Balancing Act | A Mixed Media Art Project

What's your approach to multi-tasking? ...

All individuals do it. Whether we're successful at it is another issue. Sometimes it leads to success; sometimes, failure. It's called juggling. It's called multi-tasking. This special skill is the ability to handle successfully several tasks at the same time.

Sometimes you may can feel as though you're overwhelmed and can barely keep your head above water. How does one keep all tasks in order and on schedule for completion? It all depends on hos wood one is at prioritizing the tasks.

I recall my thirty-year career in the legal field. The ability to multitask was essential to the daily accomplishments of my job. Often working on several projects during the day in which some action was required to be taken, I was able to set priorities on which responses needed to be addressed first.

Often, projects were either tabled or delayed until the next day or some future date.

Keeping the projects and status of each in your thoughts daily drained me mentally and physically. I've often read that when individuals quits work for that day, they should leave work behind them to enjoy their after work activities. I can tell you that this switch is difficult to turn off. Too many years of this leads to diminished physical and mental health.

I can attest to that fact that I developed high blood pressure, migraines, and other ailments. I loved my career, but it was becoming detrimental to my health and well being, especially the older I became.

When I ready to retire long before I actually turned in my intent to retire letter.

What I can share with you is that the biggest problem people who multi-task face is the inability to say "NO". It took me many years to learn this.

After my health problems developed, it was much easier to decline additional work. On a personal level, my struggles with family and friends offloading tasks on me or my volunteering ended.

I'd often wondered how I would feel if I declined to help others. It was a relief after I learned to do so, often extricating myself from situations in which others gladly heaped tasks upon me that they didn't want to handle.

And how do I feel now, ten years after retirement? Wonderful. Just dealing with the aftereffects of developing health issues of living too long not being able to say "NO".

How do you handle multitasking? And do you sometimes take on more than you can handle in all phases of your life?

For my current mixed media art project dealing with balancing one's life, I wanted to depict a female overwhelmed by responsibilities. She retreats into her own world while trying to figure out how to handle numerous tasks. All elements surrounding her I interpret as projects pulling her in all directions. It's truly a balancing act to stay on top of or ahead of them.

Below are my steps in which I utilized StarryAI to retrieve the female image. I'm in love with fantasy eyes, and this image delivers. I'm sure I resembled the image below on many occasions: A doe caught in headlights on a bad hair day.

The other stable diffusion image I retrieved was included that added a sense of chaos to the scene felt as if one is in a maze and underwater.

I added a few other images to create the water effect and chaos. The flowing white cloth is a free-sourced image. For the flower swirl, I designed it in the advanced fractal rendering program, Apophysis 7X. Finally, for the water, I designed the background in Nvidia Gaugan.

Flowing white cloth ~ Pure Fractal created by me titled "Flower Twirl" ~ Blue, Gray, and White Mountains created by me ~ Fantasy White rose designed in StarryAI

I utilized Canva, my design program, to blend the different type images. I leave with you my procedures which began with a blank, white canvas. I then added layers of elements using tools to remove backgrounds, resize, filter, duplicate, and reposition items as required.

I share with you my completed project:

Thanks for taking the time to view my post. I hope you like my mixed media art project.