paintings up!

The work looks GREAT in the shop, yay! If it's raining tomorrow evening I will NOT be there for Second Saturday.

dogs and cats

Okay, I've done as many as I can do, and this will fill the walls. These will be hung at 4 Paws Pet Boutique (19th and Capitol, Sacramento) tomorrow afternoon. I will be there Saturday evening for the Second Saturday art walk, though likely taking off a bit early.

I will be photographing/scanning these individually tomorrow, but this is:

top row l-r: Jingles, Brutus, Turtle, Max, Beemer
middle row (dogs) l-r: Sunny, Kirk, Rambo, Ella, Bob
bottom row (cats) l-r: Hardy, Tempura, Patches, Mocha



I'm exhausted.

silly birds

I'm sitting in here working and kept hearing birds flapping against the window. It's this pair of Bushtits, which are really itty bitty gray birds. They are sitting in the Japanese Maple out front and then they fly into the window (about a foot away, it's not like they are hitting it hard) and sorta skitter down the window til the reach the bottom and fly back to the Maple and do it again. I assume they must be going after some bugs, if not then I don't know what they're up to. Maybe they want to come in the house. :-)

Cute little dudes, they didn't mind me standing right by the window taking photos.


This is probably one of my favorite pics now:

busy busy

I have three more dog paintings done, none of which are varnished yet, so I haven't photographed them yet. There's a Yorkshire Terrier, a Boston Terrier, and a Chihuahua. I have five more sketched out on canvas and will do as many as I can by the end of the week (Pomeranian, Chihuahua, Pug, Schnauzer, French Bulldog). I'm planning to hang work on Friday. The shop is 4 Paws Pet Boutique at 19th and Capitol in Sacramento. It will be open for Second Saturday on the 14th, I am not entirely certain yet if I will be present for that.

I am making progresson the supremely icky taxes. Bleh, uck, hiisss, booo!!!!!!

That art show I was thinking about attending in early June, I realized it conflicts with a poultry show meeting I am supposed to attend. Shoot! I am debating missing the meeting in favor of making some moolah but I'm concerned that I may end up needing to attend the meeting just to be present for decision-making. Dang it. Guess I'll see how it looks by the end of the month (ugh, it's already almost the middle of the month!)

I got a postcard from Horse Expo. They say they have a new layout and lighting. Hmm, perhaps I will enter something in the art show. I haven't for years because the layout has been awful, with NO lighting, plus it's expensive. The booth prices are exorbitant, there's no way I would get a booth, but it might not hurt to try to put myself back on the map in the horsey world. And I'd better figure out what to enter in Draft Horse Classic, that deadline will be here before I know it. Oh, and I'm so thrilled that State Fair is taking all entries digitally this year. YAY!!! I hated entering there because they accepted only slides, and they didn't return them (even if the art was not accepted) and professional slides are expensive. Digital is good, I'll be sure to enter several things.

The first chicks are due to hatch this coming weekend. By my calculations there will be.... a whole lot of the little buggers!

new directions

My head is filled with thoughts about art. Today I met with my friend J.K., who is an artist, and is married to an artist, and has worked in marketing and as an art director. And I got a lot of words of wisdom, and ideas of what direction to take my art and how to market it and things I'd never thought of before, and wouldn't have had a clue how to do. There is such a market out there for what I do and I haven't even scraped at the surface. So you will, in time, see my art take some new roads, have some different appearances. My head is swimming with thoughts. The mere idea that what I want is achievable and that I could actually do this is mind boggling.

And it'll actually tie into a lot of what I had in mind to do anyway. That whole chickens in context thing that L.K. and I talked about over lunch one day, I can weave that into some new concepts and different methods. I know this doesn't make sense, bear with me, I'm writing this one for me.

I'll still be drawing chickens, and horses, and I'll still be painting dogs. I'll be doing a lot of things. As busy as I am now, it'll increase. I'll still do art shows, and still do commissions, but with any luck before too long people will wish they would have booked commissions now. ;-)

I am planning to hang whatever dog paintings I have finished at the boutique on Friday or Saturday. I'll have several more to scan and post on line by the end of the week. It's going well. Next week will be insane. I hang work at a coffee shop in town around the first of May. I'd like to produce all new work to show there, we'll see. Things are changing. Prices my change (not commissions, not yet anyway). I gotta get my website done.

Happy Easter!

more turkeys!

These lovely ladies were in the front yard today. I took a bunch of pics before I shooed them out of the yard.




I love this one! Tee hee!


In other news I editioned my litho stone image today (the Lipizzaner horse I started in... January I guess it was). Didn't get as many good prints as I had hoped, but there are enough. When the ink dries I'll scan them (that'll be over a week from now). I am soooo tired now.

Majestic Warrior

I let the client pick the title. :-)


"Majestic Warrior" (Asil/Aseel)
6x6 inches
colored pencil, graphite, ink
on gray Stonehenge paper
sold, commission

this and that

Ramblings today...

The Aseel drawing is finished (the one that's been a work in progress over the last few days) but I want the client to see it before the rest of the world does, and his internet isn't working right now. I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

I got four boxes of canvases on Monday (12x12s, 12x16s, and 24x24s). I was really disappointed to find that the 24x24s had been packed incorrectly and one of the canvases was dented and loose (it has been up against the box, which was pretty badly dinged up. I was going to call the company and complain and see about getting a new one but figured I'd see if I could fix it. A good canvas should be as tight as a drum. This one flopped! So I spritzed water all over the backside and put it out in the sun for a few hours. Voila! Tight as a drum! Guess the moisture makes it shrink down again. Cool. Now they are all in good shape, awaiting dogs and cats and chickens and who knows what else. Well, in the immediate future it'll be all dogs, gotta get enough done to hang those in the pet boutique by the 13th of April. Yikes!

I watched Lonesome Dove (again) over the weekend. The ONE thing that really bugs me about that movie is that could they not find a female gray horse to play the role of Call's mare "Hell Bitch"? I mean, that horse is an important part of the story, and they repeatedly call her "her" and it's pretty darn obvious that's a gelding! Sheesh.

Progress is being made on the limited edition print stuff, for the Aseel called "Proud Heritage" (the one in the boxing ring). The print pricing seems to be squared away, so now I need to figure out shipping costs so that I don't have to fiddle around with calculating them for every individual, I'll just do a flat-rate for US, and see if I can come up with a reasonable international flat-rate price. I need to get the word out on this thing asap though.

And I really need to make finishing my website a big priority. The sales section has been down since January and this is hurting me. I just can't find the time to get the darn thing done, ugh! If I survive taxes I have a whole lotta work to do.

I've been looking into some upcoming art shows, wanting to get more locally known, but I am finding downsides to everything. There's a local one in late June but it's outdoors, and around here that can be a pretty nasty time of year. There's another one a little farther away in early June and I could apply to be indoors (yay!) but they make you enter by medium. Like, I could have a booth with drawings...only. If I want to bring paintings, I have to pay a whole nother entry fee. If I want to bring drawings, paintings, and printmaking, I pay triple. It's pretty small money, but I don't like that system at all. People always compliment me on having a wide range of work, why on earth would a show want to limit that. Rant, rave. Might do it anyway, hmmm.

Okay, enough for today.

like dinosaurs

Gosh darn it, I just missed photographing the coolest thing. I heard all this thumping out front and looked out to see THREE turkey toms fighting just beyond the driveway out front. COOL! I scrambled for my camera but by the time I got back to the window the dogs were barking and the turkeys were running away. Drat. I took some pics of them in the field but this isn't nearly as exciting. Dang, my camera sucks at telephoto.

April 1 work in progress

not done yet