Thursday, May 19, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
All Aglow... FAE Team Art
Thanks to Julie of Mermaiden Creations for including my map of Unnamed Land No. 5 in this lovely, glowing Fantasy Artists of Etsy treasury. To see more work from the FAE team, search Etsy for "faeteam."
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Sweet Spring Days
Connor and I ended up at the Norfolk Botanical Garden earlier this week, by chance, and took a lovely walk on a perfect spring day.
All pictures taken with the Hipstamatic app for iPhone.
All pictures taken with the Hipstamatic app for iPhone.
Friday, April 08, 2011
In Case of a Government Shutdown.
This is my professional art blog, so I avoid political discussion here and on my Twitter account as well, but I am going to make an exception right now. Please hear me out.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion about government spending and taxes, and I can accept that your opinion might not be the same as mine (which I am not actually going to detail here).
But here's what I wish everyone realized. The government is not an abstract entity. It is made up of real people with real families who put real money back into the economy.
My husband is in the military. I am a work-at-home mother with an income that is unreliable at best. We rely on his paycheck to pay our bills, and it is suddenly very much in question, not through any fault of his own. Furthermore, even if the government shuts down and he's not getting paid, as a member of the military, my husband will be required to report to work without pay. So he won't be able to go get a second job or stay home with our son so I can go rustle up some emergency short-term job.
There are 2.8 million U.S. federal employees. Whether you think they all deserve their jobs or not is irrelevant to the fact that if they, or even just some of them, suddenly have their pay cut off because of a government shutdown, that is a whole lot of money that will suddenly not be in circulation.
That is, if those people don't get paid, they can't pay their bills, their mortgages, etc. They also can't buy food and discretionary purchases from cars to clothing to vacations. All of the companies and organizations who normally receive portions of that money will suddenly see their revenue drop as well - and that probably means employee layoffs, so those people won't be able to pay their bills too.
Unless you live completely off the grid, all of this will affect you, just as the recession affected us all.
This is very personal. If you feel government spending should change, whether you want the whole government to be bigger or smaller, or one part bigger and another part smaller, you are entitled to your opinions, and I support your right to ask for whatever changes you would like to see, just as I will continue to fight for my own beliefs.
But whatever changes are made, cuts or increases of any sort, they should be made in a responsible, well thought-out and cooperative manner. There are real people behind all this, relying on paychecks, which they have earned, and they and we don't deserve to be held hostage to precipitous whims on either side.
Thank you for your time.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion about government spending and taxes, and I can accept that your opinion might not be the same as mine (which I am not actually going to detail here).
But here's what I wish everyone realized. The government is not an abstract entity. It is made up of real people with real families who put real money back into the economy.
My husband is in the military. I am a work-at-home mother with an income that is unreliable at best. We rely on his paycheck to pay our bills, and it is suddenly very much in question, not through any fault of his own. Furthermore, even if the government shuts down and he's not getting paid, as a member of the military, my husband will be required to report to work without pay. So he won't be able to go get a second job or stay home with our son so I can go rustle up some emergency short-term job.
There are 2.8 million U.S. federal employees. Whether you think they all deserve their jobs or not is irrelevant to the fact that if they, or even just some of them, suddenly have their pay cut off because of a government shutdown, that is a whole lot of money that will suddenly not be in circulation.
That is, if those people don't get paid, they can't pay their bills, their mortgages, etc. They also can't buy food and discretionary purchases from cars to clothing to vacations. All of the companies and organizations who normally receive portions of that money will suddenly see their revenue drop as well - and that probably means employee layoffs, so those people won't be able to pay their bills too.
Unless you live completely off the grid, all of this will affect you, just as the recession affected us all.
This is very personal. If you feel government spending should change, whether you want the whole government to be bigger or smaller, or one part bigger and another part smaller, you are entitled to your opinions, and I support your right to ask for whatever changes you would like to see, just as I will continue to fight for my own beliefs.
But whatever changes are made, cuts or increases of any sort, they should be made in a responsible, well thought-out and cooperative manner. There are real people behind all this, relying on paychecks, which they have earned, and they and we don't deserve to be held hostage to precipitous whims on either side.
Thank you for your time.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Connor's Island
I've had my hands full lately, trying to get caught up on both business and personal administrative things. I pretty much abandoned the bookkeeping when Connor was born, but now that taxes are looming, I've been working frantically to catch up.
So since I only have an hour or two to work each day, anyway, I've put most other things on hold, including commissions and new projects. To relax, I've been working on Connor's first map, which I hope to finish and have framed in time for his first birthday in June.
I added a few more things by ink after I shot this photo, but now the inking is done, and this week, I'm painting the ocean.
This painting is one of the largest I've done, at 18" x 24", and not for the first time, I'm learning that I must work more slowly with water than I can on a smaller painting. I generally choose not to stretch my watercolor paper ahead of time, because it changes the texture of the paper in a way that makes ink spread sloppily, and if I stretch the paper after I ink it, then I run the risk of it buckling irreversibly. I guess that's not supposed to happen if you do it, you know, correctly, but it's happened to me. So instead, I usually do a sort of post-stretching, in which I saturate the final painting from the back, sandwich it with absorbent paper or cardboard, and weight it down with heavy books so it dries flat. It might not be proper, but it works beautifully for me. (It helps that I have a lot of large, heavy books. I feel this gives them a chance to earn their keep around here.)
This lack of pre-stretching, though, means that it's easy to over-saturate the unstretched paper while painting, so I must work in smaller portions. It's a good exercise in patience and working slowly and methodically, which is not my usual m.o., especially now that I have so little time on my hands.
I'm anxious to be finished, but I'm very pleased with it, and it is a special process to make something for my own child. I hope he will treasure it as he grows older, and I hope that, in the meantime, it brings him hours of happy adventures through imagination.
So since I only have an hour or two to work each day, anyway, I've put most other things on hold, including commissions and new projects. To relax, I've been working on Connor's first map, which I hope to finish and have framed in time for his first birthday in June.
I added a few more things by ink after I shot this photo, but now the inking is done, and this week, I'm painting the ocean.
This painting is one of the largest I've done, at 18" x 24", and not for the first time, I'm learning that I must work more slowly with water than I can on a smaller painting. I generally choose not to stretch my watercolor paper ahead of time, because it changes the texture of the paper in a way that makes ink spread sloppily, and if I stretch the paper after I ink it, then I run the risk of it buckling irreversibly. I guess that's not supposed to happen if you do it, you know, correctly, but it's happened to me. So instead, I usually do a sort of post-stretching, in which I saturate the final painting from the back, sandwich it with absorbent paper or cardboard, and weight it down with heavy books so it dries flat. It might not be proper, but it works beautifully for me. (It helps that I have a lot of large, heavy books. I feel this gives them a chance to earn their keep around here.)
This lack of pre-stretching, though, means that it's easy to over-saturate the unstretched paper while painting, so I must work in smaller portions. It's a good exercise in patience and working slowly and methodically, which is not my usual m.o., especially now that I have so little time on my hands.
I'm anxious to be finished, but I'm very pleased with it, and it is a special process to make something for my own child. I hope he will treasure it as he grows older, and I hope that, in the meantime, it brings him hours of happy adventures through imagination.
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