They're ready for a new home, the mini journals that is!

After what seems like a revisit to writing college term papers, the listing descriptions of each southwest wildlife mini journal are complete! The journals are available for purchase in my Artfire and Etsy online shops. Although in Artfire, I could go more into the inspiration for each journal in the listing. I feel good that this step is finished, and the next step is hopefully shipping them off to a happy buyer soon! Have a great and blessed day!!

New Project, Hiking/Trail Riding Journals

With the Unicorn painting finished, and listed on both Etsy and Artfire (and Twittered!), time for my latest functional art project. Small, hand held size hiking or trail riding journals. These journals will be embellished with natural stones or silver on the leather lacing and then a miniature painting on the cover. I think these will be very unique.

My theme is wildlife and landscapes of the southwest. I plan on using stones that are natural to the landscape depicted for the journal decoration. For example, one journal cover will feature the feral mustangs of Nevada, and I will be using natural (as possible) Nevada mined turquoise and silver beads. Reason being, Nevada is well known for it's illustrious turquoise mines and of course the abundant silver mines. I will also make two additional journals, plans are for an Elk looking over the Grand Canyon (copper and silver beads) and a Buffalo (bison) in Yellowstone (still deciding on stones; need to do some more research).

So I have the theme selected, still need to get more reference material together for the miniature paintings. I have cut all the paper out and am ready to start binding the journals. I'm thinking I will bind and bead each journal first, and then get started on each matching painting. My time is now directed on this new project; I'm excited to see how these will turn out in time! I'll keep on with updates every week!

Eagle Trio Sketches and Painting

I know I alluded in an earlier post about an eagle themed painting I was going to do. Well, it's finished and made into a beaded bookmark that's available in my Etsy and Artfire shops. I have to say, I'm pretty pleased with how the finished product looks. This post will be about the painting process though, just my thoughts about how this miniature painting came about.

I have in mind for a series of bookmarks of southwest wildlife animals, such as eagles, cougars and bears to start. Eagles and birds of prey have always been a fascinating subject for me so I chose eagles to start. In researching my reference photos, I decided on a collage of three scenes, a young eagle bust, an eagle in flight, and an adult eagle bust. So I had the reference pics chosen and then set out to make tonal drawings and sketches. Since I don't have a lot of experience painting birds, the tonal sketches will help give a better guideline of where to push the dark values, the mid range values and light values. I sketched the eagles freehand from the reference pics as I need a very small size to fit on the bookmark size paper. Sure, I could have manipulated the reference pic copies to a small enough size and then just traced the outline, however, I wanted to work on my artistic skills and chose the long tedious way. And yes, my eraser got a good work out but I learned so much in the process.

The page of sketches:

Compiling this type of composition took some math skills, which I sorely have struggled with all my life (I'm also slightly dyslectic). It took some time to get the balance just right and then all the resizing of the sketches of the birds. I used the eagle eye as the balance reference, draw the eye first and then balance the rest of the bird around the eye. Seemed to me to be the logical choice of where to start! Now what gave me the most grief was getting the beaks curved and positioned just right!! I never knew . So I wound up breaking the beaks down to a series of stacked blocks to give me a better perspective of attaining the three dimensional look. You can see that in the lower right hand bust sketch. My eraser got the most workout here!

Pics of the finished sketches:

Once the sketches and composition was done now onto the actual painting! Doing the sketches gave me a great base to work from and helped me tweak some changes as I was doing the painting. I used mostly Faber Castell watercolor pencils, they have great color and flow with water, and some creata color and derwents brand pencils too. Unfortunately I did not keep notes or pics of my painting process so I don't have them to show here. So that's a project for the next wildlife painting! Here is the finished product with the sketch reference:

This was a wonderful learning process, it may have taken me a while, but when you insists on learning at your own pace, that's what happens!

Valentines Day

Seems the older I get, the less I get excited about holidays. They usually mean to me now "gee, more extra work and pretend to like it...". I should be happy about Valentines, I am so blessed to have my Joe with me for about 16 years, pretty good record now days!!

I did at least make a couple of Valentine tags for my shops. I came up with the designs in one afternoon and then put them together over the next day or two. And then got them listed on Etsy and Artfire about 10 days before today. While the tags have had a bit of views, no sales, unless someone rushes in today! I guess after today, I'll take them off the stores and stash them with the unsold Christmas tags I did last year.

Actually have an Etsy meeting today with my Ft. Worth mini team of the Etsy Texas Crafters. And it's going to be at Central Market on Hulen. That's going to work out great, because I can then pick up some prepared food for our Valentine's dinner tonight. Joe will be home late from work and we'll both be too tired to dress up and find our way through the crowds at the local resturants. Our Etsy meeting will talk more about getting a booth at a craft fair /flea market set up at a monthly local trade days, which I'm interested in. Gotta keep the ideas flowing!

Happy Valentine's Day, I am grateful for true love whenever it happens!