Last on the Card: Jan 2026

~ Ruth ~ 4 Comments
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Perhaps not surprising that my last on the card for January was a pic of another art study completed this week as part of my online art course.

I’m having great fun experimenting with such a scruffy look – I know it’s not to everyone’s taste but I’m really enjoying exploring the rebellious side of me, deliberately making art that is unladylike and unrealistic and undone.

My current creative inspiration has been sparked by an interest in exploring urban graffiti and those old-fashioned bill boards with weathered (and often shredded) layers of old paper posters and ads 🙂

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Spark

Scruffy Grunge Style

~ Ruth ~ 3 Comments
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I wrote in my creative journal last week ‘I don’t like it when I make messy paintings, I like things to look neat’ so then I questioned why, and decided to challenge myself to make a messy painting…

And now I’m so excited to have made a really scruffy, grungy-looking abstract painting on top of an old pre-used textured canvas – I deliberately didn’t make it apologetically pretty, I’ve intentionally left it looking messy and real and in-your-face warts-and-all ugly – and I had such fun making it!

Although my ‘good girl complex’ is currently in meltdown at the reality of me creating (and celebrating) such an ‘unladylike’ painting that breaks so many of my limiting-belief good-girl rules, it finally feels like things are opening up a bit for me in my art practice, and that feels so liberating, so empowering.

As creative mindset breakthroughs go, for me this feels huge! 🙂

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Huge

Seaport Marina

~ Ruth ~ 1 Comment
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I always benefit both physically and emotionally from going for a walk along the canal here in Inverness, along past the marina and down to the where the canal meets the sea.

I never tire of taking photos when out on my walks, but maybe you all tire of seeing variations on a theme of the same basic scene all the time 🙂

Word of the Day: Benefit

Book Ostrich

~ Ruth ~ 1 Comment

My secret hiding place as a child was often a book. I loved getting completely lost in whatever imaginative story I was reading, finding myself temporarily in lockstep with whoever the main protagonist was, inexorably drawn in to different worlds and different times and different situations.

Curled up somewhere quiet where I could be unnoticed and undisturbed, feeling invisible in my self-imposed solitude, I could hide for hours from the everyday hustle and bustle of family life going on all around me. I was like an ostrich with its head in the sand, except I had my head buried in the pages of a book instead.

I suppose for me the basic premise remained the same – if I can’t see you, then you can’t see me either. And surprisingly, it worked quite well in that I was left alone much of the time just to enjoy indulging my love of reading in perfect peace 🙂

John’s Writer’s Workshop Prompt for this week asks ‘Where was you secret hiding place as a child?

A Thin Veneer of Now

~ Ruth ~ 13 Comments
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I’m discovering in my 60s that one of the (many) reasons I didn’t do any art for decades is that for too long I had too narrow an idea of what constituted ‘good’ art. I deemed it necessary to be squished into a tight box of valuing only traditional painting in a purist style, rigidly following all the rules of representation and doing it ‘right’.

But I’ve found that these days that kind of art is not really me, for now I far prefer abstract compositions in bright colours and weird (mainly organic) shapes. So I’m learning to be my own woman, deciding on how best to find my own artistic style in my own way.

And for now that exploration seems to be taking me away from any kind of realism, exploring different ways of expressing what I’m feeling on the canvas.

So here’s my latest mixed media painting, perhaps finished, perhaps not. What is it, I hear you ask? It is purely a flight of fancy, layers of words and paint and tissue paper collage and stencils and ink made into something personal to me – an imaginative visual representation of my internal landscape, if you like.

And I’m hoping there’s enough going on in my abstract painting that as a viewer you’ll maybe want to stop and take another look, see beyond the surface to find evidence of the multiple layers beneath, some ghosts of which are still peeking through in places.

Because this depth of meaning I’m trying to express is how I feel, a unique human being made up of the many layers of who I once was wrapped up in a thin veneer of now… 🙂

Weekly Prompt: Squish

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Flight

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Take another look

Make-Up Sponge Flowers

~ Ruth ~ 9 Comments
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This is one of today’s studies made for my ongoing art course – this week’s brief is to make several pieces of art, each using only one of several given limitations, so for this one I decided on painting with only one non-brush tool – and I chose a cheap egg-shaped foam make-up sponge I’d picked up in the clearance section of either Aldi or Lidl!

I used the fat end of the sponge dipped in paint to print the flower centres, the side of the sponge dipped in paint to print the petals, and the pointy end dipped in paint to add the detail (as best I could).

I was very pleasantly surprised with how it all turned out, considering the limitation of my chosen tool. The make-up sponge was (literally) a bit of a blunt instrument but it certainly did the job, and I had great fun with the whole exercise 🙂

Word of the Day: Brief

Not-So-Random Musings

~ Ruth ~ 9 Comments

I’ve written a journal for years, on and off since childhood, and through trial and error I’ve learned over time what works best for me, and what doesn’t.

I used to think it mattered to keep an accurate written record of what happened in my life, and when, but then it morphed into keeping a written record of how I felt about the things that happened in my life.

Looking back years later on my earliest journal entries I was mortified – I really didn’t like how mundane and repetitive and cringe-worthy embarrassing it all felt to read my sometimes intense, sometimes whiny, more often than not boring words – really not something worth keeping for posterity at all!

I did soon realise, however, that I seemed to have managed to work through a lot of things that were troubling me just by having gathered my thoughts together and writing them out in a kind of stream of consciousness way.

Instead of forever going round and round in aimless circles in my head, often one written thought would lead to another, and spark yet another, and soon enough either a potential solution would present itself or at least I would find a more hopeful direction of travel.

I still like to keep up that kind of temporary emotional work-book type of journal even today – not constantly, but when I need to. Although these days rather than hand-writing my thoughts and feelings in a fixed, bound book I tend to keep my not-so-random musings on more ephemeral sheets of A4 loose-leaf paper in a ring-binder, where pages can be be kept or discarded later as I choose.

My current art course requires us to journal quite in-depth about our art and I’m really enjoying that part of it – rather than producing pages of formal prose it’s often done in the form of lists or mind-maps or simply jotting down ideas and realisations on post-it notes then sticking them in to a sketch-book or onto the back of the studies themselves – a system I find really useful so might happily adapt later for my life-journaling, too! 🙂

Weekly Prompt: Journal

Fandango’s One Word Prompt: Gathered

My Current Situation

~ Ruth ~ 4 Comments

My current situation (having signed up for a new six-month online art course straight on the back of completing my last three-month one that finished in mid-December) means that yet again I probably won’t be around so much on my blog for the first part of this year.

During the course I’ll no doubt be making a lot of small studies following set creative prompt exercises rather than focusing on creating any new finished paintings so I’m not even sure how much (if any) of my artwork will get posted here. Or I might be brave and share some of my experiments, we’ll see!

But I’ll still be checking in on everyone whenever I can 🙂

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Situation

Sedentary Snowman

~ Ruth ~ 8 Comments
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After a solid week of solid (as in frozen solid) snow, we’ve finally got some temperatures above freezing and the snow is melting at last, but this little guy is still holding his own so far 🙂

Artificial Hip Joint

~ Ruth ~ 6 Comments

As many of you know I was given an artificial hip joint just over a year and a half ago, and I’m absolutely delighted with it. It took a lot longer to heal from my surgery than I’d expected, but I persevered with my exercises and thankfully I got there in the end.

When people ask me if my hip is as good as it was before, I have to ask which ‘before’ they mean, because although my new hip joint is definitely a million times better than the old worn out arthritic one I had leading up to it being replaced, it’s not as good as my natural hip joint was before I ever got arthritis.

And just for the record it’s also still not quite as good range-of-movement-wise as my mirror-image original hip joint which at 62 years old is still in reasonably good working order on the other side of my body. But I absolutely love my new hip, no regrets, and it’s definitely earning its keep! 🙂

Ragtag Daily Prompt: Artificial

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Earn