More custom fairy names almost complete.

I've been back to work now for a little over a month. It's put a bit of damper on my creative mojo. I seem to be finding little snippets of time to slide in a bit here and there, but not anything link the time I'd like to be spending. Now with the holidays fast approaching, my spare time, what little I have, has dwindled down to almost nothing. Not that I haven't been trying to find time to make some art in some form or shape.

I spent most of last weekend doing cookies for a cookie exchange. I wanted to plan one for my family this year, but didn't have the where-with-all to get it under way. However I stumbled upon one someone else was hosting. Now I've got 7 or 8 dozen cookies, and only had to bake one kind, instead of the 8 different kinds. That's nice! I have other things I want to make, but don't know if I'll find the time to get them completed. I made butterscotch cheesecake bars for the cookie exchange. I didn't do them with nuts as a few of the people I was exchanging with had nut allergies in their household. So I plan to make an extra batch of them with cashews .. mmmmmm

I'll be posting a few of the last custom fairy ornament orders that went out in the next day or so. I loved the way they turned out and can't wait to have some time to make more. I've got a bunch of things to list on etsy and artfire, but I need to get some sort of prelisting file or something to get everything ready and then just drop and paste things into the upload boxes.

I'm hoping to start selling more of the custom fairy names too. I just ADORE doing them, they're so fun. I think for Valentine's day I'll be making a few special Love ones to post and sell.

Custom Fairy orders

I've been working on custom fairies like crazy these last couple of weeks. Here are a few of the ones that have gone out. Lots of pink and purple this year. I usually do a lot of different colors, but this year seems to be mostly pink and purple...and straight pink and purple...not a mix of colors. I really like how these all turned out though.
This one needed red hair. So instead of doing the typical "red" hair red..I did a lovely shocker red and russet color. It turned out LOVELY. I usually have a standard red for red-heads, but I'm really glad I mixed it up this time.

This one was all pink. I needed a bit of a break up of the color though so put on lovely crystal green shoes and some green bows in her hair. She's a pin. Not the standard ornament. I need to get the other pins I have completed listed. They're just sitting here waiting for pictures and editing.
This one was requested to look like a fairy I had made before. She liked it so well she was hoping I could recreate it almost exactly. I got pretty close. The only difference was the hair (it's impossible to do the hair exactly the same anyway) because she wanted two buns, and the color of the star on the ring on the original was purple. The other thing I did was put an overlay of pink over the melon colored shirt. It looks like a little raglan t-shirt with different colored sleeves. Other than those three differences it's pretty much the same.

I missed taking photos of a few of the others that have gone out, and have two that still need photos taken before they're shipped off.

I LOVE doing custom fairies for people. It's fun to make something special for someone. Now I'm off to do some work on the last few Custom fairy names I need to finish so I can get them out this week.

Black and White Zentangles

I've been working on Zentangles again. I love these because they're very easy for me to tote around and work on in little bits and pieces. These are a few pieces I've done for a swap recently and I found them a bit hard to pass on. I love henna/mehndi designs and was inspired by them for some of the art in these pieces.

This piece here reminds me a little bit of lace. Well the top design does, but not necessarily the rest of it. I love to do these sorts of images and then do washes of watercolor over the top. It adds that little bit of extra pop to it. I've also done things like this in the past where I've then added blended sharpie over the top. I'll have to dig through my past art files and see if I can find any of those older pieces. A lot of those are from about 14 or so years ago and I don't know if I was scanning things at the time or not.


I think this piece is a little too higgelty piggilty. Too much going on and not enough contrasting design work. It just doesn't seem to flow as well as the other pieces. I think my next attempt will be to do a larger zen piece and then dice it into atc size, or even 2x2 squares. I'll have to see how to work it out and exactly what I want. Atcs would be ideal.
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I loved the way this one turned out. I started with the little round in the corner and was going to work it outward in shapes, but liked the round effect so just continued on with it. It reminds me of the medallions around light fixtures on ceilings, or a fancy carved wall hangings.

For the rest of the weekend I'll be working to finish up a few more custom fairy names, and a few custom fairy orders. I'm amazed at how quickly Christmas is sneaking up on me. I guess that's what happens when you go back to work. Time flies and you seem to get less and less done.

Keep watching! I'll be posting a few of the newest custom fairy ornaments and pins I've done this past few weeks. I'll also be loading a lot of new fairies in my artfire shops.

Time Flies!

Well here it is, nearly midnight again. I've been back to work now for a few weeks. Needless to say, I've got to get better at the juggling act. I once had it down, little snippets of time here and there to really make a dent in art/crafting. Now, not so much. The sad thing is I really need the creative time. My head is so much clearer after a good creative dumping of my brain. Even if it's just five minutes of mindless sketching, I feel better.

Tomorrow it's off to work in the later afternoon. I've never been one for working at night. Night is when I really come alive and want to create. If I were sleeping like a "non-mom" I'd have no problem running myself until around 3 and popping into bed for a few hours to awake and go about my day. Now I pop myself in and out of bed at two to three hour intervals as my son reverse cycles since I'm back to work.

I do have a bunch of crafty images to upload of new things and the custom fairies I've done this past week, but I need to edit the images and all that happy stuff, so instead I leave you with a few random images from my trip to our local lake this past year.

New Art

YAY! I've gotten more art done in the last couple days that I have in a long time! I'm so excited. It's nice to be on the other end of the busy train for once and being able to tune in to my creative muse is helping to clear my head. I actually think I'm becoming more inspired as I get back into the art thing. Art therapy is GOOD!
So here are things that I worked on this week. Just think, I'll be pulling out the paints soon!
I am doing a swap and needed five post cards and based on the profiles these are four of the five that I have tailored to their specific "likes". Two of the swappers love recycled paper, or interesting papers. Anyone who knows me knows that I do know usually do "collage" or "scrapping" type artwork. I love the results people get with it, but it just doesn't jive with my brain. So these two cards are what I came up with from my box of random paper "junque".














then I broke out my favorite sharpies and went to town. One girl likes crows, and I've done a lot of crow art in the past. I dreamed this idea last night and just had to see how it would turn out. I kind of like the results. I didn't do it exactly how I had dreamed it, but I was just doing a trial run to see if I liked the end product. I think I'll be trying it with other things.

and the last of my entries for tonight as it's really late and I promised myself I was going to be in bed early tonight **snicker** Another sharpie piece. This based on the fact that the person liked blues and greens. I'm always happy slapping a lot of sharpie onto a nice slice of vellum bristol! It's like a runners high. Well ok, the fumes might have something to do with that, but I don't even notice them anymore. I've been working with sharpies for far too long. So here's the piece, it's a little bit nature a little bit abstract.



I guess being completely sleep deprived over the last few day's might be a good thing. I think it's forced my brain to think outside of the box. I took on the challenge of writing a techniques feature on the Passion for Painting Guild Blog. That's going to force me to try things I wouldn't have otherwise done. I'm kind of excited about it all!

So, for now, I turn in for the night. I'm hoping to get a really nice night's sleep...though I might have to wait until Thursday for that. I'm thinking tomorrow just might be a good day for a late afternoon nap while Val's down for his nap. NIGHT ALL!

Creations from the week

Here are some things I've done this week!


Zentangle-esque bookmark. This was the first I made, then lost, then found again. I did a second to replace the first one but as always, the first one was nicest.
Well I guess looking at them both close together... they're both nice in their own way. The first one I did based around a henna design idea. I love mehndi, it's such a gorgeous artform. I've done a few images in my own mehndi style. I'm getting a bit better each time I do it.. I'd love to atually try doing it with real henna sometime, but that's a whole other beast. For now I'll stick to my sharpies.

Speaking of my Sharpie addiction: Here's a sharpie piece I did yesterday.

I did this piece intending to send it off for a swap that's due in December. I decided instead to send it to my friend's mother-in-law. She's battling cancer for the second time and going through chemotherapy again. I figured something so bright and cheery just might make her day.

Then I've been getting back into atcs again! HELLO atcs! It's been so long my friends. I was in a totoro swap and did a little white totoro atc. That's the other piece of art that disappeared a few days ago and I had to make a replacement for. So this is my replacement piece:
He turned out pretty cute I think. My other one was a bit better if I remember correctly, but i could be totally wrong.

YAY! Now all I have to do is break out the paints for the painting guild and I'll be on a roooooolllllll!

I'm running a SALE!!

Well Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approaches. I thought I'd take the time this year to offer a coupon and have some fun! Here's your chance to save on those fairy names and custom fairy ornaments! You have until the end of the month (if you're within the United States) to order your fairy names to have them in time for Christmas. Don't miss your chance for fantastic savings on original personalized art!

Visit ViridianMuse's Studio

SAVE 15.00 % On
All Items

Use Coupon Code:

FAIRYGOOD

during checkout.

Handmade Christmas

Custom fairy Special Order 1 down 5 more to go

I finished my first custom fairy order from last weekend today. It turned out really cute. I really love doing these, and these next few are particularly special. I'm modeling them after the girls they're going to! How fun is that?

So this is my first of the six that were ordered. I don't normally do colored eyes, but figured I'd try them out for this one. I'm letting her mom decide if she wants to keep them green, or make them black like most of my fairies eyes usually are.

She's got the most gorgeous red hair and I'm hoping I've done well in capturing the beauty of it in all it's fiery red auburn gloriousness. Most of the time when I do red headed fairies, they're cartoon-y red and funky. I like it that way, don't get me wrong, I think it's fitting with the whimsical style of my art. This one is an attempt to make it a bit more "real"


She's also got silver lined shoes! That's new in my fairies. I don't know what possessed me to give her silver soles, but I did it. I'm now thinking over the multi-colored names I've been doing and wondering if I should just start making the names in all one color, or just straight black so they really stand out. I think the multi-color is fun, but it tends to not POP off the page like I'd like. While the fairies are the central art, the name is what makes it special. I think I'll pose this question to my fb page and see what the consensus is on which people would prefer.

Finally some creation time!

Things are starting to hit a predictable ebb and flow here. Valor still has his days ( like today) where napping seems almost non-existent and I'd been up most of the night with him. Days like today are when the art time comes in and soothes the stress or anxiousness.
Thankfully I've got a lot of custom fairies to work on. I'm hoping once I get them all colored in, the pencil sketches are already done, I'll be able to draw some more sales from the 6 I just had. More variety in names, and coloring I think will help.
Here are the pencil sketches, granted they're really light. They turned out really cute! The fun thing is, of the 6 images, 4 are modeled slightly after darling little girls. The hair styles and skin coloring, once colored in, will be a perfect match. I also like customizing the colors to match the girls favorite colors.
Here's a few close up shots of them:

VALOR ARRIVES!

We've been awaiting our little man for many months. My pregnancy was a beautiful experience! Other than having extra testing and monitoring due to an existing health condition I truly had a wonderful, problem free pregnancy. It was a true joy, from the very beginning when we found out to the very end of it all. I did 12 hours of labor after being induced and ended up not making any progress which resulted in a c-section. It wasn't the way I wanted things to go, but apparently nature had other plans. It was exhausting, thrilling, and at some moments disgusting (I ended up vomiting about 5 times, including once on the O.R. table NOT FUN) The end result was well worth it all!

Baby belly and the gals!

Here's a picture of me, my mother and sisters and sisters-in-law.

The Artist's Continuum Chunky Book Project

The artist trading card group I hostess is starting out a year+ adventure into Chunky Books. We tried to do a small book with just a few members involved and it turned out so tiny it should be called a thin book. We had a good time doing it, but it was a bit disappointing when the end result is only 4 pages long. So we've decided to do a continuous chunky book. We're doing a round cd shaped book that we're going to continue to add to over the year. We're picking a color every couple of months and then have a month to get our pages done and put together. The first time we're getting together to punch the pages and start out the book is in November. This is mainly due to the fact that the baby is due next month and I want to be sure I have plenty of time to get into a routine with him before I start crafting regularly again. I'm very excited about this new creative venture and hope it turns into a great project and group.

I'm still working on finishing things for the gallery before the upcoming birth too. They've been minus my work for so long that I hope I haven't lost my place. Things around here have been incredibly crazy and insane, but I'm trying to bulk up on lots of wares so that they don't run out right away.

FInally back on the creative trail!

Well it's happened finally. I finally felt up to doing some creative work on fairies and getting stuff ready for the gallery. It's been so long since I've felt like doing anything. Since November when my mother-in-law passed away I've been feeling a bit dark and heavy and creative things, while part of my daily life, only kept me occupied for minutes at a time.

Now I'm back to working on fairy ornaments and getting them ready for the gallery. With this big batch I did in the last couple of days I just might have enough to keep some for the online venues and I can refresh my stores finally! The fairies are still a work in progress but at least I'm doing something constructive finally! It sure feels good. After this I have to tackle my sweater animals. I've got a stack of fulled sweaters just awaiting a bit of personality and then they too can head off to the gallery! They sold out of my last batch in a few weeks and have been wanting more for awhile.

New Fairy Name Art..

YAY! I've got new name art in the works. These are turning out so adorable. I cannot wait to work on more and come up with some boy themed art as well. Here are the two names completed last week. I've got about three more in the works and will be posting them as well. I feel the single fairy is much more adorable than the older versions I'd done with simple block lettering and a scattering of fairies. These just seem to have so much more personality! I can't wait to have people request more so that I can get to work on them. I'm hoping some people will go crazy and get ones with funky colored hair not just your standard blond, brunette or redhead.



These were made for a set of twins. What fun! I can just imagine them in their room.