 Hi there. I'm Sandy Allnock. Welcome to my YouTube studio where I'm going to be watercoloring today, and I'm going to be doing a little piece that I'm sending out to a friend because of Letter Writing Week. There's probably some reason why Letter Writing Week is in the second week of January. It's to send all those thank you letters for the holiday things that you haven't sent your thank you letters for. So consider doing that this week, but I'm going to send mine to a friend of mine I'll tell you about as this video wears on, and I'm going to talk a bit about creativity because this piece that I'm painting is also for a challenge at our adventure, and I want to talk about how we can take a challenge inspiration and make it our own by how we think through it as an artist. Instead of trying to make something that's so literal, how do we feel about it and what's going to make our contribution to the challenge much different than everyone else's? So let's get started. Some of you may recall that I used to run a charity. I ran Operation Write Home in which everybody sent in all these beautiful handmade greeting cards that I then packed up and shipped off to people deployed overseas so they could write home to their families. And I struggled sometimes especially with a few card makers who loved doing fancy fold cards. They were so complex that they left like a half an inch of space for writing or they would be on dark card stock and I knew that there was only big pens out in the wilds of Afghanistan. So there was really no way they were going to be able to write on it so I had to put liners and things because the letter is the important part in that whole project. And even though card makers have a thought in their head that the beautiful card is the thing, for a recipient if they get a beautiful card is great that's the wrapping, but the real treasure is the words written inside. If you write someone a letter and tell them how you feel about them that's the thing that's going to bring a tear to their eye. Yes, they're going to post a card on the mantle and be all excited because it's beautiful, but the thing that's going to touch somebody's heart is the message that's written in your own handwriting. And that's just something that's always meant a lot to me. So when I saw this is letter writing week even though it's probably for the purposes of writing thank you letters for all the holiday shenanigans. I am taking it seriously and I'm going to be writing a long form letter all week long every day to somebody different and telling them how I feel about them because we don't do that nearly often enough. This particular one is going to be an insert in an envelope that I'm going to send to a friend of mine with a handwritten letter. I'm going to put a second piece of paper this size this is about five by seven ish and I'm going to take a second piece of this this is arches 90 pounds so it's very lightweight watercolor paper and I wanted it to feel more like a letter kind of thing than a painting necessarily and I'm painting something inspired by a Robert Frost poem. My friend sends me regularly by text message poetry she's done this for years and it is so lovely it's a beautiful break in my day on the days that she sends me something and I want to tell her how much that means to me so this is what I'm going to send her inspired by this poem so let me read it for you it's called wind and window flower by Robert Frost lovers forget your love and list to the love of these she a window flower and he a winter breeze when the frosty window veil was melted down at noon and the caged yellow bird hung over her in tune he marked her through the pain he could not help by mark and only passed her by to come again at dark he was a winter wind concerned with ice and snow dead weeds and unmated birds and little of love could know but he sighed upon the sill he gave the sash a shake as witness all within when lay that night awake her chance he half prevailed to win her for the flight from the fire lit looking glass and warm stove window light but the flower leaned aside and thought of not to say and mourning found the breeze 100 miles away I really do love this poem and one of the things that it did for me was to remind me when I remember reading it in school and I was not all that smart I have to say about similes and metaphors even though I literally knew the definition of them I couldn't understand them when I read them on paper and I remember reading this poem and thinking okay there's a flower it's by a window and the window keeps getting frosted and then it melts and then it frosted and it melts and like what is the point of this I don't understand and I have you know come to this place later in my life where I can understand the meaning of this to me now what I think this poem means is going to be different than other people and that's okay too but I got such a sense by reading this several times out loud and emphasizing different parts of it different words and reading it slow reading it fast I started getting this real sense of unrequited love this you know flower representing you know whoever it's representing in Robert Frost mine but it represents that looking out at your unrequited love passing you by again and again and that's what I wanted to convey in this little painting that I was doing I wanted that loneliness of the flower and yet the contentment of the flower it's inside it's warm it's got a glow and there's all that cold and nasty outside we always want the things that we don't have even if they're not good flowers stay inside it's much nicer in there even if your true love has blown away a hundred miles I mean there's just so many things that were running through my mind as I was reading the poem well that kind of thinking is one of the things that I want to start bringing into the challenges at art venture a bit and I think that's why I loved when Kelly made a suggestion from our events team that we should use this poem for the inspiration for the challenge now I had two thoughts about it one was like this is exactly where I want to go because I want people to start thinking about putting their feelings into their art instead of okay I'm going to replicate this photo that I have and thinking in a different way is what's going to grow you as an artist as long as you're just trying to replicate what you see in a photo it's not bringing some of you to the table and I want to start helping people to do that but I had the second thought which is there's going to be a lot of people who want to literally and I've kind of taken the literal one off the table by doing this literally represent the objects that are in the poem and the the idea of a challenge is not to get 17 different ways of drawing a flower in front of a window that's not why we do this to compare our flower inside inside of a window to somebody else's flower inside of a window the idea is to find out as an artist what that challenge inspiration means to each one of us and see how many ways there are to interpret it not just how how many ways there are to draw it but how many ways can you read one poem and it can affect everybody in completely different ways that's where the real joy and learning comes from when we do these challenges and see each other's work and when it comes to doing a challenge from something like a poem the approach that I would take to it and I suggest to you is to ask yourself how does it apply to me does a word or a line in it make me think of an event or a smell or a color or a movie that I've seen a person that I know take some license with it like one word one phrase one line create something based on just a piece of it and you can go far afield if you need to this is a Robert Frost poem so maybe he has a different poem that you're inspired by or maybe you've always wanted to find a way to paint the wind and when I was reading this poem you saw brush strokes moving across the page and that is what your abstract is going to be like you do not have to literally take every challenge and turn it into a literal interpretation the way I'm somewhat doing here even though I've I've tried to bring in more of the feeling that I got from the poem about how that flower is feeling looking out the window at her true love out there I've seen tons of people take challenges during inktober during world water color month and that sort of thing and they they try to be so literal with it that they really are not doing the challenge for the sake of growing their heart as an artist but they're doing it just to say they've participated like the inktober has lots of spiders and ghouls and goblins in it I don't like drawing those I don't enjoy drawing them they I don't find them inspiring so I just come up with my own prompts but there are other people who will draw them and they will muscle through because everybody else is doing spiders and whatever so I have to as well instead of saying okay how do I feel about this thing I do not feel inspired so I'm going to go find something I do care about that I do have some passion for and as an artist one of the things that's going to grow you is getting more in touch with what inspires you what makes you excited about drawing or painting or whatever it is what is it that moves your heart because that's what's going to make you unique as an artist we can all learn to replicate a photo we can all learn to take that thing and you know make all the proportions right and put the shadows in and get the colors and the values and all that that's the stuff I teach in my classes the stuff that's harder to teach comes from things like a crazy challenge like this one take a poem and start to get in touch with your artist heart and discover what that means to you how are you going to interpret it how are you going to render it that's going to be completely different than everybody else you're not in a competition to see who can draw the best bird cage with a little yellow bird in it that is not the point we don't need a million cages with yellow birds but did you have a little bird when you were growing up that you miss you know maybe that's going to be your jumping off point because there's just one little piece that touched you and that's what I love to see in challenges so I figured I would just talk about that a little bit since I'm working on this challenge myself and getting this piece done to send to my poetry pal and if you happen to have any poems that you love then drop a comment with the poet and your favorite poem by them so I can send some poetry to my friend I don't really have time to sit around and be reading books of poetry but I would love to return to favor and send her something inspiring once in a while so if you've got some ideas do let me know okay once I got my background painted or shall I say repainted because I decided I didn't like that lighter value quite that much I got it all dry and I wrote in the entire poem I did get a little stuck at the end because I almost ran out of space so I had to get smaller and squish everything in but I did get the whole poem on here so that's something and now I'm just going to write her an actual letter to put in with it because I think that's going to mean a lot to her that her poetry that she's sent to me has been very meaningful in my life so I hope you find somebody that you can send a letter to this week. Thank you so much for joining me for this video and if you would please help the channel out by tapping the like button and leaving a comment because when YouTube sees that something is popular they like to send it to more people and I would love to get more folks involved in letter writing and creativity and watercolor and pen and ink and everything. Speaking of pen and ink I'll be back on Saturday with a kind of epic project that I've been working on for a couple of years and it ties in with letter writing day so I'm going to do a little piece of it for you right here on YouTube and yeah we'll talk about that on Saturday I'll see you then and in the meantime go create something every day and write some letters for crying out loud I'll see you next time bye