Chloe Glaes

I have many fabulous finds/purchases/discoveries to share this week.

Okay so three, but still they are so wonderful I've been saving them up for one big blow out as it were.

As some may remember I wear a rune stone every day and have for the past oh 10 years or so (change comes slowly, if it comes at all. Now where's my pipe weed?) I'd been thinking lately how I'd like something different, something colorful, something shiny.

Enter this gorgeous glass pendent:

It has a translucent shine on the top that changes with the light giving it a shimmer and almost glow that gives it far more depth than one would expect from a little pendent.

This bad boy was hand crafted by a good twitter friend from Chloe Glaes. They have some amazing pieces like this one:

Or this one:

Or this:

And the most amazing part is they're all $15 or under for a gorgeous piece of art that's sparkly and I can't stop playing with.

So go and check them out, that address again is Chloe Glaes.

Cards, cards, cards

I like to bounce between creating small, medium and large paintings. One month it's nothing but 16X20's the next tiny pendants.

Lately I've been embracing my small cards and getting into the halloween spirit.

The first was the more classic graveyard in studies of blue with a few tiny bats that were a giant pain to paint:

Then I wanted to try a graveyard in black and white, something striking and spooky but not blatantly so.

I've been talking up a storm that if I ever get really good at styrofoam shaping and learn hydraulics I am making my own Weeping Angel from the Doctor Who episode Blink. But til that day I can I did the second best thing and made a painting:

It might be best to not look away from the angel, you know, just in case.

The amazing thing is those all sold almost as soon as I listed them. Which encouraged a few more that I haven't listed for sale yet, who knows maybe they'll be gone in an hour too:

First a simple witch silhouette against the moon.

And finally a ghost haunting a graveyard. It started out as being black and white when I realized that oh crap white ghost is blending in far too much with the background so now it's a day time haunting:

And those are my latest in the Halloween painting list. I'm sure there will be more before the 31st of October gets here.

Corn=grass?

After last Christmas's Rifftrax Live show I started a little tradition of racing home, the jokes buzzing about in my head causing me to toss and turn the night til I could get up the next morning and put some joke or idea to pen/paper/and image document.

It was The Tree With No Account that started it all:

Last Thursday brought a new RiffTrax Live show and with it a (couple of) new ideas:

First the burning question that sits upon the minds of every great philosopher:

Students would find Plato hunched over his desk furiously scribbling out to the Gods beseeching them to just say is corn grass or not! Alas all to no avail.

We may have solved the one hand clapping issue but we still have no idea when it comes to the grass/corn debate.

And now we come to the domestic half of the jokes. Apparently in the 1930's you couldn't swing an asbestos cat without hitting a housewife on fire. They loved every and any opportunity to set themselves aflame thanks to open tubs of gasoline strewn about the house:

Oh how I dream of going back to that simpler time when people regularly disfigured or killed themselves because they had no idea gasoline was flammable.

And finally as a bit of a dare someone challenged me to take twitter av's and somehow make a T-shirt that had a theme of "Legion."

It did create an interesting t-shirt though:

And now I must rest my brain waiting with baited breath for the Halloween Rifftrax Live show featuring House on Haunted Hill.

I better try my hand at getting the Drunk Leprechaun look just right.

Kitties and Trees

I make it no secret that when it comes to creativity I have more than a touch of ADD.


I enjoy the thrill of learning how to do something new, conquer a mountain or just see if I can get a crazy idea out of my head and tack it to some paper but once I have that picture sketched out, that zombie zombified or that monkey finally figuring out how to juggle I figure it's time to move on.

Which leads to me having absolutely no theme whatsoever when it comes to my paintings. So far there's one and only one subject I like to come back to and that's trees, but even then each time I want something new and different.

Like this recent attempt when I decided to try a tree stretched across two different canvases.

Anyway this is all just an excuse to show off three little trading card sized paintings (which is my new fascination til I get sick of it and make something on say a 48"x30" hunk of canvas or something).

They're three kitties that each have very special interests. The first is Bogart who loved Law and Order, specifically Detective Briscoe:

This is Quentin, he's quite into music and chasing after those invisible notes people who got into the wrong cat nip go on about:

And last and probably my favorite is Marilyn who is apparently a RENThead.

Perhaps each of my paintings should come with a warning, there is a good chance that you shall own the only one ever created in existence because the artist just got distracted and only works in the medium of grass weaving now.

Chasing The Illusive High

They hook you at a young age. It starts simply enough, a lost afternoon in the backyard or at the kitchen table atop a pile of newspapers, with only a large mess and abstract ideas trapped within the pages to show for it.

It's all a bit of fun at first, something to do when you're bored or need to feel special. But then the cravings kick in, the smell of a fresh box of crayons, the rip of a piece of red construction paper, and the malty taste of Elmer's leave you in such a state that you don't know if you're awake, asleep or trapped in some new dimension with Rod Sterling.

Before you know it you're hocking VCR's for an Easel and a box of watercolors and your friends find you half starved sitting in a small windowless room ranting about the trees not behaving or hunched over a computer your eyes crusted over as you fervently retype the same sentence endlessly.

Parents, you must protect your children from that most deceptive of drugs - the creativity high.

You think it's no big deal to hook your son or daughter up with a coloring book and a 6 pack of crayons, something to help them relax and you'd much rather it happen in your own home. After all, everyone's doing it. But that little 6 pack is never enough, soon you're buying them the 16 and then the 24 packs to get them off. Then, when you're cleaning your kids room, you find hidden at the bottom of their toy box every parent's nightmare a 96 assortment box of crayons!

Creativity gone unchecked can lead to all manner of illegal activities - composing and recording a song about flying cannibalistic monsters, a novel series about a wizarding community or the most dangerous of all a painting of a bunch of soup cans. Oh I can't even begin to tell you the horrors we found at that studio. The walls splattered in red, tomato and chicken noodle soup everywhere.

Please, for both your sake and your childs, squash any sense of creativity your darling ever has by belittling their creations and shoving accounting literature brochures in with their lunch pails.

If not, you may find them skipping school to do this:

Won't somebody please think of the children.

IWONIWONIWONIWON

Awhile back I shared with you a tale I weaved about a Knight traveling through a foreign land seeking aid for his ill Arl and finding only certain death. It was composed using the backstory from a video game and for a contest from a replica weapon company.

All in all the last thing I'd have ever expected to find myself working on a year ago, but create and enter it in I did.

Then began the waiting game, I knew I had til August 10th to try to put the whole thing out of my mind and concentrate on making new cards:

Yesterday, early morning I logged on and checked my e-mail, nothing new. Oh well, I guess I was just hopefully and at least I had fun writing it.

Then at 10 I recieve this cryptic letter:

"You should be receiving some information today. Please check out Epic Weapons website around 5:00 PM Eastern today.
Customer Service Department
Epic Weapons"

So, does that mean that maybe I might have nah . . it's probably just a form letter. Still . . .

I passed the day putting it out of my mind as much as possible, working on more paintings:

but my eye kept turning to the clock, willing it to be 5 PM.

In the middle of flipping the steaks I log onto the contest website where I see they finally announced the winners. My heart catches, holding still til I scroll down and there under the category I entered I see this:

WOOOO!!!! I WON!

Okay you're probably a bit confused as it says Richard: taking into account the fact that this was one a back story for a videogame with a contest where the prize were replica weapons and two I spun a tale referring to vampires I thought that using my husband's name might be a bit more prudent.

The whole fact I even felt that a male name would give me a better chance is a whole other can of worms I shall leave unopened for the time being.

For now I'm walking around gobsmacked and radiating that something I created and formed was actually awarded a $50 gift certificate.

If you missed it the first time here's the story - sorry the letter winning story.

I should be back to my normal pessimistic self soon enough but for now. YAYAYAYAYAYAYA!

Zombie overload

Hints of fall are in the air.

The kids are braving the sweltering heat of late summer to get in one last good romp before they're chained back to their desks.

Stores have huge displays of pencils, pens and paper without a sense of irony.

And my brain has turned fully to Halloween.

Last time I gave you Vegetarian Zombie and his love of fine beans.

Today I give you The Horror that came from the bakery section:

I wanted to pair the cute mad love of tiny baked goods with the undead madness of the zombie. Or take two popular things and jam them together. Probably a little of both.

And I also revisited an old idea and gave it a new spit shine and polish.

In the vein of Vegetarian Zombie I sat down and sketched out Zombie Lawyer:

Click on the image to see all the little details I added.

I for one welcome our Zombie overlords because I got myself a nice boom stick.

Oh I've also listed a few of my Trading Cards in my shop.

Raven By Moonlight:

Big Blue Marble:

Baby Sea Turtle:

Oh and I also added another pendant - this one of a Waterfall with a little hidden surprise.

So aside from the Earth, the baby sea turtle and the mermaid my minds been fully focused on Halloween.

Teenagers

It's hard to think it was just a year ago when we first got this cute little 10 week old puppy into our lives to keep us up at night, on our toes as she sampled anything found on the floor and pushed her boundries.

Now that cute little puppy is a full blown teenager, complete with sass back and demanding we give her attention unless she needs her own space.

They grow up so fast.