I've been calling this year my year of no. Meaning, I have said no or been forced to say no to opportunities due to health issues, prioritizing mental health or just simply finally feeling comfortable to opt out and reclaim my time. Since I graduated college, I've held multiple jobs and gigs and once was very proud of myself for always being busy. I come from a family of overachievers and hard workers so it is more familiar to me to be busy and work all the time than it is to have leisure. In my year of no, I've rediscovered play in a way that I haven't in a very long time. My day-job/bread-and-butter is being the Assistant Director of the Center for Creative Exploration at PCA&D and I am happy that a good portion of my job is encouraging people to tap into their creative side. Often this means there is space for play and modeling play for creatives and the creatively curious! Just this past Friday, I spent my day working from It's Modern Art as part of the Peep Show with Executive Director of Center for Creative Exploration and long-time creative collaborator Natalie Lascek. We co-created a space that encouraged play as a vehicle to talk about the importance of funding the arts and advocating for the arts. 

I've been posting about a series that is more personal in nature on my social media.. It doesn't have a name yet but for now I'm playing with the idea of Transmutation. I will be telling a personal story and interspersing progress images of this series below. 

Trigger Warning: Early Pregnancy Loss, Grief, Loss

On May 6th of 2024 I had a miscarriage. I was 6 weeks pregnant and my husband and I had been trying since October of 2023. I have anxiety and this entire process has really touched on all of my anxiety triggers-control (or feeling like I have no control), my health, time, and probably a bunch of others that I'm not even aware of). I was tracking everything so I knew exactly when I was pregnant and started tracking the pregnancy. With my health anxiety, I also was really hesitant to let myself get excited until the last week when I decided to let myself be happy. I started bleeding while at work and quickly through the course of the weekend I knew I was miscarrying. Being taken into the emergency unit and calling nurses was like a dream. I couldn't believe it was happening to me and I couldn't feel connected to my body. By Monday I went in for a follow up to see if everything was okay and learned that what little tiny nugget was hanging out in my womb on Saturday was gone. 

Hello! 
I'm hoping to start utilizing this space to do more in depth writing about current projects and musings again. I've had some folks ask how to start thinking about making murals and that's a big question but I thought I'd share a bit about how I translate finished designs to walls for community paint days. The method I use when the wall is 6ft tall and smaller is a grid method. Many of us have used the grid method for projects in elementary or middle school and probably have never touched it again. I like the grid as a place to start especially when I'm working with youth. Below is an example of my design for Lincoln Middle School. I measured the wall and rendered the drawing in Photoshop to match the size. If I'm not projecting, I don't usually worry too much about resolution and set my dpi to 150 and translate each foot of the wall to inches. It's important to start with a precise measurement of the wall. In Photoshop there is an option under Extras to show a grid. You can adjust the size of the grid by either double clicking your ruler OR accessing preferences and going to the units and measurements or grids and slices area. I set the grid to be 1inch by 1 inch. I prefer to use 1:1 square grids while other like to use different ratios. I usually then label the rows with the alphabet and the columns with numbers. Below I have one portion of the wall represented in the sketch.