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.

Older Mother Earth Cards

my cards from September October. My best one is missing from here as I sent it out this afternoon without scanning it. DUH! But I hope to get a scan from the girl I sent it to. The pink on the cheeks isn't as garrish in person as it looks in the scan. My computer really skews pinks and purples. I love the way her hair turned out though. It's so not my typical hair. I stink at doing hair to make it look realistic.

Gaia/Mother Earth cards from today

Mother Earth cards I was working on today. I was sorting my cards for a swap and it sparked more ideas. So I sat down with my sharpies for the first time in almost three months. It was nice for a change. It's been so long and I was missing them something fierce. The Kuan Yin Gaia isn't done yet, still a work in progress. I think I'm going to try to translate some of these into paint at some point. I mailed off one of my older mother earth pieces, so I hope to get a scan of that from the person I sent it to. It was my favorite.

More Art Cards for SAC

I've been doing rather well with the challenge. I am however 210 cards lacking. Thankfully I have13 days to make that 210. Geez that's a lot of cards in 13 days. I hope to make a huge dent tomorrow. I'll be spending most of the day in art mode. I've got a few swaps to complete and some personal swaps. Then I'll be all caught up and can play at other things. My card goal for tomorrow is 25 cards. If I can do 25 cards or more, I'll be over the total card count I need to do daily to make my 300 mark by the end of october. So here is a picture of the 85 I have made thus far. These pictures don't count the 6 or 7 I completed tonight. This image above has my faux postage cards I did for a group swap I am in. I did two different ones. The star image in the center, and the little space man at the top. These cards are all original colored images. I had to make 9 of each. You can also see another of my kokeshi images. I'm thinking tomorrow I'll work on an alphabet set, and perhaps some fabric cards. It all depends on what I get done in the morning. I'm hoping to get my images done for an eyes swap. I have a few already, but need to do more. I also need to complete all my mother earth cards. I haven't completed mine yet as I wanted to do some research on differnt cultural ideals on "mother earth". Hopefully I can get some of that completed tomorrow as well.

A friend of mine (Rose..**waving**) has told me that I should enter a competition for a rubber stamping company. They are running a contest where you get the chance to win Designer for a stamp set for the company. I'm feeling a little leary about it, but might do it as it's just a bit uncomfortable and I'm beginning to find that when I feel that discomfort I need to jump in with both feet and break that comfort zone. I'm still not sure yet however.

My beginnings for SAC

I am participating in an art by the card event through Sharpie Scouts. I'm having a great time already.It's based loosely on the Art by the Inch challenge as we were all lamenting the fact that the site hasn't been updated in awhile and we thought we'd do our own little challenge. We decided to cut from the square inch idea and go with art by the trading card. We have different levels...and silly me picked the highest (i like a good challenge) I took the 300 card challenge. I need to make 300 atcs by the end of October. So far I'm not doing too badly sticking to my quota. I'll be trying to make extras tonight to give me a bit of a buffer incase I run into a glitch in scheduling time to do art. :) So here are ones I completed last night.
the birds are based on a theme week I am doing with a new art friend. We've decided to help inspire each other to art and the theme we agreed on for this week is birds. So I've been thinking birds lately. The kokeshi doll is just one of those things that pops up while you're randomly looking for things and then gets stuck in your head. I've got a few worked up that I haven't colored yet. I might be trying a fabric version soon or perhaps even a amigurumi version. This is an image of all 15 cards I did last night.

An image of Vincent Van Gogh as a child. I did this a few years ago for a Vincent swap.

KLIMT and Me

I've been working on self portraits this week and this one really grabbed me. Granted it doesn't look like me much, but i had fun doing it. I love Gustav Klimt. Especially his really detailed works. I patterned this after Judith 1. I love that picture.

Now I'm having a hard time parting with this one. I've made plenty for the portrait swap, ones that look more like me and less stylized. I'll probably hold onto this one for awhile.

I'm off today to spend time with my friend Lois. She and I have been having a great time getting together for art dates. We go to each others houses and sit and talk the day away and art. It's so much fun.

I'm thinking of taking more time to do Sharpie versions of Masterpieces. I had such a great time with that challenge for the Sharpie Scouts. I cannot wait to get my book! I'm so excited. Our fearless leader put a little full color zine out with submissions from the group. It looks really cool, but I can't wait to get my hands on it and pour through it! here are a few of the ones I did for the masterpiece swap.

Fab Sista finshed! ...FINALLY

I've been working on these little pins on and off for WEEEEEEEEEEEKS now. At first I couldn't get the felt to stick to itself. When that started happening, I thought "Well I can always hand sew every piece"....ugh..but the thoughts of that made me bored almost instantly. They worked out rather well in the end. When I started working on them I wasn't sure how many I was going to need. So I started 12 turned out I only needed four so now I have six extras (two were lost to appease the creative gods apparently ...small sacrifices that ended up in the great craft heaven in the sky) I think I'm going to dress them up with different dangle type earrings and maybe a cute bow or something in their hair and sell them on my etsy shop. They're really cute, don't you think?

Another mural for the Scouts

Did another mural. This one I had no problem slicing down. It looks really good even when it is cut. I've been trying to get caught up on all the swaps and deadlines I have. I just haven't felt in a big creative mood lately. I have a few digital swaps I have to finish up and get printed out, that part always makes me nervous. I can make something that looks amazingly wonderful on the computer screen and then I print it out and it's crap! Oh well I guess there's learning curves in all mediums.

These abstracts were done for Sharpie Scouts abstract swap. I love doing abstracts. I can do them so easily while watching tv at night. All of these are nothing but sharpie markers.

New Sharpie Art

Out of my love for turquoise and brown, I tried a little sharpie art to reflect that. It didn't work as I had hoped. The blue was too blue and not turquoise enough and the sharpie brown was too dark , while the crayola brown was too light. I'm going to have to try in acrylic as soon as I get my creative mess sorted out finally.

These were something new I tried. I found some photo stock for the printer for $1.00 on clearance at target. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but for a 1.00 my muse couldn't pass it by. I've found it's best not to argue with my muse, she can get bitchy and pouty like a little kid. Then she'll go into hiding for awhile. While it's hard to get the sharpie colors on close to each other without smudging them together, it made for some realy neat effects.

Then of course this silly swirl keeps bugging me and popping up in my art, so I figured I'd let it free and go with the flow. So here it is in two forms.

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This is a watercolor I did. I've got to work on profile eyes. For some reason mine always look too big, or deformed or something.

So now I'm currently working on some faux postage. It's not going as well as I had hoped. I'm having a bit of a problem reducing my image while keeping the image intact and viewable. **sigh** some day I'll get it.

New things for etsy

All this fun artwork went to my etsy store. They had the big crash and I figured it was time to get some more new artwork up. Unfortunately since they offered free listing, my stuff didn't stay on the front page long. That really stinks, so I'lll have to make some more and get myself up in lights once again. I don't have enough of a draw to the store yet and no one "hearts" me. Which is just being a favorite seller of someone's ...Oh well..I'll get there someday. ;)

More Old Works.

These are Animal Spirit atcs I did. I was in a swap where we were to take our animal guardians and make them into cards. I love little indian fetish animals and took my inspiration from those. I wanted to do a whole animal series like this and make up a deck of cards. I might still do so in the future. These have been traded away though. I'll have to start all over again. I enjoy the process though and I think I will have fun playing around with the ideas again. Coming up with interesting backgrounds to put with them and making them. These were done in colored pencil. I'm sure you can tell that though. You can see the pencil marks in the scan. I hate my scanner because it skews the colors to a certain degree. The purples turn out blue which really bothers me, but the blues stay blue...how strange is that. I'm going to have to work on sketches for these.

Some early Sharpie Artwork

The Fire Queen mask. I love masks and have made a bunch of different sharpie works in the mask theme. This one I found particularly fun to make. I tend to start with a basic mask shape and then slowly alter the shape until it inspires some sort of idea for the type of mask it would be. I do believe the gold in the background was gel pen, but I'm not exactly sure. That was three years ago.

Carrying on the mask theme...
Not one of my favorites..the Water Witch mask. I used a glossy stock and you can see the stroke marks. Glossy works on occasion, but this time didn't work at all.









This set of images was for a swap at nervousness. They are all sharpie works. I particularly loved the high priestess and the bottom two. They just worked out so well. I couldn't have been happier with the results I got . The top left and the bottom left cards are both done on glossy stock. This is an instance where the glossy stock worked well for me and really made the piece extra special. Here's a larger version of the High Priestess of Night card. A really nice piece of work with the color blending on the hat. Unfortunately the scan was a little darker than the actual piece was.


Twilight Beauty. I loved the way this one turned out. I was playing around the silouettes, and came up with this one. I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with it when i just had the pencil sketch. So I laid out the purple background first, thinking that would direct what i wanted to do. Boy did it ever! From the purple background I got the feeling of the night sky and constellations. So Twilight beauty ended up being a constellation.

SHARPIE ARTWORKS

The Item I sold on ETSY

This is the card I sold on ETSY. I play around with patter on patterns all the time with my sharpies. I can't wait to hear what the person has to say when they receive it! I'll be so happy when they do!