IF - Focused

Lately, I've been focused on learning about the law of attraction and this quote sums it up quite nicely. As a matter of fact, I found so many good quotes for the Illustration Friday theme of FOCUSED that I did two illustrations.

This week's theme is one of my favorites by far!

IF - Clumsy

Sometimes I think I must be a food magnet. Hardly a day goes by that I don't spill, splatter, squirt, slop, drip, dribble, or drop some sort of food or beverage on myself. Once at a wedding I created a monster stain when I tried to clean up a butter spill smack in the middle of my top. Luckily, the top was reversible so I went into the restroom, turned it around to the other side, (a totally different color) and went back to the table. Nobody even noticed! Maybe I should invest in an entirely reversible wardrobe.

IF - Wilderness

This week's Illustration Friday topic of Wilderness gave me the chance to illustrate one of my favorite quotes by Alan Alda. I only did the first half of the quote, but here it is in its entirety.

"Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself."
--Alan Alda

IF - Confined

These little beauties will keep me confined to the house this weekend. Individually, they are tiny, geometric, ice sculptures--beautiful and fragile. But get 100 bazillion of them together in one place and life gets a little messy. There really is power in numbers.

Enjoy your weekend whether it includes mounds of snow or shimmering sunshine.

Cheers To A New Year

New Year's Eve is my all-time favorite day of the year. It's the day when we get to be the designer of our dreams. A new year holds so much promise and possibility. It's a clean slate. A new chapter. A fresh start. A do-over. On this day we get to dwell in possibility. We get to believe that this is going to be the year that ________ (fill in your wildest dreams here) Tomorrow we'll have to roll up our sleeves and get started on working to make 2010 everything we hope it will be. But today we get to sit back and just imagine all the possibilities.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

I wish for you a joyful and peaceful Christmas doing whatever makes you happy. I hope Santa brings you lots of art supplies!

IF - Undone

I doubt that Yoshida Kenko was referring to laundry when he uttered this phrase, but that's how I'd like to interpret his words. I've been feeling a little artistically "undone" lately. Not due to lack of inspiration--more likely due to over-inspiration. I can't seem to focus on one project, one idea, or one technique. I keep flitting between projects and starting new ones with no sense of direction or purpose. This illustration is a perfect example. I started painting the pages of yet another altered book with gouache and then decided to try lettering with a paintbrush rather than markers and watercolors. I have a lot less control with a paintbrush and the result is pretty primitive. How many projects do you have "undone" right about now?

Over The Top Is Over And Out!!!

A few months ago, I posted about the Art House Co-op sketchbook project that I decided to join. I was assigned the theme: OVER THE TOP. After several months and hours and hours and hours of work, I am thrilled to report that my sketchbook is finally finished and on its way to Art House to join all the rest in a permanent Sketchbook Library.

I decided to use this project as an opportunity to practice my lettering...and boy did I get a lot of practice!!! Since the sketchbook paper was a bit thin and I did everything in markers, I only used one side of the page and left the other side blank. (I have this thing about show through--I don't mind it in other people's work but don't like it in my own.) I can't say that I'm happy with every page, but I'll include them all so you can see the entire finished sketchbook. You can click on the images to see them larger, and of course, you can visit the Sketchbook Library and see ALL the sketchbooks!























That's all folks! Over and out.

IF - Entangled

I decided to do a fun, little, abstract doodle for this week's Illustration Friday theme of entangled. The word usually conjures up negative images in my mind--tangled up Christmas lights, necklaces, or even hair--but these entangled threads just look happy to me. It was done with Pitt and Micron pens and watercolor in my watercolor Moleskine.

IF - Music

I had a difficult time with this week's Illustration Friday theme of music. It should have been an easy one, but I did a LOT of erasing before I settled on this. I tried to use as few lines as possible and added a bit of overlapping to create intersecting shapes. It was done with a Pitt pen and watercolors in my watercolor Moleskine while listening to an "oldies" radio station. I'm not ashamed to admit that 70s music is my favorite!