Hello friends and Happy New Year! The latest Minted Art Challenge calls for pieces of art that are 18 x 24 inches or larger, to be blown up to Minted’s newest large format size of 48 x 70 inches! I naturally wanted to get in on this fun, as a lot of my clients ask for HUGE paintings. My Plant Cell series looks particularly beautiful blown up large. These are the nine pieces I entered. Voting is now open…Please vote here if you get the chance! Thank you!
My pop up shop this past Saturday was great fun! Several original watercolors and many prints sold. Thanks to everyone who came on out!
And West Elm invited me back! What a lovely company to support local artists. So. Much. Fun. Will keep you posted on my next one! Happy Leap Day friends!
Hello friends! It is bright and sunny in Chicago…57 degrees today! Feels like Spring…but I know better;)
I have fun news to share! I will be doing an artist pop-up shop at my local West Elm at Old Orchard in Skokie, Illinois next Saturday, February 27th from 12-4pm. I will be selling prints, stationary and originals on paper and canvas! Here is a peak at what I’ve been working on to sell at the shop…
Gotta love that West Elm supports local artists:) Please come on by!
Hello friends…it’s been a while. Lots of changes since I last posted in Spring. I have a new little girl…Violet! She is the sweetest baby and we are all in love. Juggling life with three kiddos under 7 has been a little hectic to say the least…both lovely and overwhelming at the same time. The big girls are in school now most of the day and the baby is on a regular nap schedule. So here I am showing up…to do the work and push my little art business forward. My Art goals for 2016 include cleaning up my website so stay tuned! Also, I have been revamping my home studio and am loving it! Here’s a little peak into the space and what I’ve been working on lately. Happy New Year everyone. May 2016 bring us all fresh perspective!
A corner of my Art Studio
Once my husband’s home office desk…now my art desk!
A little shelf I picked up from Target to house my supplies in mason jars. Also…odds and ends that inspire me:)
I am, very much at the moment, into the simplicity of Black and White watercolor.
Spring is upon us in Chicago! The days are creeping up to 50 degrees, the snow is melting and my daffodils are poking through the ground. The days are lighter in the evening and you can hear birds chirping! How I love the change of seasons…especially out of winter’s long, dark days.
I notice each season how the direction of my art changes as well. Previous summers, I’ve worked on extremely colorful, graffiti inspired abstracts…last winter I did a lot of large scale florals, with moody dark backgrounds and thick layering of paint. Lately I’ve been using a lot of watercolor…something I haven’t picked up in well, a decade! No joke. The organic, unexpected nature of watercolor with it’s bleeding and soft layering are speaking to me right now. Perhaps it’s, again, the change of season and light. Perhaps it’s the baby in my belly, rolling and kicking up a storm, preparing to show her face in 8 weeks! Whatever the reason, I am loving the blurry, natural, soft and earthy quality I am getting from working with watercolor. Here are some recent watercolor paintings I’ve done. You can find some originals still available in my Etsy shop! Happy beginning of Spring friends!
Hi friends! So here we are on the last day of February and I wanted to share with you this month’s Creative Unblock project. The Jealous Curator is hosting this awesome monthly project series, where an artist from her book Creative Block gives us a challenge to break out of a creative rut. You can see my work from last month’s incredible challenge here! February’s challenge was from artist Kate Bingaman-Burt. We were asked to document the items in our medicine cabinet…eeeek, right?! The medium I chose to work in was watercolor. I thought it’d be fun to use such a romantic and organic medium to tell the story of everyday items you use for toiletries! And in black and white….they’d be just sophisticated enough to matte and hang in a…well…bathroom! The Jealous Curator was gracious enough to feature my work on her incredible blog today…check it out here and check her site tomorrow for March’s Creative UNblock project. Have a wonderful weekend!
I am so thrilled to have my mini botanical paintings featured in this dreamy Valentine’s inspired wedding shoot on Storyboard Wedding! My dear friend Jessica Davis of Soulflowers in Tennessee invited me to collaborate on this gorgeous themed wedding. Taken from the Dire Straits song, Romeo and Juliet, “Love You Like the Stars Above” was the theme. The colors were to be lush pinks and reds, moody dark blues and amethyst with celestial golds. The result…blew me away. My mini canvases of hot pink and red roses are featured at the tables as decor and wedding favors for the gifts. And now I have some at my Etsy shop for sale! Check out the wedding here friends and I hope everyone had a lovely Valentine’s weekend!
*Photos pulled from the Storyboard Wedding blog post are taken by the talented Amy Nicole Photography.
I participated in The Jealous Curator‘s January challenge of 12 months of Creative UNblock. And wow, did I have fun! If you don’t follow her amazing blog on contemporary art…you should and if you don’t have her books, Creative Block and Collage…get them! SO good. For the first challenge her Creative Block artist, Trey Speegle, came up with this unblocking exercise…
“Make a drawing in black and white {or use a found image} and then photocopy the drawing onto card stock 50 times – or enough copies so that you won’t “worry” about how many you’ve used. {Take your time and draw or find an image that you really love, and will like working with over and over} Then, alter the image in as many different ways as you can think of with colored pencils, paint, cutting, whatever. You can modify this idea and change it in whatever way you like but the important thing is to turn off your brain and just play with a repeated form and let your mind see where no ideas or thought process takes you.
Create your own tight parameters… then give yourself a LOT of room to play. Have fun.”
So with 3 days left in January I did it! I used one of my drawings from my 2014 Sketch-a-day Project, and made many variations of it using paint, rhinestones, pearls, paper, moss, and yarn. Here’s the original image:
And here’s what I came up with…
I had SUCH a blast. You can follow along and do a creative UNblock project each month. Just tag your pictures #creativeUNblock on instagram and twitter. The Jealous Curator posted February’s today! And you can follow my creative pursuits on instagram. Last thing I’m leaving you with is a little video of all my pieces together…http://flipagram.com/f/Q7OotVQ8WQ.
Ok friends, here’s the last part of December’s kazillion sketches! Had to split them into 3 posts as there were so many due to getting WAY behind on my sketches during the first trimester of my pregnancy. Needless to say, not much got done in September/October. In case you missed it here is Part 1 and Part 2.
Doing a 365 Day project was both challenging and SO fulfilling. It was challenging to force myself to draw something on days where I had been working on a commissioned art piece (with a deadline), while taking care of my two girls and their pick up/drop off schedule of school and activities. It was challenging over the summer months when I was vacationing with my family, or keeping my kids entertained and experiencing all the joys of summer, while trying to grow my small art business. But it was just one sketch a day, really. Totally doable. Unless, of course I slacked for a couple of days…or in the case of the entirety of my first trimester of pregnancy, a couple weeks! I was determined to do them all…and I did.
Here’s what made it SO worth it…
Material: I now have 4 sketch books chock-full of ideas for paintings, prints…whatever! Some of my original drawings are already listed at my Etsy shop. I’ll be adding more soon.
Memories: I have drawings of my precious children that we’ll have in our family forever. I also have drawings of my beloved husband and our pets. These are priceless.
Practice: I tried many different styles from detailed portraits to calligraphy to cartoonish abstracts. I worked with different tools. Mostly, I used micron pens, colored pencils and faber-castell pitt artist pen markers. I figured out what I liked to do best…and I feel like my drawing got better!
Sales: Sharing my sketches led to sales…many sales! I doubled my art income in 2014 from the previous year!!! Showing my drawings on instagram and facebook either reminded people of what I could do for them, or sparked an idea for a commission. I would post a picture of a peony and lo and behold I was commissioned to paint a 3 ft x 3 ft painting of peonies for a client’s dining room!
It was somewhat bittersweet seeing it come to an end on December 31st. I would love to continue my sketch-a-day in 2015 but am giving myself the break as we are welcoming our third child in just a few months. Who knows, though, I may devise some other daily or weekly challenge for a month or two in 2015. Painting a week? Photograph a day? I’ll let you know;) Here are the last group of sketches, in no particular order, from 2014. Thanks for following friends!
