YEAH - My new camera arrived! It will take me some time to figure it out, but so far I am loving it. Here are some pictures of what I have been drawing lately. I took an old board book (a young child's book with cardboard thick pages), and covered it with text pages from an old book and painted gesso on top of that - and then I drew. The nice thing is if you don't like how the pages turn out, you can just gesso another layer right on top. The pictures I am drawing are not supposed to look realistic - good thing! I prefer a look that is a little "off" - not sure really how to describe it. I will continue to work at it.





I have managed to complete 7 inside spreads and the front cover. 2 more inside spreads and the back cover to go before I am finished.



I did get outside today to take some pictures, and will download and share them soon.

I continue to relax and enjoy the Christmas break - I have been spending time drawing and playing with photos on the computer. Tomorrow I should probably do a few more chores so that they don't pile up and need my attention once my life gets back to its crazy busyness. I am excited that I have signed up for an online portrait class from Misty Mawn that starts in January.

Discover Your World

I have been busy drawing faces in a small book .... but I can't post them because - 1. my camera is broken, and - 2. because my scanner is out of ink. I didn't think being out of ink would effect my ability to scan and post images, but it does. The closest store to buy ink at is 100 miles away, and we won't be there until Saturday. Ink and scanning will have to wait. So I decided to work on an image I took last winter and play with it for a while.

A while ago I needed to make something - it didn't matter what, just create something. So I came up to my little studio, and painted a face on top of an old page out of a book, I collaged and stamped on it. I wrote on top of it, and added some words from an old book, and I felt much better. It didn't really matter what it looked like. I came back to the picture recently, and decided to make scan it and make a copy to make a card out of it. But when I looked closely at the text I realized I couldn't send it as a card, as the text underneath my painting does not give the loving message that I wanted the girl to portray.

Lesson learned - even when you are just creating for creating sake - take a look at the words that may show up in the background. You never know you may want to use the image you create for something.

Continue to Learn

I can't tell you how many mistakes I made getting this post to work the way I wanted it to. But I continue to learn everyday, all the time. I drew this picture a while ago.... have not managed to get to my sketchbook to do more drawing, but I promise myself it will happen soon - how soon, I don't know. I wanted to post the photograph that I used to draw this from. It doesn't look the same, and I wasn't intending it to, it was more of a reference for me. BUT then I realized that there may be some copyright issues with it, so I better not show it. I don't know much about copyright. Anyway then I had problems scanning and straightening the images etc. But here they are. This is the drawing......

and here is the painting I did with the drawing. I wasn't intending for it to look real - just like a bird with some berries and some paint and words splattered around on it. THe words say "no need to fly". I am not completely happy with the painting, but I haven't been doing much painting lately, and I think I have only painted one bird before, so I will continue to learn. I think I like the drawing better than the painting. But I have both so that is okay.

finding peace

Well... I have decided I am in a bit of a creative rut, and it is making me a bit unsettled. I NEED to create to keep me content and happy within myself. It has been a while since I have created something, and I can feeling the unsettled feeling creeping in. I think I will get out my sketchbook and do some drawing.... that will probably help get me going again. I have been busy cleaning my studio, as it gets amazingly messy during my productive days prior to sales. That is also a very creative time, and now that I don't have to get specific things made, I was looking forward to creating for creating sake, but I am having trouble getting there. I did work a bit on this picture tonight, and I think she is finished. I am not 100% satisfied with it, but I will continue to learn. I took a 2 day course when I was at Art and Soul in October with an amazing artist Misty Mawn. Some of our time was spent on painting faces with various mediums. The faces I had painted in the past were always with watercolour crayons, so I tried this one with acrylic as she was showing us at the course. I painted the face in October or November, but finished the background tonight. It says finding peace beside her face - it is more readable on the real piece. So... I will continue to look for my creative peace by doing some drawing in the next few days.

Well, I just realized that my last post was something that I had already posted on a daytimer I had made.... so I thought I better post something completely different. This is an imaginary creature I created at a workshop I attended at Art & Soul in Portland in October. The class was given by Carla Sonheim. I really enjoyed it, and am looking forward to some fun creating time to create some more imaginary creatures. That is all for tonight......

This is a collage I made and put on the front of a journal I made. I have been busy tidying up the studio after the last month of whirlwind creating. I only have a wee bits of creating time these days, so I may show you a few of the things I created over the last while before I was blogging. For today it is this collage.

Here are the inside pages and the front of the envelope I talk about in the post below. The posters were ripped into smaller sections, and then painted on, and sewn together so you couldn't see the writing on them (now on the inside of the sewn together pages). FUN-FUN- FUN

PS. I would have liked to put both of these images on the same post, but couldn't figure out how with scanning the images to Picassa and blogging directly from there..... I continue to learn more and more each day - forever and ever I am sure... so maybe one day I will figure this out, but not today.

As I still don't have a camera, I am having a difficult time posting images of what I have been working on . This is a scanned image of the front of a booklet, and the back of an envelope I made. Both the booklet and envelope were made from old posters that were heading to be recycled. The quality of the paper was so nice, I just couldn't let it go to the recycling bin, and so I made a number of different things out of it. The inside pages of the booklet are blank, so I wrote a letter on them, put it in the envelope, and popped it in the mail to a friend. These are fun to make, and fun to send. I love getting mail that is personal.... not just bills and catalogs!