I did this piece after trying out the technique for Try It Tuesday. Check it out if you're looking to learn new techniques. It's going to be a blast. This was the first technique to be featured. I missed the entry for the contest by about 15 mintues (DOH) but that's ok ..It was still fun learning something new. This was basically three washes of acrylic on canvas board. I put a great canary yellow down first. It's barely visable after the last two layers. Then I washed over the bottom layer with a turquoise blue/green color. Then lastly I put on a minight blue and spritzed with water and blotted it off. It turned out ok, but not like some of the amazing pieces I saw on the flickr group for Try It Tuesday. I did another one in oranges and red, but haven't done anything with it yet. I'm not quite sure if I'm going to sketch over it like I did with this canvas, or make it a more multi-media /collagey piece. I haven't done collage in a long time, but dread digging out the large box of stuff i have to get into it.

So Try something new and check out Try it Tuesdays....you never know, you just might win ;) http://tryittuesdays.wordpress.com/

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.

Another mural atc set that isn't.

Another piece that was to be cut into atcs...but again can't bring myself to do it. For some reason the scan came out way darker than the actual picture in some spots. and the yelllow bird isn't NEON. I just realized that my cardinal looks like he has a mohawk.

Here it is, three am and I'm still awake. I'm just now starting to feel the droop of a night of burning the midnight oil ...errrr..wait..burning the candle at both ends? Is that the right phrase I was looking for??Anyway............this is what I spent my evening on. I've been up since 7:am yesterday morning from which I had very little sleep. I think tomorrow I'll be sleeping in. I'm participating in a mural swap at the sharpies group. The Queen of hearts is a 6 atc mural (which is shown here uncut) I'm very happy with the way it turned out. I think once it is sliced apart into it's various sections, it'll still have apeal even pieced.
This piece should be cut into four pieces, though I can't quite decide what I want to do with it. I started out with the intention of putting it in for the mural swap, but since it won't fit into a 9 pocket trading card page without separating one piece from the grouping, it's kind of silly to send it in. I know that when the dear hubby is up, and I won't be running the risk of waking him up with the incredibly loud scanner, I'll be scanning it in to put into my cafepress shop. I think this would make a lovely tshirt and if I scan it right, perhaps even a small framed print. I don't know though....guess my brain is foggier than I thought. :) Well I should really think about heading to bed at some point before I hit the 24 hours awake mark. I'm starting to revert back to old sleeping patterns and that's not a good thing for me. Sure, I get some killer art done, but at the cost of my own health, it hardly seems worth it, oh plus the fact that it drives my dear man totally nuts. He's so sweet that he says he can't sleep when I'm not in bed (inset cuteness sigh from the viewers...either that or the typical gag response my sisters have) Nighty night all! I'll be posting someo f the other random cards I made tonight, soon.

Check My New Magnet Sets!

Here they are! My latest creations! I love doing marble magnets and finally decided that I'd try selling some with my art attached to the back. I have a ton that have the typical magazine clippings attached to the back. I'm hoping to get some better way to tranfer bits of art to print and get copied. I love doing hand drawn things and making them slightly differnt each time, but it's a bit time consuming. Not that I mind the time consuming part, but I'd like to be able to produce a horde to sell. I'm hoping to go craft showing this year. There's a first time for every thing I guess. We'll see what happens. :)

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.

alice

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.

The mask I did for the trade on SP. I like the way it turned out. I had a different idea when I first started, but love the way this turned out instead. I was originally just going to leave it full florals and hold them on by eyelets, but I love the way this looks so full with the florals pulled apart and glued down. It just seems more natural.

My first oil painting in years! I love the blendibility of it but have hard time not smearing it. I'm getting better at holding my hand away from the canvas though. This is 16 x 20.

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. ;)

My Hearts chunky book pages.

I did these pages for a chunky book. Took me awhile..but I'm happy with the results.

I did this while taking a break from the chunky book pages I was working on tonight. I'm quite happy with it and have named it Tumultuous Love. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing to do with it just yet. It's not quite as vibrant as the picture suggests. That's the only bad thing about scanning watercolor. I think it turned out lovely though. Should I sell it? Should I keep it? Should I give it away? I'm undecided...................................

I love this piece. I loved it so much I had to turn it into clothing on my cafe press shop. My mother (my biggest fan) Told me she'd like to see it on a mug, so I took it to cafe press and made a mug for her. I then decided to put it onto shirts so I could wear it. I've since worn out two shirts with it on. I'm on my third one and it's looking a little worn. Squiggles show up a lot in my art. I find it fun to scribble for hours at a time making art like this. It relaxes me and makes me happy.





This is a sketch I did for an illustration class I took about four years ago. We had to pick a theme and base all of our artwork around the theme we choose. I did it on poor quality paper unfortunately. You can tell in the background especially, there's a roughness to the stroke marks that is a bit childish. I liked how she turned out. My other pieces are large, three canvas pieces (not pretty. I was still very new to painting people ) and about three pen and ink pieces. My pen and ink pieces turned out well, though they have no background and look a bit bare.










The Moon Queen. One of my most favorite pieces. She's done in Sharpie marker and gel pens. I've found I do a lot of "star gazers" and I'm not quite sure why. They just seem to flow from me. Usually when doing a giant bunch of cards, I tend to turn out at least one star gazer in the grouping.




Celia, made for a swap on a group I'm in. It was a things with wings swap and I did all sorts of things. Angels, pigs with wings, even a cow.

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.

Looking over past works

I was cleaning today and found a disc with old art files on it. This was before we had the giant hard drive crash and I lost a lot of my saved artwork. That was a giant loss for me! So much artwork that I have sent out into the world, lost in a few minutes to a hard drive crash! That really makes you realize the value of backing up your PC. **sigh** lessons learned... So here are some of my older works.

I did this braclet for a trade with someone. I had no idea what size to make it. It was suppose to be an anklet or braclet, but the girl was so small she ended up wearing it as a necklace! I loved the way it turne dout though.




Blue Moods. A piece I did for a gal in Canada. We were both members at nervousness.org and had agreed on a trade for "refridgerator art. Somethign that would bright up our fridges! One of the very few crayon pieces I have done in the past.

This bird was a photograph I took and processed myself. I took a course in darkroom process even though I had taken one way back when I was in high school. I had a blast and hope to soon have a dark room set up. I miss being in the darkroom and processing! I LOVE it. There's just something about taking everything through the entire process. I think it's one of my most favorite things to do. I have tons of shots from this day at the Zoo. My favorite is a leopard sleeping. It's not the best shot because they have a terrible diamond pattern fence right in front of everything. It's the only pen at our zoo that has terrible views of the animals.

This is a little fairy doll I did for a museum installement. A woman from nervousness.org was doing an instalation at the museum and asked a group of artist to alter blank doll bodies. This is what mine ended up looking like. A little hand sewn felt vest and floral bits skirt. Hand knotted hair and an embroidered face. A few months later the woman's daughter got married and some of the artist that had participated in the doll installment made bride dolls for her. I had a blast doing the bride. I made her a little tulle underskirt and teeny little buttons on her straps. She was very fun to do!

Magnets

These are little wooden magnets I made awhile ago. The three last pieces are ones I carved into the wood to make. I have yet to put magnets onto those as I think I want to turn them into pins. The rest however have a sturdy circular magnet attached to the backs. All but one of the squares went in a swap with a group of people.

SHARPIE ARTWORKS

Delli the Duck

I've seen a lot of talk on this amigurumi and had to try it out. This is the first of my trials. I've got a head for a brown bunny in the works, but really haven't figured out how I"m going to go about getting a face onto him. Delli's pretty small as you can see with the shot of him in my hand. He's only about four inches high. He's got a little bit of a 'tude with the way his wings turned out. I tend not to work from patterns for two reasons. A) I can't read the ones that I find because they're in Japanese. B) I've never been good at being satisfied with the way something has turned out when working from patterns. So I wing it almost every single time. So this is how he turned out! :)

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!