Little dog in action

Warm up sketch this morning of a favorite subject - dogs :-)

Ball point pen

Mixed media painting: "The Secret Writer"

This is one of those paintings that comes from out of the blue:

Watercolor, pastels, charcoal, ink, graphite, gesso, litho crayon.

Mixed media textured gesso...on wood :-)

More Year of the Spark class work - this lesson is from Carla.  And I recorded a couple of in-process steps this time.

Phase 1 - sketch on wood and gesso ("texturized"... is that a word?):

The beginning of many layers...

Phase 2 - color

Watercolor

Final - massaged the background with Carla's "rub and buff" technique and added details:

Details in graphite, ink, conte crayon and charcoal.

And Carla always begins each lesson with a warm-up exercise.  This time it was one-liner drawing of the same face:

Inked.

Mixed media scenario and sunshine Remy

From yesterday's post about waiting for things to dry, this is what was keeping me busy.  It is called "The Discovery of the Three Orbs":

Watercolor, pastel, charcoal, graphite, NeoColor II, colored pencil

A snowstorm blew through yesterday, but today the sun is out and the sky is blue. The snow has almost disappeared.

My beautiful Remy in the sunshine.

Time to take a break for "walkies" :-)

Word art while waiting

for intermittent layers of masking fluid to dry.  There is no rushing it - a heat tool just fries the fluid.  But these mini-intermissions are okay.  I have gotten into the habit of keeping my marker and paint pens at the ready... and I created some word art.  

I had a couple of themes in mind - space and favorite words.

Space:

Acylic ink, metallic ink, pastel, gel pen

Favorite words, this is one:

Acrylic ink, metallic ink, pigment marker pen

And then out of nowhere, this phrase:

Metallic ink, pigment marker pen

And by then the latest layer of masking fluid was really, really dry :-)

Announcing... the CrannaSphere

I have officially dipped my toe into the sea of online selling.  Impetus comes from this month's Year of the Spark business video.

I chose Etsy because most of the setup is already done.  One day I will have my website up, but for me creating a website is daunting even with templates - terms such as html and style.css cause my eyes glaze over :-D

Why CrannaSphere? 

I had thought that DarleneCranna would be a logical choice for my shop but it was not to be.  If a name has ever been used before on the Etsy site in any capacity, it can never, ever be used again.


Years ago I set up an account in my name to buy some prints and other art work and because I used it to make these purchases, my name fell under the laws of Never-Ever land.  Disappointed? Uh huh.

Okay, not to dwell, I did the rest of the prep stuff (shipping info, payment methods, listings) - not very exciting.  But when it came to designing my shop banner, now that I enjoyed:

I will put a link on my blog...when I figure out how to do it.  Html...style.css...Oy.     

Dog in the studio

along with Remy, of course :-) 

Doodling around this morning with a sketch of an imaginary dog.  Originally he was very loosely rendered but I gradually changed him into a stylized, imaginary pooch :-)

Looks like he's happy and just back from "walkies".