Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant
Empower your team to innovate on demand. Melissa Dinwiddie helps tech leaders Create the Impossible™ through playful, interactive workshops and keynotes. Unlock breakthrough creativity today.
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The drips and jagged lines on this piece feel like growing tendrils, peeking up through soil the way new aspects of our identity peek out — so fragile, and yet strong enough to crack rocks over time.
(The stick was so wet with ink when I went to draw the first tendril that it dripped! So I added more drips. When something happens that I didn’t originally intend, my philosophy is to find a way to feature it. 🙂 )
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When I sit in silence on my meditation cushion, I endeavor to focus my mind on my breath. Thoughts inevitably come in, but that’s not a problem — this is the practice: noticing the thoughts, then simply letting them go and returning my focus to my breath, gently, and with self-compassion.
(Since I notice my mind wandering approximately a thousand times during each ten-minute sit, meditation is, therefore, one of the most effective ways to practice self-compassion! I call it a self-contained self-compassion machine. 🙂 )
Acrylic, watercolor pencil
5″ x 5″ x 1 1/2″
I think I have the most fun when I’m playing, just seeing what happens when I mix these colors, use that brush. Often I come to a place where I’m not sure whether to keep going or not — it doesn’t feel done, but I’m afraid of ruining it… Or I’m just curious what would happen if…
In those cases, my general rule (from my Keys to Creative Flow) is to “take the riskier path.” That’s what I did in this case, adding the black watercolor pencil over the rainbow colors.
I liked what it looked like before adding the watercolor pencil, but for me playing in the Creative Sandbox is about trying things. If I hadn’t tried it, I’d never know!
This is also one of the advantages of working “tiny and daily”: if I don’t like how it comes out, not to worry, because I’ll be starting a new piece very soon. 🙂 (Plus I can always paint over what I don’t like — I do that a lot!)
The artist (that’s me!)
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
Acrylic, watercolor pencil
4″ x 6″ x 1 1/2″
(Please allow a couple of weeks for varnishing and curing before I ship!)
People often ask artists where they draw their inspiration. These days mostly I just start making marks or blobs with paint or ink, and respond to those marks improvisationally. This piece, though, did have some direct inspiration: Ruth Yuhas.
Ruth came to my Create & Incubate Retreat last weekend, and her paintings just blew me away. I wanted not to copy her (impossible anyway), but to borrow her technique of starting with pure color, then adding lines in watercolor pencil after the paint dries. What fun!
This abstract expressionist painting on canvas hasn’t been varnished yet, but I intend to varnish with a gloss finish, which will really make the colors pop, and install vinyl-wrapped hanging wire on the back.
Questions? Just lemme know!
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
