Thursday, May 26, 2011

forgetful me

 

forgetful me
quote from Ghandi, as seen on bemorewithless.com
 
 As I am trying to do more and more on my own, I have a tendancy to get pretty frustrated and I stop enjoying the process.

Take, for instance, my painting class.  I've quite enjoyed taking Samantha daSilva's class at the Calgary School of Art.  And I've quite enjoyed playing around with canvases here in my studio.  But now comes the time to post the canvases on Etsy and get them ready for sale.

sigh

Maybe other people don't find this so hard, but with all the taking of photos and cropping the photos to the right size, and adding in the copyright declaration in the right spot, ... etc. etc. etc.  It gets to me after a while.

Now don't get me wrong!  I love working for myself and having the luxury of doing it all my own way.  I just lose sight of that from time to time.  And so I hopped on to Twitter this afternoon, and somehow or another found my way to http://www.bemorewithless.com/ and saw the lovely quote she had there.  And I knew I had to do something fun with it.  The font is LD Underwood 5, the birds are brushes 'Birds of a Feather', and the tickets and labels are from Fidget Resources.  The painting is, of course, my own - now digitally altered.

Feels good to do something creative as a break.

Saturday, May 21, 2011


I've been working on getting all the paintings I've been working on covered with the varnish, signed, named... and then there's the pricing and the uploading to Etsy.  I'm getting there.  The 'process multiple images' in Photoshop kinda made the copyright a tad bit large, so I think I have to re-do that in short order.

Here is what I've discovered in the process - making the art is really fun.  All the other stuff is not as much fun.  It's satisfying to do all the varnishing, naming, taking the photos, posting on FaceBook and Etsy - but nothing is really as much fun as the painting itself.  Pouring the blue on this canvas, after I'd let a dark orange/red dry, and then adding the white - that was fun.  The way it all moved and formed little waves and peaks and valleys - that was fun.  The alcohol dripped onto the surface to burn through the water in the paint - that was fun.

Dang it!  Now all I want to do is go and paint some more instead of what I 'should' be doing.  (sigh)

Maybe tomorrow.

ah.  That's a better sized copyright note.

Friday, May 6, 2011

something borrowed

So nice to have a camera again!!!!!  My sister has loaned me her old Canon until I can gather up enough cash to get the 60D.  That will be a while.

Caught my sister's kids in action on Easter Sunday (What, you don't associate water guns and Easter?  What's wrong with you?)

My visit down to MN was a little less than fabulous - my sister got thrush and I got a hell of a cold.  So not much got accomplished.  Although we did watch a bit of the Royal Wedding, and I managed to get to Blick Art Supply.  I could drop a lot of cash there if I lived in the area.  Alas, I'm back in the Land of Snow.  Although it seems to be warming up enough to actually rain, which would be great if just a great big downpour happened to clean everything up.

On the art side of things, next week is the last class in Level 1 Abstract Acrylics with Samantha daSilva, which will be kinda sad, but I've signed up for 4 days of her class in Red Deer in July - should be great!
I have a lot to learn, and have a great time trying all the techniques out.  This one is (I think) 24 x 36.  The tough part is naming them after I'm done.