clar·i·ty
/ˈklerədē/ noun the quality of being clear, coherent, and easily understood; freedom from ambiguity or confusion
There is something a little ethereal about feeling stable and grounded when the outside world seems filled with nonstop chaos.
It definitely wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, I was often the first to react, and if I am being honest, overreact far too often.
Self-control has been such an interesting part of this chapter’s life lessons.
I have the ability to see context and circumstances from an entirely different perspective now.
I’m not sure which set of algorithms introduced me to neurographic art, but I am grateful that it found me. I watched a bunch of videos and read up on it, and then bought some new craft supplies.
For the past many months, once or twice a week, I sit down and find silence. Not literally though, I struggle with actual silence. This silence is about tuning out all of the noise inside my head.
The noise that remains is typically in the form of music, and most recently been focused frequency sounds courtesy of a variety of different YouTube channels and creators. The 432 Hz versions are some of my favorites at the moment.
Not surprisingly, my neurographic art curiosity caused the algos to drop the meditative and frequency music channels onto my homepage. The best part is that the background music complements Mother Nature’s current playlist.
My favorite part about neurographic art is that perfection doesn’t exist. The purpose is in the process.
Every project starts as a blank page.
The journey starts on the back of every blank page. I write the date and whatever topic I want my subconscious mind to help my conscious mind with. It might be a single topic that I want to explore for the book I am writing, a statement of something I want to ponder for business purposes, or something I want to seek resolution on.
There is no right or wrong thing to want to explore.
The page then turns back over, and my pen draws a single fluid line for several seconds.
Sometimes, I add circles by tracing something I have handy around the house. For this particular piece, I drew a series of shapes that corresponded with the message on the back. I do the first run with a fine-point Sharpie, and then I trace those lines with different, wider point markers. It just depends on what I feel like doing in the moment.
No line ends on the page, and I find that fascinating symbolically. It’s like every piece leads off the page and goes to a place unknown…a place yet to be explored.
The next part is where the magic happens. Every hard intersection gets softened or rounded. It takes a long time and requires a serene attention to detail. The best part is when you screw a connection point up, another stroke or two of the marker solves that.
Nothing is unfixable with the right vision.
And then it’s time to color. I’ve used colored pencils, water brush markers, twist crayons, acrylic markers, and alcohol markers. I’ve not allowed any color to touch itself, and I’ve created pockets of color. I’ve used brights, pastels, and metallics. I’ve stuck to a certain color scheme and opted for a completely random palette.
For this particular project, I started with bright reds and pinks and then added bright greens. I closed out with some light blue and green pastels and a pop of bright blues.
The thing about experimenting with different mediums is that you learn what works and doesn’t through trial and error.
As I was working through this one, I learned that using pastels after brights can lead to blemishes from the colors bleeding together. I also learned that the pace with which you connect the outline and fill drastically changes the drying pattern of the color within a space.
Old me would have gotten extremely twitchy about the pink blemish in the pastel green. Now me accepts that it happened and now I know that I shouldn’t do light pastels after vibrant colors with alcohol based markers. Each marker type bleeds differently. Twisty crayons are nothing like OG crayons, and I learned alot about that medium and how certain colors cause issues with your hands and clothes…oops.
Mistakes become lessons.
I caught a great video clip of Ed Sheeran discussing that premise the other day.
He said, “...you learn nothing from success, nothing, you learn everything from the failures…no one talks about failure anymore. It’s like shame, like failure is shame, and it’s like oh, let’s just bury that and not talk about it. No one goes, oh, what did we learn from this…”
I don’t have a single piece of neurographic art that I look at as perfect. In fact, I view each one as perfectly imperfect, a concept that I have explored with intention and curiosity over the past many months.
Today’s fun discovery was the curious pattern and palette that emerged on the paper below the paper. Nothing intentional, just completely random and fascinating.
I will admit that not all of my twitchy ‘control and order’ tendencies are gone. The new set of markers came packaged randomly, so after I completed today’s project, that got fixed.
Sometimes, all we can do is try to create order in the small ways while the universe shakes the big stuff loose.
April 8, 2025
