A Merry Christmas to All!!

Well, the long-anticipated and stressed-over time of the month is upon us. We'll be traveling quite a bit between Christmas and New Years, so I wanted to write a blog post of seasonal cheer before the madness starts. Sadly, I have no pictures of art to post, due to holiday preparations and such. Since my last post, I have managed do some of the things on my Christmas checklist. Jon and I have been busy watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas, making batches of Christmas cookies and playing Skyrim and Skyward Sword. (Ok, so the last two aren't actually Christmas-related, but still, a good bit of festiveness going on.) It took me up till this point to get all my presents and most of my projects in order, but I think I should be set to kick back and spend time with my family. I really do love this time of year; its a good chance to be thankful for the things you have, the people you love and, of course, to remember that God was born as a tiny human so that He could eventual save us all.

In writing news, I did manage to finish a second draft of my story. It still needs lots of work, but I promised my mom she could read it over Christmas break, so hopefully it's a little more presentable now. I'm looking forward to having another test-reader; up to this point it's just been Jon and my friend Lauren. I'll be curious to see what Mom thinks of what I have so far.

And so, I bring this post to a close: A wondrous Holiday season to you all, whatever you happen to be celebrating, and may the New Year bring you much joy and contentment.

My lethargic Christmas Spirit

 I finally managed to post on a sunny day!!! Here is my newly finished creation.

I'm calling it "What are you look'n at?"

As far as the rest of my life, I'm getting by. I made Christmas ninjas earlier this month! (The one that looks black is really green, I just have a bad camera.) I think they turned out super cute!! ^_^

Other than that though, I've been procrastinating on my usual Christmas rituals. For some reason, I haven't really been in the mood. Here are some of the things I still need to do:

1. Read A Christmas Carol. I try and read A Christmas Carol every year in December. There are a billion movie versions of this story, but nothing beats the original. Dickens' descriptions of London at Christmas time are always so much fun to read. If you've never actually read this book, I highly recommend you give it a try. It's a bit hard to follow, but well worth the effort in the end.

2. Watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas (The animated one, just for clarification). This is probably my favorite Christmas movie ever; I have to make sure I watch this at least once, or it won't feel like Christmas. While I out grew most of the other kid's Christmas movies, I'll never be too old for the Grinch. I'll probably still be watching this when I'm 82.

3. Make Christmas cookies. My mom didn't make cookies too often when I was growing up, but she always had a few recipes she'd make at Christmas time. My favorites are Spritz, a butter almond cookie with a cinnamon red hot in the middle; Jolly Jelly Thumbprints, another butter cookie with jelly in the center and Gingerbread cookies. She also had this family recipe called Von Sprecken Specials (named after my great-grandma), which are a spice cookie with bits of orange zest in them.

4. Listen to Trans Siberian Orchestra. I actually have been doing this one. I have an entire Pandora radio station devoted to this group and other things like it. Occasionally I get some non-Christmas soundtrack stuff. Things like selections from Halo or Tron Legacy, but they're usually super epic sounding, so I don't mind.

5. Watch White Christmas. This is another favorite of mine. (I'm pretty sure all the Christmas movies I like were made at least 20 years before I was born.) It's not as well-known as It's a Wonderful Life or Miracle on 34th St, which are also good movies, but I still love it. 

Add to that list all the Christmas present projects I need to finish, which is like, 6 or 7, and you can see I have a lot to get done before December 25th. In fact, I should probably get off the computer and start working on them right now!

sincerely,

me

It's finished!! (Sort of)

As you might recall, I've mentioned a few times that I've been working on a story for the past few months. Well, I am pleased to announce that on Friday the 3rd of December, I finished the first draft. This is actually a bigger deal than you'd think because, as I've also probably mentioned, I've never gotten to the end of anything this big before. After giving myself a day or two to take a step back from what I'd written (which only kind of worked), I read it all the way through for the first time. Fortunately, my worst fears were not confirmed and I didn't absolutely hate everything I'd written, another problem that has plagued me for years. Reading through 28 pages was exhausting and there's plenty of work that needs to be done, but I fairly confident I'm off to a good start. Unfortunately, blogging about the writing process is not quite as interesting as looking at pictures, so I included a sketch that expresses my current state of mind.

I know, it's not a very good sketch. The sad thing is that I had a hard time getting even that to look acceptable. Anyhow, my art production has slowed way down do to this other preoccupation, but don't worry, I'll have some more stuff up soonish. (I hope.)

Seeing as how I'm starting to seriously pursue writing, I'm going to look into some ways to share some of the stuff I'm working on in this blog. I have a few other novel ideas I want to start on, plus the editing work I'm doing for this story and some other pieces of short prose. Who knows, I might even chuck in a bit of poetry for good measure, if I ever come up with anything good. Poetry is one area I'm interested in playing with, but know nothing about. 

sincerely,

me

Collages and more rain

Two collages I finished recently. Although you can't tell by the pictures, the second one is actually a lot smaller than the first. 

Collage is on odd process; sometimes it takes forever to develop a good composition, and other times, all the pieces come together as soon as you put them down. These two are the latter, but I have this other collage that I've been at for days and I'm still not happy with it. 

It's raining again. I always seem to post things on rainy days. My mood's a little better this time, although I still feel kinda lazy and dull. But Thanksgiving is coming soon and I look forward to yummy food and seeing family. This year we're having Thanksgiving with Jon's family and I'm making pies! (From scratch of course, I don't hold to this store bought pie and pie crust nonsense!)

Well, hope you all have a weekend full of thankfulness and good food! 

sincerely,

me

Watercolor/collage portrait and mood music

I finally finished the watercolor/collage portrait of Jon. It only took like forever! Here it is.

I'm pretty pleased with it. The colors look a little funny in some of the picture, but weather is rainy today, which makes the lighting kinda bad. I promise it looks better in real life.

Not gonna lie, I'm having kind of a moody day. Everything beautiful is extra beautiful and everything bad is extra disturbing. The grey skies aren't doing much to improve the situation.  Funny how rainy days can be either peaceful and comforting, or depressing.

Currently, I'm choosing to deal with my emotions by giving them some good rainy day type music. Coldplay, which I'm listening to at the moment, is really good for this. My playlist also includes a bit of Enya, Josh Groban (mostly the songs he sings in different languages), a little Imogene Heap and this neat music project called PICTURE SHOP (which I highly recommend checking out if you like artsy, soundtrack style music) I learned long ago that oftentimes, it's better not to force yourself to feel happy when you're not. Usually, if you give yourself permission to be sad or moody if that's how your feeling, your emotions work themselves out on their own. This isn't a universal rule, of course, but it does work a lot of the time.

So go ahead, have a bad day if you need to! I give you permission!

sincerely,
me

10 Random things about me!

Hello!

Thought it might be fun to share a few interesting facts about myself.

1. I am of the opinion that chop sticks are vastly superior to forks. Not only are they good for Chinese food and sushi, but also for things like pop corn, chips and taco salad!

2. I am a Christian, which basically means I have a relationship with God. It's no where near perfect, but that's ok. My faith, like the rest of my life, is a work in progress.

3. I didn't see the Lion King till I was 17. (I know, I had a deprived childhood.) Still cried when Mufasa died, if that counts for anything.

4. While I favor conservative/independent ideals, I believe the American government needs both the political right and left wing to maintain a healthy balance. I just wish it was easier for both side of exchange constructive ideas instead of insults.

5. I greatly dislike hot dogs, baloney and American cheese.

6. I was homeschooled for Kindergarten to 11th grade and then when to a Christian school for my senior year of high school.

7. In addition to being afraid of normal things, like spiders, I have a bizarre and distinct phobia of The Little Shop of Horrors. Intelligent, talking, man-eating plants give me the willies!!!

8. Whenever I start a new journal or sketchbook, I always leave the first page blank.

9. I put pickles on my tacos and didn't realize till college that pickles are not considered standard taco toppings. (Which is totally ridiculous, because pickles taste fabulous on tacos!)

10. When my husband proposed to me, he gave me a ring, a pine cone and a 175-page fantasy story he'd written himself.

So there you have it; a few unique facets of my life. Hope you found them interesting!

sincerely,
Me

New Watercolors

I finally have some new art to show. Here are four small watercolors I've been working on. 

Autumn Glory

Blackbird

The confrontation

The meeting

Since my recent posts have been all words and no pictures, I figure this one can be mostly pictures and few words. 

sincerely,

Me

Blue self portrait

It seems that I managed to go the entire month of September without blogging. How did that happen, you ask? Well, as it happened, I only intended to skip the first week of September. Jon and I went to visit some college friends in Ohio and had a super fabulous time. We went to the Cincinnati Art museum, the Ohio Renaissance Festival and a little hippie town with lots of fun shops! We also spent plenty of time hanging out, playing games and eating food. It was wonderful to see everyone and I started missing them as soon as I got home.  Shortly after arriving home, our computer decided it was sick of being alive and bit the dust. We decided that, rather than buy a brand new computer which we couldn't afford, we would buy the required parts and bring our old computer back from the dead. The parts took several days to arrive and when we finally got them in the computer, it still wouldn't work. Several things were tried and failed, then retried and failed again. Having run completely out of ideas, Jon took the computer to a small computer repair shop and the guy there got it to work. Thus concludes my woeful tale of computer troubles and the reason why my last post was August 29th. 

Alright, enough talking! Onward to art!!!!!!! Here is a recent "experimental" self portrait. 

Not going to lie, I love the way it turned out!!!!!! It's watercolor/collage hybrid. If you look closely at the pictures below, you can see little bits of torn magazine integrated into the picture. 

This next one was also an experiment. 

It's pretty different from my "typical" collage technique. I tried to go for something that felt more like an object and less like an image. I think they have a kind of topographical quality. (Sorry the photos have a bit of a glare. They were already framed when I photographed them and it would've been a huge pain to get them back out again.) I recently submitted these to a local art show, but sadly, they were not accepted. When my husband went to pick them up, the lady there told him that she loved the pieces themselves, but didn't like the frame. Go figure? I was a bit annoyed, but also pleased that my artwork hadn't been the offending factor. 

Well, I've gone on long enough.  Have wonderous beginning of October!

Full sketchbooks, hurricanes and birthdays

These are the last three pages in the sketchbook I was working on. I actually worked all the way to the last page, which is unusual for me. Normally I have at least 20 some blank pages at the end that I never got around to filling. I wonder if anyone else does that. I also always leave the first page blank, like the first few pages of a book. I do that with my journals too. Anyway, on to pictures.......

Kinda morbid, I know, but it turned out nice. I'm usually pleased with the results of my depressed sketches. Plus, I usually feel better afterwords. 

I guess this is the first "self portrait" I've posted. I was playing with a cartoon/caricatured style, which I want to develop some more. I look like I'm twelve or something, but that's actually kind of accurate to how I feel at times. 

And here's one of my husband, Jon. He really does like his swords! :-)

Oh, and remember how I mentioned I was cleaning my studio? Well here's what it looked like before I started.

I really wish I could say it doesn't get this bad very often, but that wouldn't be very truthful. However, after a few days spent almost entirely cleaning the studio, it looked like this....

Tada!!!! Isn't it beautiful. You can see the floor and everything! ^_^ Grant you, it's not quite that clean at the moment, but let's not focus on that part.

In other news, my birthday was yesterday!!! I'm kind of ignoring the fact that I'm a whole year older now than I was before. I guess everyone does that at some point. My husband and I were going to go to the Philadelphia art museum to celebrate, but Hurricane Irene decided to come and visit instead. We ended up camping out at my husband's parent's house where we all had cupcakes and watched "Up," one of my favorite Pixar movies. The storm didn't really hit us too hard, fortunately. It took a few trees down and flooded some areas, but it was nowhere near as bad as some other places (for which I'm very thankful). Jon and I came home Sunday afternoon and finished the day out with our favorite parts of Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 (also on my list of best movies ever). It was a pleasant, laid-back birthday, which was fine by me. And what, you might ask, was my favorite present? Volumes 3-9 of the graphic novel series Bone!!!!!!!! They're my favorite graphic novels and I now own the complete set in color!!!! ^_^

Watercolor, mixed media, etc.

Well, its been about a week since my last post, so I should probably put some more stuff up. Here are some studies/experiments with watercolor mostly. 

This one is base on some eye shadow ads. I love painting eyes.

This project was inspired by a bunch of left over thread from some sewing projects. (Probably should have pitched the threads, but that's aside the point.) I wanted to see if I could do something more abstract and this is where I ended up. Not sure if this is an area I'll end up developing, but it was fun to play around with something different. 

These are some sketches and studies of a creature called a pangolin in preparation for a larger project. I'll be posting about that little adventure soon. 

Like I said, love painting eye make-up. 

A few gesture drawing of our gerbils. I should really do some more of them sometime, but the little ladies are so fast that they're kind of tricky to draw. 

Most of this stuff is a few months old, but I wanted to get it up here before I start adding new art. I have a few projects going and hopefully they'll be ready to show soon. I'm also in the process of clean/reorganizing my studio, so I'm trying not to work on too many things till that's finished. 

Sketchbook pages 1

Seeing how this is an art blog and all, its high time it had some art! So I'll start out with a few sketchbook pages! 

My husband playing his guitar. 

This is one of those "wow-this-turned-out awesome-totally-by-accident!" kind of sketches. I based it off of the outfit I was wearing that day. Maybe someday I can be this cool on purpose. :-)

Ya, I was having a rotten day when I drew these two. They turned out pretty nice though. 

 Generally, the stuff I draw that's made up isn't usually too good. That being said, I think this cow looks great for something I drew without any reference.

This one turned into a shading study. Just in case you can't read my sloppy cursive, I wrote "red shoes or  angry yelling men".