came to realize that often, the goals we make are not 100% in our control. They rely on other people or a little luck. Yet we still measure our success each year by these things that have zero guarantee of happening no matter how hard we work. And really, aren’t we just using the word ‘goal’ as a synonym for ‘dream’ in most cases? So when we don’t reach the goal (that isn’t even fully in our control), we feel we have lost our dream. We feel defeated and lost. We feel we have to dream smaller. Oof again.

The definition of dream is ‘a cherished aspiration, ideal, or ambition.’ The definition of goal is ‘the end towards which effort is directed.’ So for purposes of goal setting….maybe our goals shouldn’t be the same as our dreams. We’ve already established our dreams are often not in our control which means there can’t be a sure end point to them. And who’s to say even if they were realized, it would happen in the timeline we set or in the way we imagined? We’re taking these big beautiful dreams of ours - often the thing that makes us look forward to each day and strive to be better - and giving them a lot of responsibility they didn’t ask for along with the baggage of possible failure. We still want to hold on to them, we still want them as a guiding light, but let’s not drag them through the mud with us. They don’t need our silly bouts of overthinking, imposter syndrome, fatigue from another late night, or thoughts of why me (or why not me). They deserve better than that.

Bar Harbor, Maine

Okay, so we’re putting our dreams (or big picture, holy grail, wish, etc) on a shelf in our studio where we can see it in the morning when we wake up but it’s not on our desk. Our goals are on our desk. But what are those now that we separated dreams from them? Well, if goals are ‘the ends toward which effort is directed’, they should probably be 100% in our control so our efforts are almost guaranteed to reach that end. We should, by all means, make these goals in service to our big picture/dreams, but they’ll be ends in themselves. They will be the new measures of success, not the dreams that we don’t have full control over. With this in mind, I can easily picture myself feeling a sense of accomplishment rather than our old friends failure and disappointment. Chances are high I will have finished or at minimum, partially finished the goals by the end of the year. If I don’t finish them, it’s one of three things: I wasn’t realistic about how much time I had, other priorities became more important (like family or health), or I need to take a hard look at what I truly want.

To show this all in action, I’m going to take the goals I mentioned earlier that I made at the beginning of the year and share how I’ve reframed them. But first, remember there are levels to our big picture dreams - some are really big, like ideal life big, some are more practical ones for each category of life. A lot are small, specific ones that will help you get to those bigger dreams. The point is, throw any goal that isn’t 100% in your control in the Big Picture/Dream category.

BIG PICTURE (my dreams for the year, not in my control - I’m stating them, then they’re going on the shelf!!!)
1. Land 10 client (not friends/family) jobs.
*Not entirely in my control, I’m dependent on another person to give me a job and they may not because of a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with me
2. Make $x in Art Income.
*Not entirely in my control for the same reasons as above, along with being dependent on others to buy the things I sell, beholden to the budget of a business, where the economy is at, the list goes on.

MEASURES OF SUCCESS/GOALS (100% in my control)
1. Email 100 theatres my portfolio.
2. Have 10 - 12 poster/cover pieces in my portfolio
3. Send 10 newsletters
4. Create 10 editorial pieces for portfolio
5. Email 20 art directors my editorial portfolio
*The above are all items that serve my big picture dream of landing 10 client jobs. Finishing each one is the real measure of success, landing jobs will just be a bonus.
1. Build wholesale shop on Faire
2. Email 20 stores for wholesale
3. Offer mats & frames with art prints for holiday shows
4. Offer painted pots and wood items as higher priced items, along with limited art prints.
*These 4 help to serve my big picture dream of $x in Art Income. Finishing each one will mean I’ve succeeded and I’ve done all I can regardless of the amount of $ I end up making.

I added a couple more categories for my own purposes, so these may be helpful to you or not!

Because I’m realizing I do want a lot of things to happen for me that are not in my control (that I formally framed as goals), it makes me feel good and like I’m not ‘dreaming smaller’ to write a few specific ones down. I’m really just writing them down as a reminder to just keep an open eye for opportunities that may facilitate them:

BONUSES (not in my control, cool if they happened)
1. Land a repeating theatre client.
2. Land a repeating client (in any form of illustration)
3. Get into an illustration annual


These are little things I’d love to incorporate into my daily life to enhance it and help support my ‘Measures of success’. Skill-building and building my voice will help in my portfolio and being part of a community will help me gain peers, get feedback, boost esteem, and network.

ACTIONS (100% in my control)
1. Take a color theory class (skill - building)
2. Participate in online figure drawing (skill - building)
3. Stay active in online art community once a week (community)
4. Carve out time to experiment with no outward end (building voice)

Glidden Point Oyster Farm

So. I’ve simply tweaked the language I’ve used and what goes on that written piece of paper on my desk (I like to call these small tweaks ‘playing tricks on our stupid brains’). I’ve come to realize that my dreams and what I ultimately envision for myself can be separated from the goals I work toward each year. I’ve realized that my goals should be….wait for it….small actionable steps. Which means that I really just have to do even smaller actionable steps to reach those completely-in-my-control goals. It feels good to know there’s no question of if I’ll achieve my goals or not - as long as I’m able to put in the time, I will. I tend to be a little afraid to focus on things that feel smaller, so I’m giving myself comfort by writing those big picture dreams down to remind me they are still there and not going anywhere. I’m not going to think about them in my day to day or base my feelings of success on whether they happen or not, but they do exist to give me hope and a reason to keep moving forward.

This way of re-framing my goals has helped take away some of that anxiety I felt a couple weeks ago - I went from feeling like the rest of my year was already stacking up to be a disappointment to the feeling that I just may, for one of the first times, be able to say I achieved everything I set out to do.

♡
nicole

P.S. If you have any thoughts or if any of this resonated with you, leave a comment, I’d love to hear from you!

NAILING DOWN A CONCEPT

 

Well everyone, I’m pretty excited right now because I found a way to record myself over a slideshow! This is pretty similar to the talk I gave at Brain Candy and runs around 17 minutes. There are a few little glitches and a whole lot of ‘kind ofs’ (didn’t realize I used that phrase so much as a thinking out loud tool!), but I hope it gives you a bit of insight into what happens before any drawing even begins.

I do want to point out that I learned this process during my time with Visual Arts Passage and mainly from my mentors Edward Kinsella and Sterling Hundley. It’s brought a lot to my practice and is a really grounding process to have especially when you’re dealing with any sort of creative block or lack of motivation.

Enjoy!

♡ nicole

Focus & #SUPERFLUTE!

I’m a big planner - I tend to overdo it. This year, I’m trying to be a little more intentional about it and that means simplifying. A big part of simplifying for me is to stop and remind myself of what really matters to me this year, what I truly want to focus on. It's easy to get carried away with goals/ideas/dreams - sometimes I want to work on all the things at the same time, rather than just choosing one to really dedicate myself to. I think I'm afraid of getting bored or not doing 'enough', but really I’m finding that periods of narrowed focus are really essential to doing anything well (at least for me!).

One of my major goals this year is to get my portfolio done and subsequently, get theatre poster work. Lost Fern Goods has been a large focus on mine the past few years, so much so that it’s now a fairly automatic thing for me - I can keep it running in the background while I turn my focus to my portfolio. I need to use that as inspiration for the next time I think about incorporating other small goals - a personal series of work, narrative illustration, collaborations, etc., alongside my portfolio work. To be honest, I’m struggling to get in the groove with it. I don’t really have the established habits or regularity that I have with LFG. So, whenever I think about doing all these other things that have nothing to do with my portfolio, I try and remember that I need to create the habit of working on it before I start adding in those other things. I don’t need to wait until I finish it or become a fully fledged paid poster artist to start working on other goals, I just need to get the habits (working on it daily, submitting to theatres) down first. Otherwise, instead of getting on solid ground working towards one goal, I’m just floating around trying to do 5 different ones and hoping I can land all of them.

It was really exciting to land my first theatre poster gig last December. Early in 2021, I was working at my part-time restaurant job and waited on a group of people that had just finished performing ‘Into the Woods’ with Opera Modo. I used to perform and did props for that same show in college, so I bonded with them over that. Towards the end of their meal, I drummed up the courage to tell them I’m focusing on theatre poster illustration and as luck would have it, the director of Opera Modo was there and gave me her information. Cut to September when I reached out to her with a few portfolio pieces and she told me she’d love to have me design something! Both of us were quite busy, so we finally settled on details in December. I sketched up some thumbnail ideas and by the time we settled on something, I had about two weeks to finish (one of which was a holiday week!).

#Superflute is a spin on Mozart’s opera ‘The Magic Flute’ - set in an 80s/90s Nintendo world. I’m not into anything video game related, bright colors, fandoms, etc., so I was excited for the challenge to incorporate some of those things while still creating a piece that could fit into my softer/moodier portfolio. Keeping that goal in mind helped me make most of my decisions throughout the process. I also had to be aware of copyright issues and couldn’t directly reference Nintendo (and specifically Mario Brothers and Link from Legend of Zelda).

The super simple pared down gist of the story is that Mario and Link are moving through different levels to ‘get the girl.’ It’s basically a romantic comedy, so I wanted to reflect that lightness in the poster. I love picking elements that can stand in for other things, so I read through the script and decided to incorporate mushrooms for Mario and turtles for Link - both of those things are also in my wheelhouse of what I would normally draw, so they would help in my goal of getting a portfolio piece out of the job. Hearts stand in for the romantic part of the opera - they also are often collected for points in gaming.

The three thumbnails above are what I submitted to the #Superflute team and they ended up choosing the first. It was initially my least favorite, but as I started working on it, I was really happy about their decision.

I did a quick sketch to get the shape down and did a color study over it. Again, to fit with the softer feel of my portfolio, I decided to go with retro Mario colors rather than the bright blues and greens that are often associated with the game. I was originally going to draw a modern metal flute, but the thought of drawing all of those keys in the one full week I had to get this done was not appealing. So, I started researching flutes in Mozart’s time and came up with a one key wooden flute. Double win - easy to draw and a little nod to the original opera. The mushrooms are stacked as if in levels or steps - leading up to the hearts at the top.

Final graphite drawing!

I tried coloring it traditionally - I didn’t love the results and was running out of time, so I decided to take the scan of my graphite drawing and color it digitally - color is a struggle for me and I’m slowly experimenting and figuring it out on the side, but I just didn’t have time to experiment much with this piece!

And finally, here are the ‘deliverables’ (the files I give to the clients)! Instagram cuts off images, so I like to place my full image on a white square - that way you can see the whole thing in a post. The FB banner has to be a specific size so I did a little rearranging of just the necessary elements. The Print-ready file is a little lighter than the rest of the images - Prints tend to be a little darker than what you see on screen, so by lightening it, I can ensure that it prints fairly close to how it’s meant to look.

As always, thanks for reading and drop any questions in the comments!

xo
Nicole