| K's Halloween Bento |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|09:18 pm] |
My other creative endeavor is making my daughter fun lunches. I though I would share her special Halloween Lunch with you all.
First is the Green Hairy Monster. I made a layer of cauliflower and topped that with brocolini and then nested 2 small chocolate eyeballs in it.
Then the Orange jack-o-lantern was actually very easy. I made light cuts in the skin and then peeled the pieces off.
The tombstone is made from tuna salad and an english muffin and the RIP is cut from a sheet of Nori and is on a bed of lettuce.
And the skull is a rice ball and I used the nori to make the eye and nose sockets.
And just to keep them in season, I am calling the red grapes blood clots. |
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| Impatient Dragon |
[Aug. 10th, 2009|02:42 am] |
"] This week's Illustration Friday theme is Impatient. The design for this drawing was suggested by my son who is about to go off to college to study computer animation. This little dragon is impatient for the computer to load.
Prints of this image are of course available. And of course back to school products can be found at cafepress and zazzle featuring this fun drawing. And if you don't mind taking the time to rate the design on zazzle I would appreciate the feedback. And of course the original is on etsy. |
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| New Dragon Drawing - bubbles, pipes and potions |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|12:28 pm] |
 This was fun. This ink drawing was inspired by a drawing in my sketchbook that I did over a year ago. I took the basic dragon form and his bottle of potion, and for the final ink drawing I added the nifty steampunk-ish pipe system to the background.
This guy is currently available on etsy and fun t-shirts and gifts featuring this drawing are at cafepress. If you want the original, you better snap it up quick, because I am seriously thinking of sending this drawing to armadillocon this year. |
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| Car Wreck |
[Jun. 6th, 2009|12:39 am] |
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The boy wrecked my car today. I must say, I am not that bad of a mother, because he is still alive.
We have decided that as soon as he gets a job, he can pay us back for the repairs. And until then hecan clean house when he is not job hunting.
It wouldn't have hurt so much if I hadn't already spent around $300 on HIS car making sure that it was in good working order and paying taxes on it. Then we just sent off the money for the deposite for his birthday bash. And all this after our cash was already depleted from paying for his dental surgery, which his father STILL hasn't paid his share of. Probably all the money spent on him and his car the last couple of weeks would have covered it. Why or why couldn't he have waited just 10 more days for payday.
I might need to run a sale on my stuff in etsy in order to try and pay for this in the short term. Anyone wants some art? feel free to make an offer. It appears I need around $1k ASAP.
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| Work In Progress - Fairy Cats - In Acrylic this time |
[May. 25th, 2009|11:00 pm] |
Well, I rather liked the watercolor version, but I thought that if I did the painting in acrylic (My usual medium), that I might be able to get some more intense colors.
So here is stage 1 of my attempt at acrylic on watercolor paper of my fairy cats. At this point I have done a pencil sketch of the drawing and then a mottled wash of purple, blue and yellow. Then I went back and penciled in some of the lines that washed away. Next step will be to start blocking in the main colors.
I just need to decide what colors I want to make the kitties this time. |
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| Work In Progress - Fairy Cats |
[May. 22nd, 2009|01:05 pm] |
Here we have the painting with the background painted and me having started a bit on the underpainting of the grass.
If you wish to see the other work In Progress photos for this image, check out my homepage blog. |
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| Ebay got it wrong and the joys of Project Wonderful |
[May. 20th, 2009|01:01 pm] |
Do any of you remember the early days of eBay? The excitement of watching your auctions the ones you listed and the ones you bid on? That constant need to refresh and see if you were going to win, or to see how high your listings would go.
eBay has been telling us that those days are gone, because no one wants to wait on auctions, that they want instant gratification. But they are wrong.
How do I know this? Project Wonderful!
I recently created a few ads to try it out. Just a few with some small bids to see if it would garner me any traffic or sales for my etsy shop.
Now I am reliving those early days of eBay. I am spending my days watching my bids, upping them when I am no longer the high bidder, checking to see how many clicks I get. It is crazy.
I have lost my mind. I am already up to $1.60 on a tiny little button ad! When I was just going to spend a tiny amount of money to get a feel for this site.
Now I am spending my time designing new ads, because I want to know if a leaderboard ad will do even better.
This is addictive, just like auctions used to be on ebay.
What happened to ebay? Why did auctions stop working? Was it the introduction of the "buy it now" or the stores that did auctions in? I suspect it was the stores. Because with stores, you had a huge number of drop ship items and new electronics and mass produced stuff from China showing up.
There was harder to find the unique and rare. With new electronics, you do expect to buy it now. But with hard to find computer parts for some outdated system that you are geeking out on getting up and running - there is some competition to get a limited supply- and the auctions work great for that. Or for an original work of art, when auctions were working you could find some great gems at great prices and the prices almost always were still high enough to make the artists giddy. And how about finding those vintage clothing items or collectables? Auctions were the way to go. It was for these things that eBay was born. eBay wasn't there to replace your local electronics store. Why would you bid on something you can find at your local mall for the same price and not have to worry about shipping?
When eBay was an online garage sale there was the thrill of the hunt and competition. Now that it is just an online retailer, it doesn't have a platform to really make it effective.
Amazon tried the auction thing once and discovered that it couldn't compete with eBay. But now eBay has abandoned it's roots and is tryinng to compete with Amazon in way that it's platform really won't succeed. Poor eBay. Too bad their current CEO is "ashamed" of eBay roots. If he wasn't, there might be a chance to find that excitement again. But instead of wanting to be the best eBay, he wants to be the best Amazon. Maybe he should have gone to work for Amazon instead. |
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| Retiring soe designs |
[May. 19th, 2009|02:12 am] |
I am back at work reducing my cafepress listings in order to make shopping in my cafepress store a bit easier.
This week I am going to remove all my mandalas. So check out the shop and see if there are any you just have to have before I retire the designs. |
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| Which Way To Go? |
[May. 18th, 2009|12:09 pm] |
I be you are wondering what all those images are for. Well, I need a bit of feedback. J and I are talking about buying some ad time either for my website or my etsy shop. And I am working on creating some ad designs. I am not sure if I have a workable design yet, and I might create lots of different ones.
But what I would like is to find out if I am on the right track with my design ideas.
The button ads (those little tiny rectangles) just feature a segment of one of my paintings or drawings, the square ads feature a larger section of paintings or drawings as well as my studio name.
All feedback is welcome. |
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| experimenting and practicing |
[May. 17th, 2009|03:54 am] |
The last few days I have been practicing and experimenting with my drawings.
The practicing was with hands. I used to be real good at drawing hands, probably because I would fill sketchbooks with drawings of my own hand for my college drawing class when I wouldn't have new pages done when the sketchbook was due. I have recently come to realize that will all my kitty art, I have gotten out of practice and so I have filled a few pages with some rough hand sketches.
As far as the experimenting, I have been trying out new ways of drawing faces. I have been checking out manga and big eyed art and playing with it to see if they can still look my ladies if they have big sappy eyes. Okay even if they have big eyes, they didn't exactly come out sappy. I am rather liking the attitude.
So does it still look like my art?
The hair is supposed to look a bit like the goddesses that I did last year.
BTW she is for sale on etsy.
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| Cafepress - Adding and Removing products- Feedback requested |
[May. 5th, 2009|11:20 am] |
My first order of business is that I need to streamline my cafepress shop. So at the end of the week, I am going to be removing some images to make finding things a little easier.
This week I am cutting the entire Abstract section of the shop. So if there is a design there that you have been eyeballing or sitting on the fence about, now is the time to buy. And as an added bonus cafepress does have a special going for a free upgrade on shipping in order to get your gift items in time for mother's day.
Also I am very excited to discover that Cafepress is now offering SIGG bottles. Since I have a lot of images currently in my shop, it is going to take awhile to get them all added to the SIGG bottles, so please feel free to reply here with your favorite images from my shop, and I will make that image a priority for the SIGG bottles.
Just so you know, previously I purchased these bottles for every member of the family and have been recommending them to everyone. They are nice and durable and good for the enviorment since they are reusable, unlike those prepackaged plastic bottles of water. Now that my art is available on these, I am thinking that everyone needs a spare for those long hot days at the art festivals (much better than buying a case of plastic bottles). |
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| Work In progress - Stage 2 |
[May. 4th, 2009|11:01 pm] |
Here we have Stage 2 of my Cute Dragonette.
At this point I have painted it with friskett to keep the wash from covering the parts that are not part of the background. I do have one question with this - how do you keep from ruining brushes each time you use this stuff?
Then I have gone in with the first layer of the background wash with india ink. I will admit that since I took the photo I have already added a bit more color with another layer of blue with splashes of green and salted it. There is also a bit of pearl-ex in the stuff to give the background a bit of sparkle, because my muse is really a magpie... |
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| Work In Progress - Stage 1 |
[May. 4th, 2009|11:20 am] |
I thought I would show some inprogress pics of my latest watercolor drawing. I did the eyes a bit differently making them a bit bigger, rounder with nice long lashes. I thought it upped the cute factor a bit.
Next I need to go shopping for some supplies, but hopefully tonight I can make some real progress for you to see.... |
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| Back To Work - Spellbook |
[Apr. 17th, 2009|10:16 pm] |
 Well I am back at work again. I have so missed creating. My studio is still in chaos, so until i get it organized I am not going to be doing any large scale painting. But the ink drawings that I have been doing lately have me very excited. I am still debating the issue of adding some watercolor to them.
But here is Spellbook. The drawing measures 7.5x9.5" and is drawn on card stock.
James has recommended that I I offer some of my recent works at coloring sheets. If enough folks are interested, I just might do that.
Anyway, in the mean time you can find this image at etsy, cafepress, and zazzle. |
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| Harry |
[Aug. 11th, 2008|11:08 pm] |
Harry
10x10" Acrylic on Canvas |
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