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Welcome to Your Art Is A Spell, the podcast that ignites inspiring and transformative conversations about art as a magical practice. I'm your host, Edgar Fabián Frías—a multi-passionate artist, witch, therapist, and proud mutant shape-shifter. My art spells have reached audiences through social media, billboards, and skyscrapers and have even been placed on the surface of the moon! Join us as we explore how reclaiming your unique artistic voice and embracing bold creativity can transform your life and the world around you. Subscribe to the podcast and sign up for our newsletter at www.yourartisaspell.com to stay connected!
We can still make art in the darkest of times. In
fact, that might be exactly when we need it the
most. When you're scared, when you feel hollowed
out, when the world feels overwhelmingly heavy and
you feel like you have nothing left to give. Play
and sanctuary are two of the deepest resources we
still own. They don't cost a dime. They require no
permission and no system no matter how oppressive
and strip them away from your spirit. Welcome
or welcome back to Your Art Is A Spell. I'm your
host Edgar Fabián Frías. Today we are opening
up a living sanctuary. We're going to talk
about the reality of the world we are living in
right now. why our imaginations are under siege
and then we're going to make art together in real
time. Before we dive into the cultural landscape,
I want you to know how today's episode is going to
work. In just a few minutes, we're going to enter
into an open 15-minute creative portal right here
on screen and on audio. I'll be working with tools
that are completely free and at hand. I'm going to
be using a website called photopea.com in my browser
and I'm going to be working with a guiding image.
You can do the exact same thing on a computer or a
phone or like we talked about in a recent episode.
You can pull a tarot card, grab a ballpoint pen,
get the back of a receipt or some paper you have
laying around. Or if you have a drawing pad, you
can get that out as well. You can pull out clay,
make sound with your voice, or move your body.
There is no right or wrong way to do this. We are
banishing the inner critic and the expectation
of making a masterpiece. This is about mark
making as an act of release and transmutation,
grounding and remembering who you are. And if
you're listening to this while driving, commuting,
doing the dishes, or lying down because your body
needs a break, welcome. Soak in the conversation.
Let this be medicine for your ears and you can
cast this creative circle whenever you find a
pocket of space within your week. Before we get
into art making, I want to just spend a moment
naming the reality of the moment that we're living
through. We're moving through profound collective
grief, economic extraction, and the blatant rise
of author1tar1@ni$m and f@$c1$t rhetoric. Have you
noticed how much corporations, media, algorithms,
and state apparatuses rely on imagery to keep us
paralyzed? They flood our feeds with manufactured
dread, sensationalized violence, and constant
crisis. And they do this intentionally because
when a population's nervous system is chronically
stuck in fight, flight, or freeze, we don't have
the bandwidth to dream. We stop organizing. We
stop connecting. and we default to just feeding
their machines just to survive another week.
Right now, there is a literal war of imaginations
over who gets to dictate what the future is. On
one side, there are people spending billions of
dollars to construct a future rooted in paranoia,
militarized borders, paramilitary violence,
surveillance, austerity, and isolation.
They want us to believe that this grim dystopia
is inevitable. On the other side, millions of
us are holding the vision of a world rooted
in collective care. A world where housing and
access to healthy food, air, water, and land are
non-negotiable human rights. Where health care
is universal. where billionaires pay their share
and where human dignity comes before corporate
quarterly profit. That future cannot be built
with policy alone. It has to be imagined first.
When you pick up a brush, a pen, a digital stylus,
you're committing to an act of counterinsurgency.
You are taking your attention back from the
panic engine and placing it back into your own
sovereign hands. For many of us who are artists,
creative workers or freelancers, our art has also
become our job. We deal with invoices, metrics,
social media algorithms, and client expectations.
Even our hobbies get commodified into side
hustles. When that happens, art stops feeling like
a refuge and starts to feel like another task on
an exhausting, neverending to-do list. Today, we
are stripping all of that away. All of it. All of
it away. Art's original ancestral medicine is not
productivity. It is an energetic boundary. It is
a spell. It is a sacred place that we create where
you can discharge the heavy emotional debris that
doesn't belong to you and where you can reconnect
to intuitive play. Play is not frivolous.
In repressive times, joy and uninhibited
play are profound disruptions. So, we'll start by
taking a deep breath with me. In through the nose
and out through the mouth.
Drop your shoulders away from your ears.
Unclench your jaw. Grab whatever
materials you have nearby.
If you're joining me digitally, you
can open up a canvas at photopea.com.
That's photo p-e-a com. If you're needing
some inspiration, a muse, or some guidance,
you can pull a tarot card of your choosing or
choose an anchor image if you want a visual
compass. We're officially opening the circle.
Let's play. So, we're going to start by showing
you my anchor image. Um, if you are listening, I
will be describing what this anchor image is here
in a second. It's a photo of me as a young child.
I think I'm maybe 10 years old. In this photo,
I'm standing on my bed striking a pose. I'm
smiling, laughing. Um, and I just feel so free,
so fluid. It is a moment of just ecstasy and
joy. And I see this as a moment where I'm just
unbburdened. I'm fully myself. I'm choosing this
photo as a muse, as something that I can return
to if I need to, as a way to remember that
expression of myself. Fully embodying joy,
dancing, jumping on a bed, being a child, and
feeling that flow, that rush of energy. And so
with that, I'm going to transition here and
go to photo pea. I'm going to go to select a
file. I'm opening up a square image. This to me is
like a simple image that I can use to play with,
to connect with. And you know, I'm just going to
sit here for a moment and let myself think about
that image that we just talked about, that
joy, that pleasure, that feeling of ecstasy.
And I'm going to just tap into that as a way to
get myself into this feeling of play and freedom
and noticing already that I feel some emotions
coming up that are wanting to be brought into
this artwork. I' feeling some heaviness in my
chest. I'm feeling some grief, some sadness,
some hopelessness here.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm just going
to grab a brush here. And I'm just going to
make a mark. I'm just starting. I'm just going
to let myself make a mark just to get over that
first feeling, that fear that might come up
when you're looking at a canvas and you don't
know what you're going to do. I just made a mark
already. You could see it's uh if you're watching,
you see it's a pink mark. Um I'm going to
grab another color here. I'm going to get
a dark blue. And I'm going to change my brush
a little bit to make it more like airbrushy,
which I really like. And I'm going to just make
a couple of other marks here. I love that dark
blue. Yeah. And just like the way that it feels
like faded, like it's kind of peeking through.
I'm going to just keep going with this cuz it's
feeling really fun right now. I'm going to grab
some green. And I'm just gonna place the green
right next to the blue just because that's what
I feel like doing. Yeah. And as I'm doing this,
I'm already feeling this like movement in that
energy that we were talking about earlier. There's
like a moving happening. And what's great about
working digitally is that if you do something and
you're not so sure, you can always command Z and
erase it. Start all over again. And now I'm
going to grab an ellipse to make a little circle.
And I'm going to color that circle
in here with like a dark purple
and a yellow. I'm all about that contrast.
Maybe I'll get a little bit of black here,
too. See what that looks like. Oh, that's nice.
And as you'll see here in this image, we're
working with just one layer. You can create
another layer if you want just to have multiple
layers. I'll show you how to do that here. I
just like to grab a rectangle and cover the whole
screen. And then you just Ctrl + C, copy, paste,
Ctrl +V. And then now you have another layer
here. And so you can work on either the background
layer or the first layer. What I like to do then
when I do this is I like to erase the first layer
so that it's kind of invisible. And then so you
kind of are actually rebuilding a whole layer. And
then you have the first the background layer here
as the original. So then I'm going to be placing
stuff on top of this layer. So I'm going to make
a rectangle here that's a little smaller. Again,
just like moving through these colors intuitively,
feeling into what feels good, what feels fun, what
feels maybe right in the moment. And then I think
I want to draw something. So I'm going to grab the
pencil tool and I'm going to get black color.
I'm just going to draw a little creature here.
I don't really know what this
creature is going to look like,
but you know, hey, do I have to really know?
It's kind of like a rabbitish.
Um, I'm gonna color this rabbit.
Make this little rabbit pink.
Make sure I color that other
ear. And then, you know,
I want to give this rabbit a little bit
more dimension with some other colors. So,
I'll grab something a little bit
darker. I'll grab the brush tool.
And as you can see, I'm highlighting the
pink just so that I only paint on the pink.
I like that look already. So, just adding this
little augment of purple gives a nice little bit
of depth to my cute little creature here. And
I'm going to imagine this creature is tossing
some energy up. It's saying, "I'm done with
this [ __ ] [ __ ] this shit." Letting out a
little bit of my own anger to this creature.
It's creating like a circle around itself.
And remember, we still have that background.
So, you know, I'm going to add a color to this
background here. And I'm going to start by, as
you're seeing, I'm highlighting everything except
what is already drawn in the background.
And I'm going to grab the gradient tool,
which I love. I'm such a gradient
queen. Um, which one should I choose?
I'll try this one.
You know what? I'm going to try the rainbow
one and I'm going to go to reflected just
to try to get multiple rainbows here. Ooh,
that's really nice. Yes, I like this. Okay,
so you see here it's starting to come together.
I do want to make a couple more lines like I
did at the beginning cuz I feel like I could
use a few more lines. And I'm going to make
them with the non airbrush. I'm going try
to make them the same size as I did this
one here. The first initial line I made.
I'll show you a little fun
thing I like to do with lines.
So once I've made those lines, I do
like to go and highlight them. And
then I'll get the airbrush back. I like
coloring in these lines. Different colors
just to add like different effect
to these lines.
Even though we're doing something that's
abstract, you could see that there's like
little narratives maybe popping up here.
Noticing the contrast of how these colors
interact with one another. The stories are
maybe wanting to share as we're working on them.
You can always pause and take a moment
and just kind of look at what you've made
so far. You might even get a feeling or a
sense of what might want to happen next.
I am wanting to bring in some triangles into this.
So, I'll start with one triangle here. And in a
similar way as I've been doing, I'm going to use
the brush to create this triangle. Trying to use
colors that are not present here. Oh, that's
interesting. Okay, let me grab a darker color,
darker green. I'll even go to a black here.
And you can kind of see that I'm working on
the background layer. So you see that there is
like that top layer. I'll hide it here for a
second just so you can see how what that does.
So how it's affecting what this looks like.
So I like that effect. So we
made a little triangle there.
I'm going to make another little triangle up here.
And this time I'm going to make it on the top
layer just so it'll stand out a little bit more.
And I'm choosing green and a light bright blue
and an orange.
Maybe I need a little bit more blue in there.
I feel like that green a little overpowered.
There we go. Tryolored triangle.
So, I'm, you know, really noticing like the shift
in my mood already as I've been playing. It's so
much fun to play in this way. Um, it does remind
me of being a child. I think one of the tools in
photo op that really reminds me of being a child
is the smudge tool cuz it is a little bit like
finger painting. And so, I'll show you what
that looks like. So, I'll go down to my little
rabbit. We can smudge its nose a little bit. Say,
I don't know if I like exactly how this rectangle
looks. I could smudge it up a little bit. This
and you can see this creates another depth,
another color, another pattern. Feel like it
adds an interesting dimension to the work.
So pretty.
And if there's something that you do that
you're like, I'm not really sure about that,
you can always add another layer. You
can always erase it, come back to it.
you can always addd another layer. you can always erase it, come back to it.
Uh, you know, they're really I feel like a big
part of this process is just to keep going. It's
almost like improv where you're saying yes
and yes and yes and. Right. And I think I
want to do a couple more little circles here
of color. And I'm going to do them in white.
And then next to them, I'm
going to add like a dark blue.
Just kind of layering those in together.
And I'm just going to do some yellow,
too, because I love that
contrast. Little trifectas here.
And I'm grabbing that smudge tool again.
And just a little bit more dimension
here. Feeling like this is almost done.
You know, I'm not trying to resolve
this into like a commercial poster or
an image. I'm just looking for the moment
where the piece when it just tells me,
"Okay, that's enough for today."
And I feel like I've gotten there.
So, I'll just take a pause here. So, I just
invite you to pause right where you are. If
you're finished, that's great. If you need a few
more moments, that's also great. You can continue
um here in a second. Or you can put pause on me.
And even if your piece doesn't feel finished,
spoiler alert, or is really
finished. It just rests. So,
just take a moment and step back from your
screen. Put your pen down or open your eyes
if you were listening quietly. And let's
take another deep breath here together.
Just notice how your body feels right now.
How does your chest feel compared to when
we started a few minutes ago? Is there
a millimeter more space in your ribs?
That tiny expansion, that
feeling of nervous regulation,
that is the spell working.
You took raw time and attention away from
dread and you channeled it into creation.
So just as a reminder, you don't need 40
minutes to keep this channel open during
hard seasons. Here are three quick structures
that you can use throughout the week. The
first one is the Three Minute Envelope Sketch. So
whenever junk mail comes in or a bill arrives,
take the back of the envelope and fill it with
intuitive, frantic or gentle line scribbles.
Just discharge that tension physically. The One
Layer Digital Collage. So again, you can open
photo or Photoshop if you have the program or your
phone's photo editor. While on a 10-minute break,
layer one photo of sky or of nature over a meme
or a headline. Shift the blend mode to overlay or
difference and save it as your phone background.
And the third option for yourself this week is A
Sound Clearing. If visual work feels like too much
cognitive effort, record a 60-second voice memo of
yourself. humming or sighing or singing into your
phone to release stagnant emotional energy. And
you could choose to listen to it or not. It's up
to you. And just as a reminder, your art is not a
luxury. It is your sovereignty, your intuition,
and your birthight. Especially now, if you made
something during this episode or alongside this
episode, whether it's digital, analog, messy,
weird, or unfinished, I would love to witness
it. Post it on Instagram. Tag me at Edgar Fabian
Fria's altogether or share your experience
in the comments here on YouTube. Tell me what
shifted in your body or in your spirit when you
gave yourself permission to play. Thank you for
holding this space with me. And never forget that
your art is a spell and it will change your life
and the world around us. Thank you for listening
or watching your art is a spell. We want to invite
you to please join us on Patreon by going to
patreon.com/youartisaspell. You can become
a free or paid member. This is a private container
where I share updates. You can ask questions or
even influence the direction of this podcast.
I want to say thank you to the paid members of
this podcast over on Patreon. Thank you for making
this podcast possible and invite you to join the
Spellcaster Circle for only $5 a month. If you're
interested in being a part of my newsletter,
you can go to mutant-magic.com to sign up for my
free newsletter where I send updates periodically
about upcoming events or ways to collaborate. If
you're listening to this as a podcast, we'd love
for you to leave us a review, subscribe, and we
want to thank the recent few folks who left some
lovely five-star reviews on this podcast. Thank
you so much for sharing this podcast with your
friends. And if you're watching this on YouTube,
please consider subscribing, liking, leaving a
comment. All of these wonderful interactions
are spells of their own, and your spells
help amplify the web of magic that we're weaving
together as a collective. Thank you, and goodbye.