Possibilities -Pink Hibiscus

they are endless. Truly.

I have a body of work I have been collecting for years, I've played with web pages and sites and customized to my heart's content, and now it's coming together.

Seriously coming together...
like actually using digital techniques to play with the images more than I ever did. I would only crop or contrast or saturate. Now I'm playing with filters and smudges and stuff I never ventured to before. Designing cards and clothes around the images opens a whole new world, I never glimpsed for myself.

I don't know why I never did. There is a first time for everything, right?

So here's a hibiscus I played with. I am happy with the effect.
Different, changed, but still all mine.

I'm even keeping up this blog a bit more.

Who knows what will happen.

Coyote

Began last night, and finished this morning.

We went to the pow wow yesterday, and I finally got the burr in my paw to get that coyote out...it  has been howling inside of me for a few weeks now.

This is my very first finished oil pastel picture. I'm happy and now I need to get the turtles out. They have been much more patient. Like, years in the making.

Coyote

14' x 17'

oil pastel on heavy paper

And it can already be bought http://www.zazzle.com/coyote_poster-228803626482858529

How cool is that?!

Royalties

I have shut out.
For now... quit my steady job to take on students from the local community colleges, again.  It's okay, I love it. However, it is frightening to jump off when you have children to raise on your own.

I have to work extra hard, now. 

The students will trickle in.

My income will be constrained.

I discovered Zazzle. Well... I didn't discover it, but I was made aware. I was so excited, I forget now why I was there to begin with, or how I got there.

I have been painting and taking photographs for years with no feasible (make that free-sible) outlet to attract customers. Or at least without the knowledge of such places... for me, that is. You know... a nobody artist in a sea of nobody artists.  Mine eyes hath been opened.

Anyway, I have just plain stopped the presses of my doing for others, for the time being.

I'm working on my own repetoire.

Who knows... if everyone has been telling me the truth, and I DO have a good eye, a keen brush, and a sharp wit, I should be able to make a brilliant go at it.

I would link to the store, but as of now, the system has the storefronts whacked out, but the designs are out there.

Until then... I'm designing.

Mobile mantid

Checking my mobile settings with an 8x10 mantid work in progress.

It's eyes are a bit alien, I think, I'm not sure where that came from.  This is one part of a larger work with three canvases. It will show a food chain stalking in progress on three levels of canvas depth.

The entire work is based on my own observations. I watched a dragonfly stalk, catch and eat a fly... just a few hours later, I was watching a mantid on my front walk, suddenly, it reached out and grabbed a dragonfly clean out of the air, and gobbled it right down. It was a vicious and delicious fight.

The mantid held the dragonfly and ate it head-first, munching all the way down until it was holding nothing but wings. Wild.

My Sketching Palette

I've never kept a solid journal for longer than maybe four days.

But, now I hear that a way to stave off artist's block and procrastination is to keep an art journal. I looked over several examples, and decided to just dedicate what I have here to that end.

How about starting off with my favorite sketching palette, this is what I start every painting with, then add color as needed.

Burnt Sienna is what I sketch with and use to make black by mixing with the phtalo blue. I then make a greyscale with the white.

I like to sketch with a #4 or #5 round brush. The Burnt Sienna lends an earthy and real base for the shadows, and make a great jumping off place for the color when it comes.

Sketching with paint? Oh, yes. With oil paint, it is possible. It can be moved around in a way that pencils can't be moved, it can be erased...restarted...erased...restarted over and over again.

My first videos from the studio are coming soon. If you have EVER wanted to paint, but never tried, I want for you to try now. I don't care the plethora of reasons you can come up with to discourage your talent of self, just try it. I want to show you how.

Art is not pretentious, people make it so. Everyone is a natural artist, all that is needed is the basic set, an example to start with, and off you go.

It's the little things, like knowing you CAN erase an oil painting. Didn't you listen to what Bob Ross had to say?

'There are no mistakes in painting, only happy accidents'

Wood and Grimm

I had a flash of inspiration while I was looking at some of my older paintings. What is MY art journal for if not for recording MY quick thoughts before they slip away. From what I've seen, many people have art journals that are glorious examples of extended scrapbooking.

I hate scrapbooking. (in the new crafty sense, I used to have a scrapbook in the literal sense.)

I read the term 'art journal' when I set out to wrangle my societally induced adult ADD lifestyle and grab my potential by the horns to steer myself where I want to go. To get over my procrastinatory ways, I read I should keep a daily art journal.

I was thinking 'diary with drawings and clippings' then I searched 'art-journal' and I was instantly put off by the idea as it was presented. I kept reading it was supposed to be whatever I wanted, in whatever format.

I wanted online and digital, but I don't think my screen will take but so much paste.

So no pages of collage and decorative wordings. Mine is a diary, and some pictures. I need bones in my diet, and not so much meat. Meat I have... something to hold it up is called for now.

Inspiration flash... I make nice gnarly, woody, and dark. I love to catch expressions... In my mind I saw the expression of a Grimm style heroine peeking from behind a Black Forest tree, her wide eyes, her fingers pressing into the rough bark, the rough bark grabbing at her garb. What she sees is just barely reflected in her liquid and detailed eyes. Most viewers should not notice this until really looking at the painting's nooks and crannies.

This is what I saw when looking at one tiny detail of a completely unrelated painting.

This is what I mean by an art journal.

Ballard Peaches 16x20 oil on stretched canvas.

The peaches were picked off of the tree in my yard. A leftover from when the farm was a peach orchard and fruit stand.

Cojones

Just spit it out Sarah. Are you woman enough to take the balls out of your mouth?

No, I don't think so.

Is it somehow okay for this horrid wreck of a reality show whore to say out loud that the elected President doesn't have the Cojones for fill-in-the-blank.

Is it somehow okay because it is a foreign word... does it make it politically correct?

Go ahead, Sarah. Say it in English. Since it is the preferred language (nay, OFFICIAL language) of your darling posse party of tea leaf readers, go ahead...

Look him in the face and tell him HE doesn't have THE BALLS.

I dare you. Who has the biggest balls of them all?