Tag Archives: colored pencil

Receiving Love From All Over The World and Beyond

Colored Pencil Sketch: “Receiving Love From All Over The World and Beyond”

Post by Cheryl Renee Long

 
I float in a starry sky.
On my left is the sun.
On my right is the Milky Way.
I open my body, my mind and my heart to the healing love and blessings I receive from people all over the world.
I sense the colors of their:

prayers,

attunements,

reiki,

shamanic healing and

enfolding good thoughts

I consciously switch my energy to Receive.

 
 I am very good at transmitting, but the current cannot be complete without receiving, a less familiar skill.
I bask in the healing love of my friends, my family and possibly entities unknown to me.
I accept their kindness and allow my body to become whole and well. 

New Night Vision Class Begins April 4

The inaugural Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal Course went extremely well! A new section has opened and is available for enrollment now for $75.00:

Welcome to Your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal Online Class

Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal began one day in Eastern Oregon when sister Cheryl gave sister Sandy a black paper artist’s journal and a handful of gel pens and Prismacolor pencils. Both of us started first to do scribble art.

Out of the darkness of the page emerged the figures of dream and imagination. I was as if we were cave painters putting our hands to the dark cave walls and blowing paint to mark our passing there. Spirit figures emerged from the dark pages of the cave and began to move in living color.

In 2008, we began posting our Mysterious Night Vision Field Journals on our blog. Memories, dreams, and reflections arose spontaneously from the Well of Soul.

In our Mysterious Night Vision Field Journals, we see the outer world in reverse, as if in a mirror. Slightly disoriented, in love with vivid color, we pursue the soul’s uncensored purpose.

We are so glad you are joining us!

In this class, you will be given a short lesson and a drawing assignment or challenge every other day.  Videos and examples are provided for direction and inspiration. There are also bonus assignments for those who have time to explore more deeply.

Some of the assignments are:

  • Draw a Dream Animal
  • Draw a Volcano, Tsunami or Other Dramatic Natural Disaster
  • Draw a Jungle
  • Draw a Soul Portrait
  • Draw a Dream

You will write about your images, then take a photo (with your cell phone, for example) and add to the class. There you will be able to give and receive imaginative, supportive feedback.

Cheryl Renee Long is the instructor for this course. She’s the blonde in the photo.

Her sister, Sandy Brown Jensen, will be taking the course alongside you. Sandy is also the resident techie, so feel free to consult with her with any tech related questions at sandybrownjensen@gmail.com

We love our Mysterious Night Vision Journals, and we are excited to be sharing this passion with you.

Successful Seattle Art Event

On March 5, 2016, Daniel Smith Artist Supplies in Seattle, WA, sponsored a Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal workshop by Cheryl Renee Long and Sandy Brown Jensen. This video captures that event and the spontaneous art produced by the 13 participants. The pool is still open–jump on in! The registration button is on the home page of this blog post.

Woman with Baby

Woman with Baby

By Cheryl Renee Long

Sometimes I feel that I am nurturing a baby. I hold her close to my heart and I go about my life.
Sometimes I dream that I have forgotten my baby or I left her behind somewhere. I frantically search for her and usually find I left her behind at the home of a relative.
In my dream I berate myself,  “How could I forget a child?”
A few weeks ago I reviewed all of my old sketchbooks going back to the 1970’s. I saw so many great sketches that remained an embryonic idea. It made me sad to see how many possibilities never came to fruition.
But ideas are everywhere. We mere humans cannot actualize the abundance of creativity that is available to us.
So I draw the woman with a baby, a floral skirt and colorful shawl.  She nurtures her art the very best she can, and she also dances and she rejoices in life.
I hope you will join us for the March 7, 2016 Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal class, or tell someone you love about it.

Tropical Dreaming (On Such a Winter’s Day)

NOTE: The next Color Your World two week class begins Jan 4, 2016. What makes this class different is the one-on-one daily interaction with an empathetic instructor and with a supportive community of fellow artists. Only $50.00. Click this button to learn more and to register:

If you would like to experience a free class, click here:


Tropical Dreaming (On Such A Winter’s Day)

By Cheryl Renee Long

December 28, 2015

Hello! I’m looking forward to meeting many of you Jan. 4 when the colored pencil online class starts.

Yesterday I purchased sturdy rubber boots with a confetti pattern to enliven gray days, rain and  wading across flooded trails. After-Christmas shopping for myself included warm fuzzy mittens and wool hiking socks. It is winter in the Pacific Northwest – wet, cold, and flooding. We are delighted, of course. Last summer we fought a forest fire in our local Hoh Rainforest. Water is essential to maintaining a rainforest with its giant cedar trees and acres of hanging moss. Rain is a must.

However, desert rat that I am, my paintbrush longs for sunshine, palm trees, blazing orange and pink sunsets and enticing cenotes.

Cenotes are small lakes or pools of fresh water in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

Today, I drew my imaginary go-to place to relax and meditate. People swim and snorkel in the cenotes. The trail across the landscape is populated by two cars and people walking. The gulls are ever present along with the colorful sailboats in the Caribbean.

What is YOUR go-to place?

Dreaming in the New Year

NOTE: The next Color Your World two week class begins Jan 4, 2016. What makes this class different is the one-on-one daily interaction with an empathetic instructor and with a supportive community of fellow artists. Only $50.00. Click this button to learn more and to register:

If you would like to experience a free class, click here:

Dreaming in the New Year

 

Cheryl Renee Long MNVJ entry December 27, 2015 Woman In Bubble Bath Dreaming of the New Year She is deeply relaxed, immersed in the turquoise and white bubbles. Her pink curly hair drifts and morphs into a white bird and her dreams slip into an astral journey. She sees and knows her 70th year. It will bring life, color, and abundance.

During the holidays, it’s sometimes hard to even hear yourself think. These are joyous family times for most (though not all, I acknowledge). But eventually visitors leave or you travel home. You become aware in the northern hemisphere of the short days, the long nights, the rain or the snow. In the southern hemisphere, dog days of summer keep temperatures hovering around 100 degrees F.

Cheryl Renee Long–After Thanksgiving 11/28/15, heading home north on I-5

Now is the time to find your own quiet place, go deep into a kind of dreaming trance and let some other spirit speak quietly to you. It’s true that this healing mental and spiritual drifting has an affinity for water. In the Mysterious Night Vision drawing above, Cheryl has drawn a bubble bath. In my household, it’s the hot tub with a glass roof and the sound of the constant rain. I’ve been in warm climates this time of year, and there we are drawn to waterfalls and the warm sea.

Sandy Brown Jensen. One December 2013, I found myself at the end of the year in a cave on the island of Kauai, a perfect place to lose myself in the timeless flow of the islands.

Give yourself to those private moments, and then find a place to curl up and draw in your Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal. If a white bird seems to flow out of curly pink hair–so be it. The Night Vision Journal is never about “learning how to draw”; it is first and foremost a place to bring the images and colors behind your eyes to the black paper which is so much like the drawing board of a dream.

Dreams

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one—-
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions—-
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss—-a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer—-
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

–Mary Oliver


 

Note: This blog entry has been cross-posted on http://toucancreate.com/mysterious-night-vision-field-journal/141/

How to Do a Scribble Drawing

Getting started with your Mysterious Night Vision Journal couldn’t be easier. This short video will get you up and running in no time.

Here is the drawing I did for the video in sequence:

First: SCRIBBLE!

Second: Let spontaneous play ensue!

Use whichever colors appeal to you. Bring out faces or landscapes or whatever you “see” as you scribble.

Keep on going!

Give it a title! Sign and date it.

 

Last but not least: Do a little write about your image. Who or what emerged? What might that mean to you?

Hooray! You’ve begun your beautiful Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal!

How  did that go for you? Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments!

 

Draw Your Dreams

“Tree Woman with Fire Sticks” This image was more of a “waking dream” as I drew what spontaneously appeared in my mind’s eye. That is heart and soul of the Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal experience.

Today’s Daily Create is to draw a picture of a place you have been to in your dreams.

I think this activity is a good way to introduce a class that Cheryl Long and I are developing to run at the Toucan Create! Online Art Classes Creativity School sometime early in 2016. It is called The Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal. It is all about using black artist sketch paper, gel pens, and colored pencils to explore memories, dreams, reflections.

It is, in many ways, the opposite of Color Your World. In the Color Your World class, we are looking out at the world and making an artistic representation of it. When we have black paper, we have a dark blank slate. It is our interior darkness. It is the world of dream, of spontaneous creation. Here we may draw our deepest thoughts, our most ephemeral emotions, the world that lives behind our eyes. It is the well we go down to where we may draw up the water of our own personal Source Imagery.

This is a Dream Mandala in my Mysterious Night Vision Field Journal

In this dream, I am sitting with Mom at a cafe outside the Museum of Modern Art, although I have significantly and unconsciously labeled it “Musee.”

We see my dad, long since gone from this world, climbing the steps and entering the “Musee.”

That’s it, but this 2008 dream is still strong in me seven years later. You’ll notice (or maybe not) that I can’t draw. That matters not at all to me.

I am fascinated by the way the dreaming mind likes to rhyme. My parents were inseparable except by death, but even in death, dad enters the MOM-A. I think that speaks to their bond, which built the strong foundation of my life.

But the element that still engages me is the connection to me of Modern Art–and I have tried to live a life in art–and the cross meaning of “Musee,” or “muse,” that which inspires. In Greek mythology, there were nine Muses, and still today, each artist is said to have his or her own Muse or inner source of inspiration.

What I understand now about the dream is that my father’s spirit entered into the storehouse of modern art and became my Muse, an artistic spirit who still advises me. But I have to say these meanings only come to me now as I reflect on the dream so many years later.

THE DREAM MANDALA

In this Dream Mandala I am driving around a dark lake toward a volcano streaming with lava. I have lost my glasses, but I can see them floating in the sky

I love the idea of drawing such elusive inner experiences inside a circle. It is a spiritual or ritual symbol representing the universe. Knowing that, my dream fills up the space of the universe for the page of the moment and reminds me to think expansively, to look not only inward but outward.

Do you draw your dreams?