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".