etsy

The Filled Heart Part 4

By in Cards, Crafts, etsy, General, Illustration Friday, Revisiting Older Works, Women

filled_heart_loI first painted this image during in my purple & silhouetted people phase. So probably in 1995. The original was done in watercolor and acrylic on a brown paper shopping bag. The image is of a woman looking to fill the void inside herself that was left when she lost her heart. She is choosing to replace it with a new heart symbolizing love. I’m pretty sure I did this one after a breakup. I was in my early 20’s. Everything was much grander back then. So a breakup was kind of epic.
filled_heart_3d_loAt any rate, in 2003, I updated it in order to enter a small Valentine’s card competition (it won). I recreated the image digitally in order to make it into a template so I could construct it into three-dimensional layers using cardboard.

In 2005, I went back to the rough digital and cleaned it up to make it available for sale on Greeting Card Universe. The inside of the GCU card reads, “Of every heart, I choose yours. Be my Valentine!” I realize it’s a bit of an odd image for a Valentine’s Day card. Conveniently, it went along with the Illustration Friday topic that week, Choose.
And now here we are in 2014, almost 20 years later. This little image has become part of my Goddess pendant collection that I used to sell on Etsy.IMG_6043_lo

A December update

By in etsy, General, Updates

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Pablo Picasso

Ahh where to begin? My website and blog have been around for a while now but ever since my brother, Harris, died and my babies were born, I have had limited time and practically no focus. And I haven’t thought that I had anything really interesting to share publicly. The last several years have been busy and profoundly life-altering. There is a clear and solid break between my past life where I had a brother and best-friend-in-the-universe sharing in our mutual appreciation society and all those crazy things from his birth until he was gone (I was the older one) and my life going forward with my beautiful little Jaegerlings who are now 38 and 7 months old who have no idea they ever had an uncle, and of course my lovely husband who came into my life only a couple of years before my brother got sick. It’s two completely different lives for me.

And that’s currently the short version of what’s been banging around in my head these past 5-ish years. I lost my mojo. I was never an artist who created from dark places. I like to create from light. But I have made peace with the dark and have been looking pretty hard at what really inspires me. The themes are as old as dirt and don’t sound particularly creative but they are what they are. Life. Birth. Death. Love. Happiness. Symbology. Spirituality.

A couple of years ago I went off-staff from k12 with whom I’ve been working in various capacities for over 11 years. Wow. 11 years! I now consider them my main freelance client, though I have much shorter hours as I am now working from home and taking care of the babies as well with a little help from the most fabulous nanny and my support group of moms. I find myself in an interesting new phase of my life and I’m hoping to take advantage of the creativity of the changes. And also maybe some of the crazy things toddlers come up with.

I’ve been doing some thinking and realized that it’s absolutely ok to be a little scatterbrained as a creative. I have a short attention span in the granularity of what interests me, so I hop around and make and do lots of different things. I’m discovering that the best thing to do is to focus on myself as a brand, kind of like Martha Stewart or Mary Engelbreit, and fine tune a little bit from there. Hopefully there will be interconnectivity, if not focus.

To that end, I’ve opened a new Etsy store, changed my branding on Greeting Card Universe, and have opened an account in earnest on Deviant Art. You can find me in these places by searching for my name, though I’ve linked to them from the “store” section of this website. You can also, as they say, LIKE me on Facebook. I haven’t got an external virtual location for my “fine arts” so those will live here in the Sketchbook for a while. At least until the next Artomatic comes around. And yeah, the SIAWOA section is in serious need of updating. All of these virtual places will get attention in turn and I have a lot of work to do. I will try and post updates occasionally on this blog and, well, a lot more on Facebook so if you’re interested, you can follow along.

If I have any occasional brain-cells to spare, I will attempt to share my creative, spiritual, pithy, introspective, and philosophical ponderings with you here as well. I’m feeling very larval right now but on the verge of butterflying.

In the meantime, check out these nifty snowflakes and sea turtles I made last week. Hey, it’s a start. Time for New Year’s resolutions… Happy Holidays! xo

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