Snow Penguins

Well, I finally finished the penguins. Now that my internet is working properly again, well, mostly properly again, I can post it :)

Tire Swing

Hello lovely people :D  Just a little bit of fun to help get me back into the swing of things. Thank you for all your wonderful and kind comments on my last post. You all are wonderful!

IF Sky

Instead of singing "rain, rain go away",  Lizzy and Arabella wanted it to keep falling from the sky. Playing in puddles is just too much fun :D 

My son's favorite days are rainy days. I love the rain too, as long as I don't have to drive in it, and as long as it doesn't last for days on end, because my yard becomes a small pond when it does. ;)

Illustration Friday's prompt this week is sky. I've been having a bit of a dry-spell with personal work. I have started illustrations for the IF prompts for the past three or four weeks without finishing one or even posting a sketch,  so, this is a carry over from water.

Yay, I finished it. Now I need to go back and do the other ones that I started...

IF Imagination

 

Milly and Tilly love to twirl and twirl while imagining that they are dancing in the center of the Milky Way...  or something like that :D.

I started this for last weeks prompt, Identical and along the way it turned it into this weeks prompt Imagination mostly because I didn't get it finished in time. Well, I didn't really try to finish it. I sketched it on Thursday while I sat in the waiting room at the Center for the Visually Impaired and didn't get back to it until last night. I did try to paint them dancing on clouds, but it just wasn't working. Sparkles and stars are the next best thing though. ;)  I thought I'd post it progressively, because I haven't done that in a while. 

 I hope that you are all having a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to comment :)

IF Teacher

Ms. Marple was a wonderful ice skating teacher. She even made a safety net to keep her pupils safe. Don't worry, she's a grandmother a thousand times over and became a vegetarian weeks ago, which in a spiders life, is like years ;)  I started this for last weeks prompt, Freeze, but I got sidetracked.

IF Refresh

updated version

I'm trying to "refresh" my style with some silly creatures ;)


*So, my husband let me know that the sweet face just didn't work with him trying to catch monsters so I revised him. Now he is at least a little fierce. ;)

IF_Shiny

Bigsby loves shiny things, but so do all the other hedgehogs.  So he tied his shiny trinkets to a balloon, which also happened to be shiny and went in search or a new home.  My grandson loves hedgehogs and one of my daughters has a pet hedgehog named Bigsby, so of course I had to paint a flying hedgehog.  I seem to have a thing for flying animals lately. ;)

IF_Kernel

Gertie had a small kernel of an idea.  She hitched a ride

and went in search of...

IF_Hitched WIP

I feel like I have been away forever! So sorry, I have been having health issues. I thought about posting something new everyday for the past few weeks but just never seemed to get to it. I feel so much better now that I have posted something. I hope that I can keep up and post more often now. I apologize to those of you who follow my blog. I have let you down. I even lost a follower :(...

When I first started blogging I posted fairly often, but this year I have been lackadaisical. (Big word for the day ;D) Lax, unmotivated, not quite enthusiastic, un-energetic, etc. etc. etc.  
or dare I say it....

maybe I've just been really, really tired, but that goes back to lack of motivation right?

Anywho, I love my blog and I want to keep it alive, therefore I must provide the "food" for my readers to feed it with. So I am making myself yet another promise to post more often. There I wrote it down, so I have to do it, right? Of course I think I haven't written it down before and obviously not followed through!

I also want to do Illustration Friday more often. Why?  Well, for one thing it keeps me posting more often, also because I am a creature of habit and right now I am out of the habit of blogging. But mostly because, IF pushes me to draw and paint things that I probably would not normally come up with.

When I first started doing IF, I posted every single week for, wow, I can't even remember how long now, a long time. Then I got out of the habit. Now I just think about posting. For example this idea was for the prompt "Puzzled", she was going to be a flying pig with wings. Then I was going to adapt it to the prompt "Jump" because I never even got past the idea of it for Puzzled and she was going to be jumping into the water with water wings on. Now it is hopefully going to work for the prompt "Hitched".  What's she hitched to, you ask? You tell me...

So, if you are still reading, this is where I ask you to comment and tell me what/who you think "Gertie" the pig has hitched a ride on?

Thanks for being wonderful, patient and kind!!!

IF_Forward

So, here is the colored version of the sketch that I did for IF's prompt Twirl. I actually made it before midnight on a Thursday! ;)

I think that I got lucky and he works for forward as well as twirl.  He is going to be part of the artwork on a valentines card/mailer.  I am so bad about marketing that I am trying to push myself to make a more diligent effort at it.  I would just paint and draw all of my time away if I could and leave the marketing to the wind ;)   You all are so supportive. I appreciate all of your comments on the sketch.    Thanks for stopping by :) 

IF_Round

So, just some fun and playfulness. I was taking a little break on my projects and playing around in painter 12 and photoshop.  I rarely find time to post for Illustration Friday lately, so its nice when I can find time to do one.  Thanks for stopping by and for all your wonderful comments :)  Hope you all had a happy Thanksgiving. 

My son asked me to illustrate a whale with wings and a crown.  I decided that I liked him and wanted to reuse him, so I recycled him.  Thanks to a few good friends, (you all are so wonderful) I am pretty happy with him now. It was a fun piece to work on.  I did this one in photoshop start to finish.  I usually use painter then photoshop. It worked well for this one, but I don't think that I will give up on painter completely.  I'm just a little frustrated with it at the moment. Thanks for stopping by, I enjoy your comments and visits. 

Safari WIP

It's been a little while since I have posted anything, so I thought I'd post a work in progress, although it is, slow progress.  I'm busy with other projects right now, but I've been working on this one here and there, whenever I get a few minutes, since way back when IF's prompt was Safari.  I'm not even sure when that was, but it's been awhile.  Anyway, I'll post updates as I get a little more done. Hope you all are having a lovely weekend.  Me, I'm sipping on fresh roasted Costa Rican coffee and considering spending a little more time on this piece instead of doing other work ;) Did you know that fresh roasted coffee has a plethora of good smells, like popcorn, then pancakes, and other yummy goodness that I can't quite describe? Smelling it roast is almost as nice as drinking it.

Thanks for stopping by, you all are so wonderful!!!

IF_Launch

Gosford the gosling was determined to live out his dream of flying even if his wings weren't ready to carry him. ;)  It's late and I'm off to get some rest. Have a great remainder of the week.  Thanks for visiting :)

IF_Swept

Swept away on a wave :) I saw a 3D frog in an inner-tube on a summer flier and just had to put something like him on a wave.  You know one of those that looks like a bendable rubber toy. It was strangely cute. This one is supposed to be a turtle (Ha, my son says he looks like Voldemort from Harry Potter. So, maybe not so cute after all. ) I should have added one surfing too.  Just some fun with the newest version of painter. Wow, it crashes a lot! Hopefully they will get that fixed. When it is working right, it is a good bit faster, when it's not, it's a booger :(    Anyway, I'm thinking I may end up keeping the older versions to use too.

Hang tags

I don't have much time, but I thought I'd post something since it's been awhile.  These are ideas for hang tags for the children's tie dye my daughter and I have been working on. Summer is almost here, I can't wait to have a little free time :)  Thanks for visiting! I miss visiting everyone and will be checking in with you over the next few days.

Princess and the Pea

So, I am tentatively finished with this one, finally.  It's didn't turn out exactly the way I had envisioned it but other than the fact that I keep finding little things to fix, I am pretty happy with it, I think.  Sorry, I have been away from blog-land so much.  Summer is near and I should have a lot more time to be creative in the coming months. School has really bogged us down this year and we are still dying and selling t-shirts.  We even opened up an Etsy store.  There is a link on the side bar, so be sure to check it out. We are still donating a percentage of the sales to charity and 10% of the sale price of the womens shirts has already been donated to Japan.  Thanks for stopping by and for all your kind and gracious comments. I appreciate it!

Fred the Praying Mantis

Just a short post of a quickly done painting of a praying mantis I did for my best friends daughter. Happy Easter! 

PS.  I am having so much trouble posting images from CS5 online or sending them in emails. I keep getting server rejections and having to shrink and shrink it again.  It's like it is saving them so much larger than it says it is, but then the last time I did a thumbnail for IF it ended up pixel-ated before it would let me post it.  I am not sure what the problem is and it is so aggravating.  Anyone else having this problem?

IF_Layers WIP

curtains? what do you think?

No time to finish this weeks post either, and it's very last minute, again.  Actually, I just realized it's already Friday.  Oh well, better late than never.  

Yay for Presidents Day!

because it gave us a long weekend and that allowed me to finish this up.   So yay! Freedom to create.  Maybe I'll even get to finish something new... and no headache!