I've been working on a kot of grid paintings in my journal.  Now, I am working on 4" x 4" tiles that are the same as grids but can be rotated and moved around a lot to different compositions.  I really like this way of creating grids.  Here is my first one.  It's pretty busy so I don't know where my eye is going.  Maybe to just give me a headache!  But it shows the power of black & white.
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I took a free online class from Jessica Ybarra .  It made me interested in weaving.  I have lots of yarns and roving from other experiements I have done in fiber art and the loom was pretty inexpensive so I thought I would give it a try.

I like how it sits on the loom so I'm unsure of what to do next.  If I leave it on the loom, as kind of a frame, I can't make any more unless I buy another loom!  My brother is a wood worker so maybe he can make me a few similar looms.  I don't mind paying since this is like paying for framing of some of my mixed media works.  

I also think I will add more weavings to cover more of the white string (warp?) at the top.  I can say this is very zen.  No pressure.  No pattern.  No idea how it will look in the end.  Just my kind of art-making!

I love making paper.  Sometimes, I make it from pulp and sometimes, I just print, stamp, paint on watercolor or mixed media paper.  But now, I have a LOT of papers!

So how to use all this paper?  I've started to collage these papers into new compositions.  Here's one I did recently.  I machine stitched around the edges to give it a mixed media feel.  Not sure I liked that but will continue to experiment as I continue to collage my papers in the future.

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If you would come to my studio, you would see lots of notebooks, filled with my efforts to mix colors together to make new colors.  I usually do this using "tags" so I can re-arrange a color palette and know what it might look like.

For this exercise, I wanted to know how my colors would contrast with black, since black has always been a color I have struggled with but always liked in the end.

It was also fun to see more colors on the page together in a group.  I tend to sort my paints along the colors of the color wheel because I know that analogous colors always work.  

I have to say, after years of making these "swatches" I rarely go back and visit them but the process, in itself, is training my mind in a way I never imagined.  This process is developing my "intuition" and I think that's what is the underpinning of the advent of AI these days.  If you train your mind (or computer) on lots of information from a variety of sources, then your mind begins to see the world through a different lens.

Hmmm.  Getting too psychological for this Saturday night!