busy busy...

Wow, the month of September has been so busy for me. In addition to my day job, I helped photograph a wedding, have been working on processing those photos, had a family event, hosted a large event, babysat several times, and did a lot of landscaping at our new house! I'm pretty exhausted. I hope October is slower. I want to share some photos of the perennials I planted, but they'll have to wait another week, until I'm done with these wedding photos.

September here was exceptionally warm and dry the first few weeks. It was lovely. Today, the weather changed. It was cool, really windy, with rain coming and going, alternating with patches of sun. The wind was so strong, we were afraid our birch tree was going to go right over.

I hope everyone else is having a lovely fall!

Treasury

FuriousDreams has included me in a treasury with some other great artists on Etsy! Click here to visit and get a closer look!

Getting back to work

Well, we've been settling in at our house here. It's wonderful. We spend a lot of time out in the yard playing with our dogs. We finally have a big enough, fenced yard so they can actually run! When we have time to relax, it's a really great place, and we are thrilled with it.

Last Thursday, I drove to work, and due to a major accident on my route in, I was delayed over a half hour. Then, on my way home, I went to pick up a lovely sewing table I found on craigslist, and then my car wouldn't start. I couldn't get a hold of anyone I thought likely to rescue me, so I quickly hiked over about a mile to where I was most likely to be able to catch a bus downtown. That bus got me downtown with about 5 seconds to spare to catch the last bus of the night out to our new place. I narrowly missed having a long night on the town. Luckily, the car only needed a new battery, so we got it working again.

That was enough stress for my week though, and I decided that the weekend would consist of de-stressing. We barbecued both days, which was lovely, and I worked a lot on my digital art, which felt wonderful.

Here is another in-progress update of my digital painting I plan to hang in our new living room. Now that I've had a bit of a break from working on any of this stuff, and I'm doing it again, I feel really comfortable and natural at it. I feel like I really know how to manipulate my colors, shadows, filters, etc. to get what I want. It feels great! I've also been working on a digital wedding portrait as a gift, which I am super excited about.

And lastly, here is another in-progress piece I haven't shown yet. It's a bit of a different style. It's an architectural piece from San Remo, Italy. I've had the drawing part of it done for a while, but couldn't decide if it was sufficient as-is, or if I should add some color, so I figured I might as well add the color to try it out. I'm doing the color in a light, sketchy style. The beauty of digital is that you can always go back if you do your layers right! Please feel free to let me know what you think of these pieces.

Settling in

Well, we are all moved in at the new place. It's fantastic!

The unpacking is done. The organizing is almost there. Tonight, I sorted out my art supplies for ease of use in the office. Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to use them. Unfortunately, I am still having issues accessing the internet from my own computer. Hopefully we will get that sorted out soon. My etsy shops are open again, please visit :)

I got a treasury on Etsy tonight. Click here to visit. The photo-uploader isn't working right now. I'll add an image of it tomorrow if it lets me.

Moving

We will be moving to our new house next Friday. We have been packing up for several weeks. Our current home is a quite full of boxes and stuff! It made me a little sad to pack up my art supplies, since it means I won't be able to use them for a little while (whether or not I would have used them any way.) I tried to take the opportunity to thin them out though. I have such a hard time getting rid of art supplies- I always have so many ideas of something I want to do "sometime". I toughed up and gave away my oil and acrylic paints, as well as several random arts and crafts items.

I hope that by reducing the variety of creative implements I have, I will increase my use of them. I really would like to get some gouache paints again, and I figured it would be easier to justify buying them if I didn't have a bunch of other unused paints sitting around. After I gave those paints away though, I realized I have several canvases that I started painting but remain unfinished (see my almost first ever blog post). I will have to figure out if I should keep those too or not- only a couple are in close to finished condition. I will have to think about it for a little bit- I could maybe do some mixed media work over them if I felt like it, but most of my remaining supplies need to go on paper.

I went through a period last year where I was feeling like I should do more work on canvas. I was thinking how great it would be to not worry about framing for every piece. I thought I could use our garage for a studio, but it ended up not working very well at all. I have since come to terms with the fact that without my own large studio dedicated to painting, I am unlikely to get very far with canvas at this time. Also, I am very much more familiar with paper, as I have been working on it for so much longer, and paper can be a very beautiful thing.

I will now be putting my Etsy shops in vacation mode until a few days after our move is complete. I look forward to getting my stock listed in them again.. after we get our network set up again so I can actually access the internet from my own computer (I haven't been able to for several months). Well, I probably won't be posting here again, until after the move, but all this packing is making me and my puppies very tired :)

Treasury

I just got a treasury spot on Etsy. Click here to get a closer view at any of these beautiful photographs.

Work in Progress

Here is an image of a work in progress- a large-scale digital landscape painting. When printed out at full size, this will be 20x36". This is the first digital piece that I've attempted on this big of a scale. My husband and I are buying our first house this summer, and I hope this turns out well, so I can showcase it on our new livingroom wall!