A rare two-handed day!

I am gradually coming to terms with the fact that my productivity, art-wise, will just be low for a while.  And that's okay.  Of course, if I get commissions I will still fulfill them in a good amount of time, but in terms of just day-to-day doing art stuff...yeah, I won't be setting any "do two paintings or more a month!  Paint a stone a day!" type goals for a long time.

Except for that magical time called Babysitting Day.  And then I can do anything for a few hours!

These will be coming to Etsy one day...as soon as I get enough time to take pictures of these skull necklaces on some other surface than my desk...

 

I'm really lucky to have a bunch of baby-minders that I trust...mostly family, mostly the grandparents, but one particular non-family friend comes every week or every other week so that I can have a break.  Of course, last week I had to use that break to get my tax papers together (yay...), but this week, and the week before that, I got to use that time for ART.

Summery things...

Okay, first, allow me a brief pregnant-lady rant: so, non-alcoholic beer?  It's not good.  One of my husband's friends had a beer-tasting party last weekend, and I went anyway, and brought some different near-beers so I could taste-test those, and...yeah, they were crap.  I love a good beer, especially in the summer, and these just tasted like weird, bitter, vegetable-soup-flavored sodas.

But then, that was just O'Doul's, St. Pauli NA, and Kaliber (the one that's made by Guinness...still not good, not vegetable-y, but sort of cinnamon-coffee-ish in a bad way).  What's a good non-alcoholic beer that tastes somewhat real, internets?!  I need help.

Other than that, we've been having some nice days, so I've been using my back porch "office" some more...

Scotty is still an awesome back porch coworker.

The warm weather, plus the constant marketing of summer stuff that's already begun (swimsuits, pool toys, beach stuff in Target even though we live about eight hours from any beach) inspired me to do a piece of summer art yesterday:

Monday = cheap Cadbury egg day!

Happy Easter weekend, guys!  Here's a quick Easter piece I did, a bit of an experiment...

In two different colorways, just for fun...egg shapes were made in Illustrator, with a collage of different watercolor textures layered on in Photoshop.  Left side is Screen blending mode, right side I believe is Hard Light (looks kinda Eric Carle-ish to me).  These will also be up this afternoon on Society6 and my print store, in case anyone wants some last-minute Easter-y goodness...hint, hint...

We're not doing anything in particular for Easter...I just wanted to draw eggs.  But I'm realizing that in a couple years, though, we could be getting into the baskets-and-egg-hunts phase of childhood...which is great!  I'm kinda looking forward to doing all the holiday trappings that you do with a kid.  And I'm pretty good at hiding eggs, so I hope our kid is a good finder. ;)

Starting off strong...

Well, art fans, it's shaping up to be an exciting 2015 already, and we've barely even started!  I don't know what I did, but for some reason the universe has decided, "here, have some sprinkles on your 2015 cake!"  If, y'know, sprinkles were jobs and dollars.  I don't want to jinx it, but there's a project I'm in the running for that would really be a great opportunity...challenging, but that can be fun sometimes.

For another thing, we got our old house rented!

Scotty will miss the Art Shack.  As will I.

And we didn't even have to use a management company, so no management fees!  Of course, this means that I have to add "property management" to my long list of part-time jobs that I do, but I don't mind.  I'm just happy to have the house taken care of and not have to pay two mortgages anymore, let me tell you...

I also got my first Etsy custom order!  This is exciting.

Painting outside the box. Literally.

Hello!  How's everyone enjoying this winter so far?  Arizonans, how are you liking all this rain we're having?  I love rain...even when I lived in rainier places, I still loved it, even if it was almost every day.  It was raining Wednesday morning when I woke up, and I just wanted to lie in bed all day, listen to the rain, drink tea and cocoa, and read...darn responsibilities preventing me from doing that.

Everyone ready for the holidays?  We have our tree up, some lights in the window, I've been wrapping presents, and I'm sending out holiday cards which, of course, I drew...after the holidays and once everyone's gotten theirs, I'll post it.

Also have one last holiday craft show tomorrow, and a couple new pieces for it...you'll want to see these.

Color of the Year excitement!

So, you may have heard...this is Pantone's new "Color of the Year" for 2015:

Image courtesy of Pantone

It's called Marsala...I would call it "brick red, but snazzier," or a "warm dusty wine red" maybe.  And you know what?  I'm actually really psyched about it.

Instagrammically challenged

Sometimes you'll come across these "[blank]-a-day for a month" challenges on blogs or social media...I've tried to do a couple of them in the past, but when you're not posting the results you're not really accountable to anyone, you know?  So I never finished the couple I'd tried before.

But then I saw this on Twitter...

...and it linked to this, and I thought, why not?  I'll play it this month!

My studio is always open

So, the weekend before last was the Open Studio Tour...

My setup...art on the wall, supplies, reference photos, finished cow painting and unfinished dog painting on watercolor pad.

 I got to set up in a gallery at Old Town Artisans (very cool place, highly recommended to visit if you're in Tucson!  The restaurant there is also very good).  I got to meet some other artists, see a couple of them work, and finish a painting while I was at it.  It was a nice couple of days.

The curse of too many opportunities...

Y'all, I am abjectly apologetic about the lack of...stuff I've been putting out.  I know, it's only been a week or so, but it has been CRAY-ZEE.  Here, have a cow:

Cow watercolor in its unfinished state...I finished it last week but haven't had time to snap pics because I've been busy, well, having cows.

In case you care for the story, read on...

Reasons why you should always check out the gift shop...

I found some inspiration from an odd source while we were on our day trip on Saturday.  Was it the desert landscapes?  The mountains?  Nope...it was from a gift shop.

It was very inspiring, though!  And it's also odd to me because it's not my usual style.  Let me explain...

Confessions of a wacky watercolorist

Okay, it's confession time again...I have to admit that I have a somewhat unusual method of watercoloring.  I learned how to watercolor with, y'know, watercolor paints, in tubes, at school, and I like doing that.  But in my freshman year at art school, I discovered these:

*choir of angels, clouds open up with a ray of heavenly light*

And these, my friends?  These are watercolor crayons.  They were life-changing.

Show prep, show prep, show prep...

I'm about two and a half weeks out from the Hilton Indoor Summer Art Festival (i.e. my first JURIED art/craft fair, with the most traffic of any craft fair I've done so far), and a little less than two weeks out from exhibiting at the Southern Arizona Watercolor Guild. So...cue the panicking?

"Hurricane Panic," painted in 2006 when I lived in Florida.  Appropriate to many life situations other than hurricanes, however.

Surprisingly, I'm not panicked about it, though!  I've just been doing a couple little show-prep things every day, here and there, in addition to my everyday chores.  It's been fun, and in getting things together I unearthed some hidden gems.  Like...

Show prep madness!

As I may have mentioned, I'll be selling my work at Monterey Court here in Tucson this Saturday night...actually, I'm pretty sure I only mentioned it that one time, because ever since it's been finalized I've been in major preparation mode.

A Pile O'Prints!  Plus on the left you can see a package I just shipped - a cat portrait off to Florida.

 I ended up making 17 large prints (like the ones above), 20 smaller prints, and six sets of greeting cards.  So Tuesday was Packaging-fest 2014!

Rolling stones gather no paint.

Okay, it's official: I need an intervention.  I can't stop painting stones.

Actually, don't bother intervening, stone painting is too fun!  So I probably won't stop doing it. :p What's so fun about painting a bunch of river rocks, you ask?  Well...

Words, words, words.

This past weekend, our house was overrun by teenage boys.  My stepson has some friends in the neighborhood, and they come over some weekends to play video games and watch TV shows and anime where apparently a lot of the plot involves people yelling "WAAAAAAAAUUGHGGHHG!" every ten seconds. (I think it's Dragonball.  Can't be too sure though.)

After a couple hours of this, I needed a break.  So I retreated out to my studio and spent much of the weekend playing around with...word art!

New prints!

It's that time again...time for new things to go up in my print shop!

"The Ceremony", watercolor and ink

 Some of these date back to December of last year...the only camera we have that takes high-resolution photos had its battery completely die.  As in, would not take a charge for mysterious reasons known only to the battery.  So when my husband got a replacement battery I was immediately like, "yay, prints!"  I get really excited about these...

I also want to ramble about a couple of these new pieces...brace yourself for art-geeky talk about colors and stuff...

Rockin' on with my...uh, paint-covered self?

So I had a wacky idea...of course, that's sometimes the only kind of ideas I have...especially now that I'm in planning/obsessing mode of preparing for upcoming art shows. (Still many months away, but I have big plans!) I was thinking of smaller things to sell, since it's a good idea to have a range of price points, not just huge original pieces that cost three- and four-digit prices.  I'll have prints for sale, of course, and mini-prints for even lower prices, and maybe blank greeting cards with art on the front...what else?

Well, I have a craft inspiration board on Pinterest, accurately titled, "Stuff I'll Get Around to Doing...Someday."  I was trawling through that recently, and I found a bunch of pins I'd posted of painted rocks.

by Elspeth McLean, not me...she's much better at this than I am yet.

 And I thought, "Hey, I can do that!" So, well...someday was today!

From progress to DONE.

So remember my painting of a Westie that I showed you guys the progress on a few days ago?  Well, it's done!

When last we saw the painting, it looked like this...

This westie has no background, but she doesn't care - look at that tail wag!

And now?

Painting in progress

I feel better today...as I posted on the Maxfield and Madison Facebook page yesterday, I was reeeeeally sick all weekend.  I'm not entirely sure what it was, nor were the people at the urgent care place I went to, but they just threw antibiotics at me and it seems to have gone into retreat for the moment.

Unexpected illnesses are just not fair.  I had planned on going to the big street fair this weekend, to see what other artists were doing in terms of booth setup, maybe asking them questions, doing a little research.  But did Mr. Illness care about that?  Noooo.

I had planned to finish this painting on Saturday too...

But since I spent most of Saturday lying in bed with a fever, this did not happen.  However!  Today I made up for the lack of progress on things this weekend.

And now for a shameless plug...

So, this weekend I manned a booth at an arts festival (not for my art, but for the jewelry designer I work for as a "day job").  I'll probably do a post later on down the line about "tips for having your art in a craft fair/street fair/arts festival type thing," because I've done a few shows now and I learned a LOT.  It's exhausting hauling stuff back and forth and standing at your booth in the sun all day, but it gets easier each time you do it.

But!  That's not the point of this post, because this post...is to get you to vote for me!

 

Eegee's (a local-to-Tucson fast food chain, famous for ranch fries and fruity slush drinks that change flavors every month) was having a t-shirt design contest, and so of course I was going to enter.  Not just because the prize is a free combo meal each week for a year, either (although that helps), but also just because, well, I think this t-shirt would be cool and I would wear the heck out of it. :P

Click here to vote!  I also submitted another design, and although I don't like that one as much as this one, I certainly wouldn't complain if it won instead, so here's the link.

And yes, the skull should look familiar if you've seen my portfolio...I tweaked it a little and added the lemons and strawberries, because those are two of Eegee's three regular flavors (the other is pina colada, and they also have a different Flavor of the Month each month.  I like the watermelon, which they usually have in July...although last week's blueberry lemon was pretty darn good.)

So that's it!  Vote, vote, vote!  Tell your friends to vote!  Tell your enemies to vote!  Tell your dogs to vote!  Every little bit helps.