I’ve been somewhat dissatisfied with my image gallery plug-in for a while now, but haven’t gotten motivated enough to do anything about it until now.  I’m testing something new and want to see how it looks.  The upside is if I like this, it’ll look much nicer on the site.  The downside is having to completely re-upload and redo all the images on my site. 

Oh, and as anyone can tell by the dates on the blog posts, I’ve been a lazy slob about updating.  I’ve been much, much, MUCH better about updating my Facebook art page and Instagram, which needs to change.

Testing…

UPDATE Tuesday – I think I’ve found the setting I want to use.  The gallery adjusts based on the images, so it’s not all same sized boxy pictures.  It has captions and a lightbox setting.  So far I’m loving it.  Yes, it will be a hassle to redo all my galleries, but I’ll take the opportunity to clean them up as I go along, which should be a good thing.  Below is the starting point for the “Abstracts” gallery. 

Continuing with my cleaning and organizing theme, I finally took the time over this weekend to put some items sitting out in my office/studio away in the closet and slightly straighten up my drawing table.  The room feels much bigger now, even though it wasn’t as if I were cramped for space or anything.  It’s a psychological thing, I guess.  In the process of cleaning up, I went through the things in a plastic storage bag that was still struggling to survive the twenty years plus since I got out of college. 

The bad? Here’s what remained of a triangle that didn’t make it and instead crumbled into a lot of dust and little pieces.

The good? I finally FINALLY found my French curves!  Yay!  I knew they were around here somewhere, and I thought I’d checked this bag in the past, but apparently I didn’t check well enough.

I’ve been getting close to just buying a new set, but all the ones I saw at office supply stores were small and as you can see, these are nice and big.  It’s giving me ideas and I can use them for the first of my Art for the Paws canvas.

Here’s to a creative and fun 2017!  It’s off to a good start!

I have been incredibly lax about updating the site and posting any images here.  I have the remainder of the January 30-in-30 that I did plus a few other pieces that I’ve managed to do in the past six months as well, but the truth is – I’ve been incredibly lazy in general.  Just haven’t put a priority on making art, which isn’t good.  I feel better when I’m creating at least something.  But near the end of July, I got my creative vibe back and have two new pieces to offer.  I’ll be going back and figuring out what is missing from the galleries here and updating those as well.

“The Gates of Tomorrow”
Watercolor and white ink on paper, 8 x 11
Prints are available through my deviantArt account, if interested.

The Gates of Tomorrow | Watercolor and white ink on paper | 8″ x 12″ | 2016

“Untitled (Blue Layers)”
Watercolor on paper, 5 x 7

Blue Layers | Watercolor on paper | 5″ x 7″ | 2016

The local shelter in my area, Helping Paws, is doing an art donation/raffle event and I decided to take part.  I donated my money to get a canvas, did my piece, and turned it in today.  I’m a bit nervous because this is the first time I’ve put my art out there like this.  I had to write an artist statement! :O  But you have to start somewhere so here I go.  I’m planning to go to the formal reception in April to see the full mosaic of pieces done for this event, because it’ll look awesome!

My biggest challenge was how watercolor and canvas can play together nicely with the tools and supplied I already have and the short answer is – not easily.  However, I’d done some research previously and knew I could mount the paper to the canvas (as opposed to applying watercolor medium and then painting directly on the canvas) but since I’d never done this before, I was pretty nervous.  It worked out beautifully though, IMO!

“Sky Full of Stars”
Watercolor and white ink on paper mounted on canvas
6″ x 6″

Sky Full of Stars (Art for the Paws) | Watercolor and white ink on paper, mounted on canvas | 6″ x 6″

Sky Full of Stars (Art for the Paws) | Watercolor and white ink on paper, mounted on canvas | 6″ x 6″

I really like how the painted edges turned out, including trying to paint the edge of the paper so that it wasn’t a stark white line.  I think that instead of doing this again, I’ll save my pennies and invest in some watercolor medium, which I can put on the canvas, sand down, and then use the watercolors as usual.  That would make a nice change from doing all my pieces on paper which tends to almost require a mat and frame for display.

Now that 2015 has arrived, I thought it made sense to do an art review of 2014.  It was the year that I got back into traditional media instead of solely doing digital art.  In fact, I’ve been enjoying using my paints that I’ve done almost no digital art at all this year, except for editing my photos to show off what I’ve been doing.  And I’m fine with that.  I’ve reached a point in my life where I don’t want to spend all my time sitting in front of a computer.  I get enough of that for work that being able to move about and paint at my drawing table is a huge relief.

I started the year out slowly but by September, I was really rocking.  I began with “proto-aliens” (which eventually turned into the alien creatures), moved through doing suns and moons, which fed into the retro circles.  All are loosely related series that I want to keep working in as my interests take me.

I gathered up some images to as a visual year in review, which is how I found out I really didn’t produce any images in July but really had some output in September.

Heart, digital media, 2013

Felt compelled to offer up a heart to celebrate the day.  Enjoy!

Over the past year, starting on 26 JAN 2013 and going through 18 JAN 2014 I’ve been taking a photo each Saturday morning of the turn in the road I live on.  I’ve been posting them on Google+ under the tag #SaturdaySeries and now that the year is up, I made an animated gif of the images to show how the seasons change at one location.

The only editing or adjusting I’ve done is to place the yellow arrow sign at the same place and approximately the same size, and cropping all the images so they are the same size.