This is what I've been thinking about lately. I just don't know what it's going to take for me to get it back into gear. I've gained so much weight I feel like a bloated Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Art is...

I made this in response to a weekly prompt at Art Squared, a blog showcasing Lita and Samara, "two artsy types, two distinct styles, one weekly prompt". Everyone is invited to join in and post a link to your own interpretation of the prompt. I'm super happy with this piece, and can't wait to see what they have in store for the next!

Samara Gugler, I love you!

I followed a tutorial that Samara Gugler posted on YouTube and made this! I was so shocked by the color I obtained from my watercolor crayons...shocked I tell you. My pic doesn't hold a candle to Samara's work but i'm quite pleased with it, and happy to have learned so much from this exercise!

Thank you Samara for sharing your knowledge, and for allowing me to create something I could have never done before!

To view some of Samara's colorful journal pages, click here.

To view Samara's YouTube video, click here.

Calendar Art

I read an article in the Fall issue of Artful Blogging, by Kate Crane, about an online calendar challenge. One look at that calendar and I was hooked. I wanted to make one right then and there. The Flickr site was like a chocolate factory to me....one creative calendar after another. The colors, the designs, the little drawings and squiggles, the backgrounds and stamps. A visual vat of yumminess! I don't know how many times I went to the Flickr site but it was a LOT. I just couldn't get enough of all that goodness!

I spent most of the day Thursday thinking and planning how I would make a calendar, and then proceeded to put one together that looked nothing like what was in my head. But I did it and I'm moving forward with it. It was fun to make, I have all month to play with it, and I can't wait to make one for September!

Each month Kate starts a new post for the calendar. Check this one out for the end of July/beginning August. All you do is join in with a link to your blog or to Flickr. Easy peasy. If you want to join the challenge, hop on over and read all about it! It's a year long challenge, but you don't have to join in every month, and you can begin whenever you want to! I like this!

I'm a girl, I'll change my mind if I want to....

...and I want to. Just five days after declaring freedom from counters and comments I'm putting them back. My blog seems so naked without them! I really do appreciate the comments that are left by people, I just get funky now and then and feel bad about the comments NOT left, the traffic I'm NOT getting, blah, blah, blah. But hey, if you don't want to leave a comment, fine. If you do, thank you and I hope you have nothing but sunshine and lollipops and rainbows for the rest of the day!

I've been SO touchy lately! I swore I wasn't going to say it but geez, there's just no reason for all this bitchiness, unless it's Mercury in retrograde. HA!

Onward!

xxo

Doodle!

Way back in November, I took a Creative Doodling class with Traci Bautista. Did I blog about it....? I'm not sure....I know I've mentioned that I can't doodle worth a doodle, and that I flunked the class, but I certainly didn't post any doodles, at least not ones created by moi. Even with Traci starting the doodle for you, I had a hard time getting it. It was a great course, well worth the money, and Traci is fabulous. I just didn't think it worked for me.

ANYWAY, I pulled out one of the sketchbooks I have and found some doodles I had done...doodles I did....sounds odd either way! Hey, they weren't half bad for a grown woman! Any kid could do better but it's been a long time since I was a kid. And since I seem to have found this new sense of I-don't-give-a-damn, I think I'm going to post them. I hope you enjoy viewing them as much as I did making them because I have lots more!

These were done in combinations of regular crayon, watercolor crayon, markers and Tulip fabric paint. This was just to get us used to doodling. It wasn't until I started using color rather than plain black marker that I started to like them.

Background was sprayed with Glimmer Mist just for the color. I thought if I didn't shake it up I wouldn't have much glimmer, and I didn't.


I need to go back and outline the flower in this one so it can be seen. The stem of the flower turns into an arrow and pierces the heart.

Declaration of Blog Freedom

I've noticed lately that some bloggers have discontinued allowing comments on their blogs, and I like that. I once thought I could never disable comments on my site but I think it's a good thing for me to do. I rely too much on them, or the lack of them. So I'm not allowing comments any longer. Not that many people comment anyway, especially since I changed my URL and lost a slew of followers and links to my site. I've also removed the counter. The hit numbers can't be right when people are using RSS feeds or Google Reader and besides, who cares how many hits I get? Do you? Do you look and say Wow! She has 14,000 hits on her site! Or do you look and say Wow...no one's posted a response to her all week, or all month!

I was reading Dawn Sokol's blog yesterday when I came across her post about this same thing. I don't know for sure, but I think she wrote this just for me....

"I am going to disable comments again. I did this awhile ago in an attempt to blog really just for myself and I think it’s time to do so once more. I don’t understand why the internet has become SO consuming, but for me it has."

"I’ve started to worry too much again about comments, pages views, subscriber counts, etc. I don’t know how long this no-comment period will last. But please know that it makes my blogging better if I’m blogging just for me. If you want to chat or comment on a post, please feel free to email me. The button to do so is in the sidebar. I will respond if time allows. Know that I appreciate your visiting here, but have come to count on it too much again. Thank you!"

She pretty much sums it up for me. I worry too much about comments and I don't want to do that. I want my blog to belong to me, so I'm removing all those little number counting things that consume me and tell me how popular I am, (or not) and I'm just gonna blog. You can always talk to me on Facebook, or send me an email....the addy is down there on the right.

Have a great day!