May Your Holidays Be Mighty ...

Wow! I was just informed that I'm featured in the "Lotus's Workshop" blog featuring different themed gifts every day up to Xmas (today is Yule-themed gifts, so my Odin cards have been included).
There are some really fantastic collections here, so I feel honored to be chosen to be a part of it. This has only encouraged me to paint a lot more Vikings.

Check it out!



Speaking of, the card sets are available for sale now, so I should probably put up my card to you all.

So, in honor of the Solstice and in case I don't get to post again before the New Year...

Happy Yule, Season's Greetings, and have a raucously good time with your cherished friends and family. Go ride an armored polar bear and drink Glögg and give boots filled with presents to those younger or less fortunate, dammit!

Clockwork Wings.

So, this was the big winner when I had a table at GenCon a couple years ago. Sold a lot of prints of it, and I'm working on ideas for the next of the series. If anyone has any thoughts of what you'd like to see done along the lines of clockwork and windup things or things that shouldn't by any common sense be clockwork or mechanical, but are... well, let me know. I've got a list but I'm wondering if I've missed anything!

She's like the Wind. (RIP Master Swayze.)

Trying to record my process more, so I see what my patterns are and where I can improve and shave time (when appropriate).
So here's the sketch for the last of the Elementi series, "Aria". For now. I might want to do a whole different interpretation on the Japanese elements, or the five Chinese elements.

This is the second painting in a week that I've decided to execute in greys - I associate my "style" as being very tied to vibrant colors, so having a drab palette helps me focus on my execution and detail. I'm going to enjoy painting her.

Fuoco.

The third lady's done in the series of anthropomorphic elements, and I'm very satisfied with the radiant color happening here, so I can't wait to dive into the next. She's a bit more stylized, but I don't really mind. Firey salamanders don't really exist either, I've been told.

Cranking out work, huzzah.



The Mister and I are hand-making some of our holiday gifts this year, and working together on it is kind of nice - having art hobbies other than "what I do" is nice, since it's a break from art, WITH art. His big gift from me this year (a woodburner with full set of tips) was opened early, since he's using it on the gifts. The scent of the wood he's burning in the house is a great smell, and it makes me a little sad that we bought a house without a fireplace. Oh well... that much more of a reason to save our pennies and get a woodstove installed this year.

A friend posted a Facebook comment recently of "making Christmas, making christmas", so now I have the song in my head. It's kind of motivating, though, so that's fine.

I do have a finite amount of time I can work before needing a break just to stretch, walk around, have some coffee and so forth, but this week will be best used if I barricade the studio door, start the long and excellent journey through the first seven seasons of X-Files on DVD, and keep the pencil to paper. Oh, and block any and all social networking sites.

Making Christmas, la la la.

Updates, updates, jiggity jig

So, it's weird when the best reference you can find of a particular thing is a photo of "the Beastmaster" Marc Singer. It's not like I can find a hawk and do a photo shoot with it, so The 'Master will have to do.

Trying to find the motivation to work according to daylight/normal people schedules is seriously difficult. My most productive hours consistently lay somewhere between 11 pm and 5 am, every night. When it's daylight, I feel like I should be cleaning, organizing, making a pot of soup, that sort of thing. I suppose it could be chalked up to Pavlovian training of the art-school late night painting sessions. All-nighters equal good paintings. Odd.

I meant to take progress photos of this year's holiday greeting card from sketch phase, but I started painting and forgot until the base wash was down. So here's the sketch with the base wash:




And here's my very helpful cat, Jonas, helping me paint. Very helpfully. (That's his "emotional support" face, I think).

Fricking Lasers!

It's 2-something am, and I should be sleeping. I am getting laser beams shot into my eyes tomorrow. They're going to cut flaps in my eyeballs, and flip them over, and zap them some more, and flip them back. It's really kind of just occurred to me today how horrifying that is, and that I'm really absolutely terrified about this.

I've never had any real kind of surgery before (getting a mole removed doesn't count). I am terrified that I will be one of those amazingly small percentages of something going wrong, and I will end up blind. I will be a blind artist, and I will not take it well, and I will not become the "based on a true story" inspiration for some movie with Daniel Day Lewis and Kate Winslet in it. Perhaps Kate Winslet will win an Oscar. She'll probably wear a really gorgeous dress to the awards, and she'll invite me to accompany her because she's so gracious, and I'll look terrible and disheveled and overweight, and people will say "oh Kate is SO much better looking than the real Amy". And I'll cry. I'll cry pitiful blind tears. 


Hmm. That was rather insane. Reel it in, cupcake. Reel it in. So... anyway...

I have no idea how long it will take to recover REALLY (the doctor gave me a "this is approx. how long it takes to recover" speech, but I think, of course, that my surgery will go poorly and it will take me twice as long to recover), so I don't know how long I'll be out of commission to the world. I will, as they say, be Away From Keys.

Yikes.