Snippet about my artwork.

Question:

"I have an art question--is all of your art made out of flowers and plants? Do you paint ANY of it?"

Answer:

My art is *mostly* made out of flowers and plants. So, for example, on the temple pictures I've done, the background sky and grass are painted and the lines to define walls are painted... other than that, everything is flowers and leaves. For the dragon picture I recently posted, the only thing painted is the whites of his eyes. His scaly skin was the perfect spotty leaf, the fire and scales on his back are a colorful maple leaf I picked up last fall. The marshmallows are baby's breath flowers. His webby wings are made from skeleton leaves I found in my backyard. The background was created digitally.


Sometimes I embellish with glitter or other scrapbooking supplies to add interest. Its hard to see, but this fairy is sparkly as is her wand and the center of the flower she's passed.

I guess my philosophy is that anything goes as long as I like how it turns out in the end. I love using leaves and flowers because I think they add more interest than my imagination could come up with. :) The colors and imperfections add to the uniqueness.

(As an FYI, my designs-in-floral website is down due to a tornado hitting the building where the server resides (no where near me by the way). It may be down for a while, so I'm working on redirecting traffic to go to my Etsy shop in the mean time. Hopefully it won't be too long until its up and running again.)

before and after.

As of Tuesday, ‎November ‎04, ‎2008... My driveway has looked like this. We did shovel away some of the rock pile so that a car could squeeze in, but it's been a tight fit for the past 6 months!

Today. ahhh... room to move. amazing. The junk pile has been cut in half, with promises of the rest being gone with the next garbage day. And below, the latest progress on the front porch area...
All I can say is its about time. Lets keep it moving!

A deal for my readers and a busy day.

Hey all, thanks so much for the compliments on my dragon picture! I sure needed the positive reinforcement. :) So, for you guys, I'm making a deal. I usually charge $20 for my fine art prints. They are printed on cotton rag, fine art papers and printed with pigment inks so that your print will last more than your lifetime. For my blog readers only, I'm offering the prints for $16 with free shipping! To get this deal, go to my etsy site and purchase the listing. What usually happens is they link you to paypal to pay right away. What you need to do is "buy" it on Etsy, then wait for me to send you a invoice, so I can correct your price. You can then click the link in the email to pay. You can go here to buy my print on etsy. Offer ends May 21.

As for life, it was a busy day today. We finally are making some visible progress again on the house!!!! Its been a LONG wait, with a long story to explain it all, so I won't bore you with the details. I will, however, post pictures very soon!

We also said goodbye to our racoon today. Turns out it was a SHE racoon and she had her babies up in the attic. Now we have to get a bid to see how much it will cost to repair the roof and clean the place out. It STINKS up there, the insulation is torn to bits and peed and pooped on all over. We still have to check the stuff we had stored up there. I think things like our luggage are going to need to be replaced.. along with anything that was not in a plastic bin. What a joke. The irony is that I was relieved that she will be relocated with her babies instead of killed. *sigh* Just make sure its FAR FAR away. (He said he drives an hour away to relocate the animals he collects).

Anyway, that's a day in the life for today...

um. dragons have wings.

oh yea, dragon's have wings. Any ideas for a name for this pic? They're roasting marshmallows together in case you can't see the detail.

What do you think?

Our latest visitor

I thought it was a fluke that this guy was on the garage roof last week. Unfortunately, we've seen him there several times since. The freakiest thing ever was when we closed the garage door while we could see him and he disappeared INTO THE ROOF! Apparently, he climbed up the tree and dug through the roofing and is living in the attic over the garage there. He's damaged the gutter there obviously as well. Mice were seriously ENOUGH. What am I supposed to do with this guy!?! I'm so freaked at what he may have done to the stuff I actually have up in that attic. We can't get to it right now because of the construction stuff blocking the way to the entrance. EEEK!

Turn off week

2 weeks ago, the kids came home with a flyer about "Turnoff week". The school was challenging the kids to take a week off from TV, computer games and game consoles (wii, nintendo etc). They have done this before and you would not believe the amount of whining and complaining and ANGER my kids had over it. However, just as in years past, I was determined to make it happen. Goose is the challenging one, he LOVES the computer. He would play on there all day everyday if I let him.

Well, I don't know what the difference was this year, but we had the easiest, and most rewarding turn off week ever! I think there was an average of one kid each day asking if they could watch a movie or whatever it was, but there wasn't even any whining when I said, "no, its turnoff week." Just an "oh yea" or "ok." The older kids came home from school and played outside, made crafts with stuff in the recycling bin, read books and played games together. It was a beautiful thing.

I don't know if this is a local thing, or if it is national or whatever, but I am curious if you have done this. If you haven't, I totally recommend it! Tank's TV addiction has been thwarted, Goose realizes that he likes to do other things besides the computer! And Sweetie got to share her love of arts and crafts with her siblings. Those 3 actually sat down together and played a game of Chutes and ladders! And this was AFTER turnoff week had ended! Goose and I were talking about it, and he said, "you know, last year I had some pretty strong words about having to do turn off week."

yes, I remember, but its not so bad this year is it?
"No, its not bad at all."


So, here are a few statistics to get you motivated to try this experiment:

Number of minutes per week parents spend in meaningful conversation with ther children: 38.5
Number of minutes per week average child watches TV: 1,680


Hours per year the average american youth spends in school: 900
Hours per year the average american youth spends watching TV: 1500

Over the week, here are a few things we did:

Went to the bookstore and bought new interesting books to read throughout the week
Practiced piano, much more efficiently than during other weeks
melty bead crafts
balancing bird craft
Went on a walk
Jumped on the trampoline
Went to the arboretum
rode bikes
played with friends
learned to rollerblade
played card games
played board games
made cookies

Need more inspiration, check this out: YIKES!!!:

"If you watch an average of 31.5 hours of TV each week (which the average person in the US does) and you value your time at minimum wage of $5.85 an hour, you are spending nearly $800 a month ($798.53) to watch TV. That comes to nearly $10,000 ($9582.30) a year."

Ok, enough. :) I'm sure you get it,

now just do it.