What I’ve been up to

This weekend I was able to get a few things crossed off my yearly list. We took the car for a little mini road trip. We went to Matt’s favorite restaurant Bierstube. Actually it was a different one, but same great food, different atmosphere. AND the item off the list that I’m most proud of so far…I finally sent in my artomat paintings. Good grief, it was years in the making. I wanted to take a picture of me handing the package to the postal worker, but was to embarrassed. But sending them off is not the end of the story, I still have a few things up my sleeve regarding this series and artomat yet.

Unfortunately I am very sad to say that I also let one of my yearly list goals slip me away. Today is the due date for me to send in my moleskin for the arthouse group project. I’m so mad at myself that I wasted this opportunity. I really debated spending money to participate, committed, and then just let other things prioritize over it. The journal arrived in January and I was working on NaBloPoMo for my blog, and had several big projects I was working on, but told myself once february came I’d get it done. Then February came with Thing-A-Day and next thing I knew I had less than a week to even formulate any ideas and complete the whole book. Then of course every day when I need to work my regular day job and then come home to create something for thing-a-day, it just didn’t happen. Okay, I have to stop thinking about it, it actually makes me physically sick to my stomach that I didn’t get this done.

Now, on to things that I have been doing:

I made some small circle collages to base paintings off of. Below is the semi finished results.

I can’t tell you how much I love these pendants. They are only (I think) 1.25-1.5″ inches in diameter and took a very “widuw” brush to paint with. The final steps with these pieces before posting them for sale in my shop will be coating the image area in a thin layer of resin and tying on a strap necklace.

Then the other night in a last minute brainstorm attempt to finish my moleskine arthouse book I got the idea to execute an idea that I’ve had in my head for over half my life. Do you remember those stores in the malls called Arcadia? They carried designer notebooks, folders, pens, pencils and all sorts of awesome paper products. It was my favorite store to go to and I had a dream to create my own line of notebooks with covers of all sorts of textures including this astroturf-like indoor outdoor carpeting. It had not occurred to me until the other night as I was drifting  off to sleep to use a moleskine, rather than a spiral-bound notebook. I always have some of the indoor/outdoor carpeting on hand because well, I love everything grass or grass-like, and I use it all the time for different kinds of projects. I also love moleskine and had an unopened package of the cahiers. Viola! They are available in my shop.

Oh, gotta go, I’m already super late for work.