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“Art washes away from the soul the dusts of everyday life” – Pablo Picasso

Believe it or not making art for your own enjoyment actually has its benefits to both your mind and body. We often spend our weeks rushing around focusing on our everyday commitments whether its your job, looking after kids, school or ticking off daily errands, that we never really get the chance to relax.

When you’re overwhelmed with the stresses of a busy lifestyle, actually embracing your creativity can actually reduce anxieties and stresses to clear your mind making you feel better. So art itself is extremely theraputic and to fill you in abit more as to why doodling, colouring or painting should become apart of your weekly schedule here’s 3 reasons why art is good for you!

1. Helps you to slow down - During the week we’re all on the go and so being a little creative whether it’s drawing, colouring, painting or snapping a photo with your camera actually helps you to physically and mentally slow down. Rushing around doesn’t do our bodies internally any good and so making time to do something artistic that you enjoy is healthy to both your body and mind.

2. You embrace a side of yourself you might not usually - Not all of us work a creative job but this doesn’t mean if you’re an accountant for example you can get inky and doodle away! You may even surprise yourself with the things you create and through that feel a sense of achievement in the things you make which builds up your positivity in mind.

3. Self expression and letting out your emotions – Much like music and drama making art in whichever form, helps you to express a side of yourself you might find hard to do otherwise. Like musicians who infuse emotion into the music they write, you can place emotions into the art pieces you make. In turn this helps you to acknowledge your inner feelings and let out things you might not find the words to say which you are can through a brush or ink for example.

Featured illustration is by Oana Befort and you can find out more about her work here.

Making a to do list is pretty easy and though some of us love making them, others may find them boring beyond tears. If like me you often find yourself saying:

” Hurray I’ll write this to do list and get everything done no problem!”

To then find you’re half way through the day and your to do list remains untouched then there’s something not quite right with that to do list you’ve got there. Although to do lists or making them doesn’t have to be boring, being creative we love to add a doodle here, a splash of colour there with some photos or fanciful fonts it just makes our day more forfilling.

So why not try this approach with your to do list? Staring a rather plain lined page of text is no creative feast for the eyes, however  lorie at Elvie studio seems to have right idea with making that to do list fun ! So add your own style, favourite colours and really jazz up that to do list that will not only make it fun create but fun to tick off as you go about your day.

This image is by Lorie Vliegen and you can find out more about her creative work here .

Wow. In three simple steps, Flickr user cshimala blew my mind.

1. Drive around Chicago with a video camera on windshield

2. Speed up resulting footage in video editor

3. Apply mirror effect with same editor

It’s crazy how a simple mirror filter can transform a video into something else.

Check out when he drives under the L.

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Have you played this Pictionary-like, turn-based, quasi-illustration game yet? If you’ve got an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, I guess the answer is “probably.” I actually just found out about it recently, but according to the developers it’s “***The #1 Free App, #1 Paid App and #1 Word Game in over 80 countries!***”
I don’t know that I’d classify it as a word game at all — though you are indeed given a topic to illustrate and a forum in which to share it (which reminds me of something else, actually).

To me, it’s more of a drawing game… conceptual illustration, to be exact. It works like this: The turn starts when you’re given three choices of words to draw. You take your pick and make your pic — crafting the best sketch you can muster within the confines of your screen and digital-screen drawing ability. Then you hit “Send.” Presto: Your drawing is whooshed off to your friend, whose job it is now to try and guess what word you were drawing. The better they guess, the better your game. So it’s kind of a collaboration.

One fun thing is that your friend doesn’t just see the finished illustration, but rather gets to “watch” you draw it as each line and dot falls into place. This turns out to be a big help to both the illustrator and the guesser, in my experience — you can infer a lot from what your friend chose to depict first and last. It’s also fun that the words you draw are categorized by difficulty when you choose them, so a beginner can work on an artistic rendering of something simple like “Cat,” while more experienced Draw-Something-ers can opt to take on, say, “Socialism.” I think you get more coins, or something, for drawing the harder words, but so far I haven’t found much use for the coins.

The most fun thing though, to me at least, is getting to see your friends’ drawings. My friends — even the ones who aren’t artists — are *fantastic* artists if you ask me. Part of it is that a tiny glass screen is a great leveler of artistic skill, and while there are certainly folks who can do amazing things within the i-devices’ constraints, most of us just try to get by on our cleverness. Or that of our friends. But the fun also comes from seeing how your friends see things.

If you’re given, for example, “seasick,” do you draw a person with a green face and hope your friend will know it’s not a martian? Do you draw the sea, *then* some image of illness? Or will your friend get hung up and think you’re imagining some kind of underwater hospital? Also, they’ll be guessing your word based on not just the picture, but a jumble of letters that includes s-e-a-s-i-c-k. What if they get confused and think you meant to

Freelance illustrator Junyi Wu shares his portfolio with us. It’s like walking into the middle of an epic fairytale in progress.

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The fun blog of student Freya Hartas houses a collection of her doodles and collages.

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For the past 2+ years I’ve been illustrating a weekly Dr.’s column for the most popular Argentine newspaper’s Sunday magazine, Clarin.

Readers send their concerns- which all too often seem to be way too similar- and Dr. Abdala offers his medical advice.

I truly love doing this column every single week. It challenges me to find all kinds of different ways to illustrate depression, anxiety, aging, phobias and complexes, over and over again. Needless to say, no reader ever sends a concern about how to stop being so incredibly happy.

Moreover, because they know my work quite well by now, and I assume they like it enough to keep me this long, I have the unusual freedom to experiment and try out new approaches to my work. So I often adapt my style to the concept, instead of always adapting the concept to my style for the sake of style consistency, which is what often happens with illustrators but not so much with graphic designers.

So, my friends, here is a selection of my 10 favorite illos from this column that keeps me busy- and on antidepressants (FYI, yeah, that IS a joke)- every Monday of my sweet existence.

Hope you enjoy them… and that, whenever and wherever it is you get to see them, it’s a sunny day outside.
{¡Gracias Jorge, Gustavo, Diego & Marina!}

- Fernanda

“Suicidal Thoughts”

“Panic Attacks”

“The Narcissist”

“Upbringing Gets and Stays in the Way”

“Envy”

“Temperamental”

“Recharging”

“Post-Abortion Depression”

“Depression” (again)

Poketo, a designer of limited edition art products, accessories, apparel, and decor has super cool spring wallets available on their site. The two shown above are from Eleanor Grosch and Jennifer Sanchez.

A 24hr. head start! Élena Nazarro writes: “I’m starting up “Every Day In May” again, where I (and others who join in) are committing to paint/sew/write/create for 31 straight days. We’d love to have you join, especially if you think you need a kickstart. Goodness knows I do!”

More info at her blog, French Toast Girl, and a Flickr group too!

I was doing some research for a commission this afternoon and discovered these lovely bookmarks by Lucia on flickr!

A page from Ellen Donovan's scrapbook, with calling cards

From BoingBoing I discovered a sweet link to The Daily Scrapbook “a book and website by Jessica Helfland of Winterhouse Studio“. The book in question is called Scrapbooks: An American History and the posts on the Daily Scrapbook blog give us an amazing glimpse into this 425 page volume (as well as the collected ephemera of American lives over two hundred years).

Keri Smith asks what if your hand could tell stories?

Ellen Million breaks down U.S. Copyright Law and traces the history of the Orphan Works bill (with handy link citations) to help clear up some misperceptions on existing copyright law and the new proposal.

Found via this BoingBoing entry about an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who support the Orphan Works legislation) in a comment by Nelson Pavlosky. How’s that for a citation?

EMG-Zine: May 2008 - Orphan Works

my pals at poketo are having a big spring cleaning. AND THAT MEANS BIG SAVINGS FOR YOU! (yes, i’m a car salesman too.) swing by their studio this saturday, may 10th, between 10 am and 5 pm to find some great deals on some great “art for your everyday.” read all the details here.

2008 seems to be the trend of the beard in illustration, did you notice?

More thoughts on beards

crazy delicious beard

weird beards

Beard alphabets

My beard puff pin!

(pic from if you grew a beard)

hidden in a recent American Elf comic is an easy recipe for yummy tortillas!

a majority of contemporary paintings are created in dafen, china by talented but anonymous artists who use their skills to recreate famous works of art. an organization called Regional invited some of those craftsmen to paint themselves. “The final works

thanks to my brother and boing boing for the story!

I can read your mind. You’re thinking “Making art is so great! But who cares? I want to make a difference in the world!” Well…

Art With Heart, an organization devoted to “healing youth through creativity,” is offering free training in their Art Buddy program on Saturday, March 29th, from 9:30am – 1pm. (RSVP is required and donations are welcome.)

I’ve been surprised to receive a lot of emails asking how to throw a portrait party. There is no wrong way to do it but, to get your party started, I wrote out some instructions.

Each of the portraits above was drawn by Christine Castro in just two minutes!

I’m grateful to live in an era when I can ask a friend “What have you been up to?” and he can answer “Making a movie. Wanna see the trailer?” The short film, a surreal love story called Now and Nowhere, was made with a live actors in a CGI world. The preview left me hungry to see the whole thing and curious to know what other art projects are taking shape in garages all over the world.

My friend, Connie, alerted me to a fantastic art project: the SketchCrawl. In short, it is a world-wide drawing marathon. Visit the website for details, tell your friends, and sharpen your pencils because the next crawl is scheduled for March 29th, one month from today!

The SketchCrawl map above was drawn by Enrico Casarosa, the fella who founded this foolishness.

My friend, Miguel, collects drawings of The Bride (Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill). I added a page to the series a few years ago and I feel vaguely competitive now whenever he gets excited about a new piece. This weekend, he showed me this contribution by Jim Rugg. I was blown away. I promptly asked for another shot at Miguel’s Bride sketchbook AND I looked Jim up as soon as I got home. His blog is dynamite. No wonder I was blown away! (Hyuk hyuk!)

Last week’s IF topic was “Blanket”, and in response I got an email from Lisa Celotto who had contemplated the topic and came up with this unique interpretation: Slippers! She made slippers from an old blanket and the soles are made from a recycled acrylic painting. How cool is that?

Not exactly illustration, but I thought it was pretty darn inventive.

Awesome job, Lisa!

Painter Josh Keyes