A Little Bout Love...

[caption id="attachment_479" align="aligncenter" width="692" caption="Available for sale in my Etsy store"][/caption] Love is all around us.  We see weddings, engagements, and anniversaries happening all of the time.  People honoring their love with celebrations. [caption id="attachment_480" align="aligncenter" width="692" caption="Available for sale in my Etsy Store"][/caption] Sometimes it is easy to overlook the love around us....to feel lonely.  Sometimes it feels like everyone else has the love we desire.  When that happens to me, I begin to look inside.  I firmly believe that we have to have love inwardly for our own selves before we can love outwardly for someone else. [caption id="attachment_481" align="aligncenter" width="692" caption="Available for sale in my Etsy Store"][/caption] When you love someone, you do make promises.  And you create expectations.  I have yet to figure out the secret of loving someone unconditionally, without expectations of what THEY will do for ME in exchange for my love.  But I am working on it!  I believe in the power of love.  I believe that love can help create positive change.  It can inspire people to be the best version of themselves possible.  Love can change a person from the inside.  I hope this brings a little love to your day!! [caption id="attachment_482" align="aligncenter" width="692" caption="Available for sale in my Etsy Store"][/caption]

A Little Holiday Magic!

It's the hap - happiest time...of the year!  I made a goal to create my first piece of Holiday artwork....and here you go! I started out thinking it would evolve into something with hanging ornaments.  Guess not!  That is the magic of art for me - sometimes things take a direction both unexpected and delightful! I used a shape cutter and made some different sized star masks to create the tree.  The paint is semi-translucent.  Before it dried I added a little glitter.  It looks so sparkly on my mantle! From my house to yours - I wish you happy holidays and a season full of touches of magic!

The art of music...

Sometimes the basic colors of black and white fascinate me.  The symmetry of piano keys can beautiful.  I wanted to meld the perfect alignment of ebony and ivory with chaos and color! This was my first experiment with using photoshop to merge a canvas.  For all of you artsy followers, this was a ton of fun!  The canvas itself was too big to fit on a scanner, so I had to scan it in 4 parts.  Photoshop Elements allows you to bring all four scans into one piece and "stitches" them together perfectly for you!  The technology is simply amazing! I used my new scanner, the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Color Scanner "".  I was amazed at the color match - I didn't have to adjust color settings at all - and it was a perfect color match for the actual painting.  VERY impressed with that! I love how you can see the actual texture of the real painting also.  Fun for me.  Hopefully inspiring for you! Anyone interested in the PhotoMerge steps - read on! 1.  Set your scanner settings to at least 350 dpi so you have a good high resolution scan to save. 2.  Scan in as many parts as you need to and save each scan separately. 3. Open photoshop elements editor.  Select File, select new, select Photomerge panorama. 4.  Under the Layout options, choose auto. Then click the browse oval on the right to open the files that you just scanned. 5.  Select the scans you want to merge together.  Click Open. 6.  Check the boxes for Blend Images Together and Vignette Removal.  Click Ok.  Let it do its thing! 7.  Make sure you flatten your images (Found under the Layers Menu bar) and Crop it (Found under the Image Menu Bar). 8.  Save it at whatever size you want!  Voila - a large canvas is now a cohesive single high resolution print!

Making a Mess....Finding My Style!

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Sometimes learning what is NOT your style is just as important as learning what IS your style.  Here is what I have learned to be true this week:

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1.  Sketching out a rough draft ahead of time is NOT my style.  

 

2.  Small, painstaking detail work is NOT my style.

 

3.  Highly repetitive work is NOT my style.

 

4.  I like to work intuitively - that IS my style.

 

5.  I like it messy and unplanned - that IS my style.

 

6.  I need for art to happen quickly and come together in an explosion of color - that IS MOST DEFINITELY my style!!

 

What's your style?