Treasury!

I'm being featured in this lovely treasury by pinkparchmentsoaps on Etsy! You can see my Angel bookmark on the top in the middle. :)

IF - Repair

My new sketch for today's Illustration Friday. I sketch straight in pen, so it gets a little messy. Plus, I chopped my hair off last week and now I seem to be drawing more and more ladies with short hair! ;)

Marigold Wishes and Corn Stalk Dreams...

We took a trip to an incredible pumpkin patch last weekend. But we were all much more interested in these two things: a sea of marigold flowers, and a great corn maze. It was burning hot during the day! Not like fall at all. But as it started to get dark it really cooled down, and then we were able to pick out our pumpkin by the light of the moon.

Three Little Birds

I finally finished my newest painting 'Three Little Birds' over the weekend! It's done in watercolors on 140 lb. watercolor paper, and measures 9x11.
The thing that inspired me to paint this particular piece was a great song (I unfortunately don't know who sings it) that opens with the lines, "Three Little Birds sat on my window, and they told me I don't have to worry." Painting the girl behind a window is really new for me, and when looking at it straight on the highlights aren't as prominent as if you look at it as pictured here from an angle. I hope I didn't over-do it! Any feedback is welcome, as I'm not sure it comes across quite right.
This piece was certainly a challenge, but alot of fun, too!

IF - Late

I am so loving these Illustration Friday themes. They really jump start my imagination!

Illustration Try #1! Need Your Feedback, My Friends!

As many of you may know, my ambition in life career-wise is to become a children's book illustrator. I've decided to really start concentrating on that, and am doing everything I can to go forward with this dream of mine. I decided to try a little mock-up of an illustration in this vein to see how it comes out. It's just a work in progress, but I need all the feedback I can get on it! and please, be as honest as possible (within reason! Hahaha!)

(As a post-sidenote, pencils reallllly don't scan well! There's alot of detail that just didn't show up, even on the darkest scan I could manage! And...it's amazing the problems I can see right off the bat when viewing it not on paper but on my computer! Ugh!)

New Orleans - Revisited

This is one of my very favorite pictures I took while visiting New Orleans last year. They have these horse posts all over the French Quarter, and this one particularly caught my attention, with its (perhaps generations of) layer upon layer of paint.

My New Little Tree!

I love to garden and grow things, though my thumb is far from green! One thing I'm pretty good at is growing avocado trees from pits. This is one of my very favorite foods to eat, and when I'm done I'll sometimes take the pit, stick some toothpicks in it, and place it on the rim of a cup filled with water. A month or so in my sunny kitchen window and I have the beginnings of a little tree!
This one is has really taken off! After pinching it back and waiting a little bit it's finally ready to be planted. You can see how wonderfully the roots grew in the first picture. In the second picture is my new little tree freshly planted in soil!

Sweetest Thing

Here's a painting I've been sitting on for months. I painted the background and sketched out the figure, and then put it aside. Then, this weekend, I pulled it out and finished it! Yippee! Please meet "Sweetest Thing", because, after all, what is better than inspiring this degree of trust in a nervous little feathered friend? She measures 11x14, acrylics on canvas panel, and will be for sale soon in my Etsy shop!

"The Lullaby"

Here is my completed acrylic painting, "The Lullaby"! Measures 9x12 on gallery-wrapped canvas, and will be posted soon to my Etsy shop!
I've never attempted anything like this, so I'm quite happy with how it turned out. I added a mouth to this specific piece as I didn't want it to appear scary or threatening. :)