Sunday, January 31, 2010

My First ATC Night!

Here in Calgary we have a great building called Art Central, which is home to a host of different art shops, artisans, a flower store, a restaurant and a coffee shop among other things. When I first moved to Calgary in 1994, the building that Art Central now occupies had at least two bars and who knows else what! The building was deteriorating and it was the perfect spot and time to be reborn into something better. If I recall right, Calgary actually has a shortage of affordable art space.

Anyhow, I made it down to The New Gallery last night, where they have Artist Trading Card nights on the last Saturday of every month. I was kind of nervous - how many people would be there? Would I have enough cards? What if they weren't my kind of crowd?

Fortunately everything worked out and I came home with some nice trades. People were really eager to trade, it was almost competitive. People arrived with these huge binders of cards and they got passed around like high school yearbooks. I had only about seven cards to trade and I whipped up two on the spot.

I'll have to get myself a big binder now - and I noticed people trading photo ACEOs as well as prints, so I'll have to do that for next time. It was a little embarrasing to run out of things to trade!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Almost forgot...

If I don't write things down and cross them off, they often go into the void! I wrote a book review for the Etsy Alberta Team Blog. Check it out, as well as the talents of my fellow Albertans!

Monday, January 18, 2010

Workin' on it

I read an article online that today is "Blue Monday", which is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. Today was a bummer, but mostly due to a long company wide meeting in the afternoon. After sitting for two hours in a dark theatre, I was quite ready to go back outside again or take a nap.

Apparently by now a lot of New Year's goals are abandoned as well - and personally I can't believe it's January 18th already! Whoa! Put the brakes on 2010 someone! So far I'm doing really good with one of my Mission 101 goals, which is to make Sundays truly a day of rest. I resisted the urge to vacuum and my sole housework was cleaning the bird cage. I went to the Alliance church behind our house and enjoyed a very thoughtful sermon on faith and good works (as opposed to just good works or faith), then I played cards with our neighbours and later my husband joined us for dinner. A blessed, relaxing day indeed!

Whatever you do though, we all need a day of rest, whether it's on a Sunday or Monday or other day of the week. That was one of the lessons I took from a book called How Did I Get So Busy? by Valorie Burton which I highly recommend. When you get too busy, you start ignoring not only your own physical and spiritual needs, but those of others too. Burton is a warm and sincere author whose gentle advice can put anyone back on the right track for what matters most to them. I have read many a book about "getting things done" but she's the first to address the whole person, not just how many things you can cross off a list :-)

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Christmas 2009

For the past few years I looked forward to buying birdhouse ornaments from one of my favourite crafters. This picture and 2010's are inspired by two of them. As much as I enjoyed doing the Christmas horses, I ran out of ideas for them. My mistake though with the two pictures was not focusing closer in on the birdhouses - they are 7x9" and there's a few inches of pine tree around them. That will be cropped out for both. 2010's is half done - it's going to be a little more on the brown side.


2009 Christmas picture

PanPastel and Colored Pencil ::: 7x9" ::: January 3, 2010

Sunday, January 3, 2010

Big yellow horse coming through!

Until spring rolls around, this is the best picture I can get. The distortion I was going for didn't quite happen, and the pose is almost more of an homage to Geroge Stubb's "Whistlejacket" but I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Painting "loose" or "different" is not usually something I do :-)



Big Yellow Horse Painting


Acrylic ::: 24x24" ::: December 29, 2009