Salaric

This image was created out of sheet felt for the video I created for A Stranger Dream. The video has since been played at various events such as International Women’s Day and Pride.

This weekend is the virtual launch party of my poetry, music and art album Within and Without. It went live at 10 am this morning 🙂

There will be give aways and postings of links, explanations of the recordings, videos and more. I am running a Facebook Event, a Google Plus Collection as well as blogging across various platforms 🙂

I will be going until 11 pm Sunday evening!

Within and Without is an on going art, poetry and music project that I started several years ago. This is the first part and contains the visual poem A Stranger Dream which is also a colouring in book I have produced. Some of the colouring in sheets or art visuals are included in the download along with art work from a sister book not yet released that goes with the track Winter’s Heart.

The whole download costs £1 and comes free with any merch purchase you make. If you wish to just just purchase the merch you can go to my Etsy shop.

I hope you all enjoy the work.

Art prints of A Stranger Dream have arrived – these are wonderful – I am really chuffed with the quality and I have found some black frames which work really well with the images.

Currently there are only three designs: Dismissed, Identity Clinging and Love. As these sell I will have enough capital to get more made but it is going to be a slow roll out – sorry guys!

Also I am not currently selling things online other than the book itself which you can get through amazon. The reason for this is that the after affects of head bang make it still a bit too much for me but I am selling them at events.

Obviously I have only just launched A Stranger Dream: Love a non-linear visual poem as a colouring book but… well people have been asking about other books – now I have a long list of other potentials but thought I’d see what people want 🙂

Trying to decide what type of ink style colouring in book to draw next – so here's a poll! tweet me "other" too 🙂

— Sarah Snell-Pym (@Saffy) May 6, 2016

Yes it’s on twitter – I’m not quiet sure how this works but if you can’t click the options on there then just comment 🙂 Also I am happy to consider other suggestions 🙂

Thanks muchly 🙂

I am a poet, I am an artist, I am many things some of which seem contradictory – after the head bang last year the question of identity reigned large in my vision of self – not just my identity but everybody’s and societies reactions to identity issues – so I started working on a series of images.

I was learning how to draw again and the ideas were appearing faster than I could create them, I spent 3 months working on the visuals for A Stranger Dream. And mainly I have had positive feedback though some people do hate the style and that is fine it is stark, it was meant to be.

But what is A Stranger Dream? Well for a start it is not A Stranger Dream it is A Stranger Dream: Love but it’s not it is

Love: A Stranger Dream…

or both or neither or something…

It is a non-linear visual poem on identity, gender, our place within family, our concentric non-ecludian intersecting and exclusionary circles of all the cultures of us – it is the distorting mirrors within our own heads – the fitting and the not fitting – the fires within.

I know it doesn’t look it but it was a hell of a lot of work.

Then someone said “it says colouring in book to me” and I thought… why not?! I thought people colour to relax, to sort thoughts, to just be themselves and that is fitting – plus colouring in book is on the list of to-dos and I have been producing colouring in sheets for my kids workshops for ages.

So I started by popping the images up as individual sheets for download and colouring – they are still there and they are free.

Then I made ring bound ones at home for shows and events… people far away started asking how they could get hold of them so I have created a colouring in book complete with purple spine and title box because… I am the Purple Poet!!!!

Here is a picture of the spiral bound ones at The True Believers Comic Book Festival earlier this year.

And this weekend (April 22-14 2016) I am having a launch party – sadly I am only running a virtual one but it is going to be epic!!!

I will be pinging around the internet – of course hoping people will buy the book but as I said don’t feel you have to because I put the individual sheets out there for free download and I know times are tight (having said that I need to buy more art supplies… to you know produce more art!).

There is a Facebook Event, a Google+ Event, a twitter hashtag # astrangerdream and my patreon account (which will have hidden extras in it for patreons only). There are also the blogs namely this one and Turquoise Monster which is my poetry blog 🙂 So I think that is pretty much everyone covered – I am hoping to do a little film thingy too but we will have to see how the laptop holds up!

The colouring book is already up on Amazon and Book Repository etc… it is appearing as £10 odd – I meant it to be roughly £7 if you’ve bought the £10 copy let me know as I have a little goody bag to post to you containing some lovely tie-in items 🙂 (yes I am trusting people to be honest here! Thankyou 🙂 )

Oh and there should be a gallery unveiling where people can post pictures of their colouring in – if they wish 🙂

There are going to be give aways but there will also be merch for sale and special offers etc… (sorry guys I would love to give you everything for free but I do need a new computer!).

I am actually stupidly excited about this and am even making myself an outfit out of the art work! The poetry cards have arrived and are beautiful in a way I was not expecting 🙂

Most of all though regardless of weather you buy or take for free or just look – mainly I hope everyone will be enriched by the work itself, it was very important to me whilst creating it. It’s kind of an imprint of the soul, maybe a darker one than people would like but it is… something – I’m not quiet sure what.

I hope you will join me for turning the starkness into a rainbow.

A few days back on Google Plus I saw a post about a drawing challenge – now I was in the middle of not only trying to run a poetry writing drive but trying to do the drive myself as well as plan things for a science-art exhibition this month and start gearing up for festival season – so I thought I would join in 😀

Insane yes!

The challenge as set by Margareth Osju and is to draw 100 birds in 100 days – I am off course already lagging behind but hope to catch up!

There is a Google Plus circle and Margareth’s blog.

I shall be posting the pictures on my Picture Books and Illustrations blog Orange Monster.

This first one has been done as a request for my husband, most of the drawings will not be this style at all. The picture is called Gaia and is part of my visual poetry journal.

I made this little Visual Poetry booklet as a source of inspiration to other poets and writers I meet up with. I looked through magazines and selected the words I wanted – chosen for what they said and the type face used. I then cut strips of card using the bell scissors out of my shape cutting scissors. I punched a whole in the corner of each strip using a whole punch, using pritt stick I glued the words onto the card strips and selected some lovely varigated coloured eyelash wool which I used to tie it together.

It is a new year and I am assessing my blogs and what not and I see I haven’t been posting about my art and craft properly for a while – so some back blogging and stuff needs to happen 🙂

Apart from that I have quiet a full year planned – I am hoping to be booked for more festivals and am going to be running a Science Art Exhibition at Centre Arts in Cheltenham.

I’ve signed up with Etsy and plan to put items I’ve made plus tutorials on their 🙂

And then there are the books I want to make. I’ve been mucking around with various Print On Demand things and have three books I want to create were Art and Craft are concerned.

1) Junk Art and Upcycling

2) Salaric’s 100 Things to Make and Do

3) Fantasmagrams and Illustrations

The third one sort of already exists on my PhotoBox but is very expensive so I am hoping to get ones printed that are going to be more financially viable 🙂

Craft wise I have decided to give up on Craft Fayres I am just loosing money everytime or braking even for lots of effort. I will stick to running workshops and try out etsy 🙂

Drawing/art wise I am trying to do more illustration this year – last year I managed to finish off The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry etc… but I want to work on my comic book for my writing. Drawing projects are:

1) It’s Raining (a picture book I have half drawn)

2) What Can I See Under The Sea (most of the pictures to this are almost finished and it should have been finished years ago!)

3) Percival’s Christmas Wish which I am doing to raise money for Shelter

4) Revalation – a comic or graphic novel based on the novels I am writing, I scripted it for Scriptfrenzy a couple of years ago 🙂

5) I want to re-draw and draw more of my Inspira pictures and maybe do something with them 🙂

Knitting and yarn craft wise I am refining my up cycled ‘knitting machine’ and still knitting away – the first part of the year is going to focus on knitting molecules and then poetry for various events 🙂

Feeling very happy about all of this and I’m sure there will be random papier machie and stuff thrown in 🙂

Yesterday I attended the first ever Green Unconference in Long Ashton near Bristol, organised by Daniel Lewis. It was an amazing setting with brilliant speakers – I only wish more of the people I’d invited had turned up but apparently most of them hadn’t seen the FaceBook invite until the event was actually taking place 🙁

I have come away saddened but optermistic and re-energised about the stuff I do to try and be a bit more friendly to the planet. Everything from government policies to how to garden to how to save/use waste food to feed those who are increasingly needing to use the food banks in this country was covered. I myself did an Upcycling and Junk Art workshop – complete with a mini talk and slides.

It was the most gorgous setting for a workshop and I had my visual poetry stuff with me as well which a couple of people stayed on to do as a mini workshop. The workshop was making a vase of flowers out of old magazines.

My little girls were about as well behaved as I think I could realistically expect :/ I think Jeany eat most of the buffet before we officially had stopped for lunch!

I’m glad that people are taking on board that the average family can not afford or percieves at the least that they cannot afford organic food and that steps are being taken towards sorting this out. I wish I had managed to catch a few more of the talks but they clashed with my workshop and we had to leave early due to having triple booked ourselves for the day :/

I am going to attempt write up a few more of my junk art and upcycling projects. In making the slide show I realised I had a lot of material which I may try to collect together into at minimum an ebook. I have had people asking me to do this for a while now but haven’t had time what with all those workshops and other publishing projects on the go 🙂

And talking of e-books don’t forget to download your copy of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry before midnight on the 31st of October! Click the image below for your free PDF.

Image is a link to a free PDF of the book!

A few years ago to entertain my then just turned 4 yr old I wrote a series of kids poems and we made a little book with me handwriting the poems and drawing some quick pictures in felt tip pen. My little girl liked it so much she took it to school with her where to my embarassement the head master saw it and thought it was great.

I typed up the poems and took photos of the book assembly – for this blog and thought that was the end off it all – especially when the book got a cup of water spilt on it (much to my annoyance and the tears of a little one). But I then ended up writing a Little Book of Poetry for all sorts of other events and festivals like christmas and the birth of my second child and to stop the heart ache of the first ones destruction I scanned the pictures I drew.

People kept telling me that I should release the books but I thought I should digitise the pictures so I spent ages trying to draw the pumpkins and things but I found that it just came out looking like a cheap hobbled together image and that was not what I wanted. Then I came to the realisation that this was not needed and that the felt pen look was a good for kids books. So I drew pictures and have run them through a few filters and things to clean them up etc… (I found that different sketch books have slightly different coloured paper in them which needed to be sorted etc…).

But the up shot of all this is that tomorrow I am having a virtual launch party of an e-book (PDF) of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. I will be giving things away and there will be author interactions etc… The PDF will be available for FREE until midnight on the 31st of October 🙂

Enjoy.