Studio Notes

Close-up of a hand holding a paintbrush, applying warm-toned paint—mainly shades of yellow and orange—onto a textured canvas. The painting surface shows blended areas of color, suggesting an abstract or impressionistic style. The lighting highlights the brushstrokes and texture of the canvas.

How to Start Making Art

Feeling stuck at the starting line with your art? This post is a warm, down-to-earth pep talk for beginner creatives—full of encouragement, budget-friendly tips, and playful techniques to get you creating without pressure. It’s all about embracing mess, letting go of perfection, and just starting where you are. Because every artist begins somewhere.

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A hand is holding a TourBox controller in front of a computer monitor. The controller is semi-transparent with multiple dials, buttons, and knobs designed for creative software use. On the monitor, there is abstract black-and-white artwork with organic, contour-like patterns on the right side, and part of a digital art program interface is visible on the left. The monitor displays a 144Hz refresh rate label and various app icons on the taskbar.

TourBox Elite Plus Review: Small Device, Big Creative Control

Curious about the TourBox Elite Plus? I gave it a solid test run and was seriously impressed. It’s a compact creative controller that transforms your workflow with customizable wheel, dial, knob, and buttons. Whether you’re editing photos, painting, or making videos, it’s a smooth, tactile way to ditch repetitive keyboard shortcuts and stay in the creative zone.

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The image shows a collage of three abstract artworks, with a hand holding a smartphone in the center. The left panel features a vivid abstract painting with fluid, blended colors such as turquoise, orange, purple, pink, and green. In the center, a hand is holding a smartphone vertically. The phone screen displays a cropped, stylized version of the abstract art with editing options at the bottom, suggesting it’s being digitally altered or filtered. The right panel shows another abstract composition with similar color themes, overlaid with white line art of stylized leaves and some handwritten script. A snippet of printed text is partially visible at the bottom. The overall aesthetic emphasizes digital art creation and editing, blending organic and graphic elements.

How to Glitch Your Art for Wild Collage Patterns

Turn your doodles, paintings, or mark-filled pages into eye-catching digital art with Decim8—a glitch-art app that transforms photos into wild, abstract textures. It’s playful, unpredictable, and perfect for collage. Whether you’re layering digitally or printing pieces to cut by hand, this workflow fuses tradition and tech in a totally fresh, creative way.

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A mixed media collage featuring a variety of textures and elements, including torn magazine pages, abstract acrylic paint, and photographic images. Prominent in the center is a vibrant painting with blended colors such as turquoise, purple, yellow, orange, and white, resembling melted or swirled paint. Surrounding it are fragments of text, including a large black serif word “Epic” on a white background, architectural photography showing balconies, and layers of paint in greens, blues, purples, and metallic hues. The composition is chaotic and colorful, emphasizing creativity and visual contrast.

The Messy Joy of Creating

Letting go of neatness can unlock pure creative joy—paint on your hands, scraps stuck to your fingers, and glue on the table become proof you were truly in the moment. Embrace the chaos, and you might just find the mess is where the magic really happens.

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The image is a collage combining vintage elements. At the center is a sepia-toned, torn photograph of a man and woman in formal attire from the early 20th century. The man has a mustache and wears a bow tie, while the woman has her hair styled up with decorative hairpins and earrings. To the left, there is a smaller photograph of the same man standing in a long coat. The background is layered with old handwritten text, newspaper clippings, and teal and reddish watercolor-like stains. Over the collage, large cursive script is written in pale pink.

The Writing with No Meaning

Dive into the mesmerizing world of asemic writing—art that looks like writing but carries no literal meaning. In this post, I share how exploring mark making and wordless journaling became a meditative, freeing practice that adds depth to my art and lets creativity flow without the pressure of perfection.

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A close-up of an open human hand covered in smudges and smears of various paint colors, including purple, blue, pink, green, yellow, and black. The background is blurred but shows similarly colorful, abstract patterns, suggesting an artistic or creative environment.

Why I Love Getting Paint on My Hands

There’s something deeply satisfying about walking away from a painting session with stained hands and a full heart. This post dives into the tactile joy of traditional art, the love of messy creativity, and the magic of blending digital with hands-on expression—proof that the real beauty lies in the making, not just the masterpiece.

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Abstract painting with vivid, fluid streaks of color blending across the paper. Prominent hues include bright yellow, turquoise, cobalt blue, peach, and purple, interspersed with black and white. The colors appear to be dragged or poured, creating feathered, wave-like textures. The upper corners feature heavier black and grey areas, adding contrast. In the bottom right corner, the artwork is signed “T Cowley” with the caption “Art & Design by Teresa Cowley.”

Guess Who’s Back (With Actual Paint)?

After a much-needed break, I’m back to blogging—with fresh energy and a renewed creative spark! I’m diving into traditional art again (hello, paint and lotion experiments!) while still mixing in my digital work. It feels great to share more of my personal journey, and there’s plenty more art and insight coming your way.

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