Bring. It. On. That's what I've been saying to the Universe at Large since the before the beginning of the year. What I have realized in the last few days is that those were the words I was saying, but my actions were saying something quite different. And I couldn't understand why nothing seem to be happening.

Do you ever feel that way after you've spent a morning doing "chores"? Things that have to be done like scanning and labeling artwork for various tasks (hi-res for printing, low-res for the web); organizing computer files; doing paperwork, etc. I got an early start today but here it is noon, and I'm just now getting to a stopping spot. Not finished, mind you, but stopping. I don't think you ever get finished with this kind of "stuff"!

You can feed the fishies! They will follow your cursor around - just click to feed them!! Enjoy!

I do have the best of intentions, but sometimes I really let them get me into a jam. Take today for instance. I was speaking to my mom on the phone around 2:30 this afternoon. She asked if Chris and I would like to come over for burgers. Instead of just saying sure, sounds great, I said "Well, I put a huge pot of stew in the crockpot this morning. Why don't you guys come over here instead." And of course, she agreed. 

If you don't call them failures, and the painting is not a success, what do you call them? And yes, this is a serious question. I'm not really sure what to call it beside practice. Which is what this painting is. Perhaps I don't need to add qualifiers. 

I recently received a comment from someone who said, "I've never seen you post a failure on your blog. All your work looks wonderful." Well, let's correct that today, shall we?! The painting above is what I call a glorious failure - it has a few redeeming qualities, but for the most part it's a fairly bad watercolor. However, the glorious part comes with what it has to teach me.

     Choco cautiously sniffed the object, but could detect no smell by which to identify it. Then he tried nudging it. Nothing happened. After study the thing for a moment, Choco turned the shiny disk over. Still nothing. Gingerly, he bit the disk.

Frantic, Van made a grab for Choco's tail, missing him by several inches. "Choco, come back!" he nearly shouted. But it was too late. Choco was almost to the little bridge, Van's voice already fading from his mind. He had seen something small and shiny fall from the man's pocket as he had ridden by. What it was, he didn't know, but he meant to find out.

"Because you've been avoiding me" replied the chocolate bunny, "It seemed the only way to get your attention."

Let me be more specific - is the economy messing with your left brain? Is that in turn messing with your right brain? I heard from several folks with regard to yesterday's post. It seems the economy is a common left brain theme and a number of folks asked the same question: The economy doesn't appear to be improving very quickly, so how do we move forward, get back to making art? Several thoughts came to mind:

A few more thoughts to go along with Teresa's wonderful post below about ancient wisdom. The fear of failure, of embarrassment, of success even, is the domain of the left brain. The left brain is doing its best to keep us from embarrassing ourselves, failing, succeeding, when the way is not clear before us. The left brain uses fear to immobilize us as well as to make us believe there's no use in trying something new, different, challenging, and so forth.

Blueberries, Art and Life: Newspaper column for March 2009

Sitting quietly, watching the rain fall softly, I could almost hear the earth sigh. Slow, gentle, cool drizzle giving the earth time to drink deeply. Just what was needed. Hopefully, more rain to soon come . . . . 

Barely. Actually the yard sale was great! We had lots and lots of folks to stop by and we purged a good deal of "stuff". Yay for us! Now we can get busy on filling it up again. Kidding!!! Of course, it took almost all day with the clean up and packing up of stuff that didn't sale (for the next purge).
I'm using "palette mud" to paint this. Palette mud is leftover mixtures from other recent paintings. It will have a very muted look (by choice) when I'm done. You can just barely see the pencil lines to the little pastry dish. I believe I'm going to paint it to look rusty and dull too. 

I finally got back to work on the Hyacinth series in my sketchbook and have completed the painting of the bulb. Again, I'm not really happy with the scan as there are a lot of colors in the bulb area that the scanner is not picking up. Not sure if it's the low resolution or a color issue.  

Do you ever get an idea of how you want something to turn out in your head, and no matter what you do, it turns out nothing like that image? Hmmm, well, that's how it was with these eggs. They didn't turn out anything like that image in my head. Why does that happen? Or in this case, why didn't that happen?

Peppers Five Original Watercolor 

on 140 lb. Saunders Hot Press Paper

100% Acid Free

16.5" x 6.5"

(The red border and watermark are not on the original artwork)

$125.00 + $10.00 Shipping

I was recently asked, " I know you can paint, but what I don't get is why you're trying to paint fast. What difference does it make if it takes 15 minutes, 50 minutes or an hour and 50 minutes?" Good question!

May you be surrounded by Irish laughter, love, and luck for today and always!

Daily Practice - Eggs

The complete sketchbook page with eggs at a tilt

Chris calls me this afternoon from work to ask me if I had given the dealership his mobile number when I took the Jeep in this morning. Now why would I do that, I'm wondering. and say as much. It seems they called him and left a garbled message on his mobile. He suggests I might want to call them back. Then again, I might not. Want to call them back.

What I didn't share with you yesterday was that on my way home from having dinner with my FIL the window on my Jeep Liberty rolled down and wouldn't roll back up. It started a horrible racket every time you touched the button. Chris took a look at it when we got home, but he couldn't "see" anything because of the way Jeep "seals" their door panels. He would have had to remove the seal and we were concerned this would void the warranty.

Crazy for sure, but I do get the biggest kick out of fortunes in Fortune cookies! I have had several that turned out to be quite accurate too! Anyway, we went to dinner with my FIL last night at the China House Restaurant, and below is my fortune!

Whenever I paint something and it doesn't turn out, I often hear Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days" playing in the back of my mind. I can't help but wonder about all the what-if's and what-might-of-beens IF the painting had worked out. And of course, the one that failed is always the one that would have taken best of show - LOL! Hope and dreams - it's what keeps us going.

Here is an update on the suave Van for those of you having a Choco and the gang withdrawal! Just about 97% completed! Yay! I didn't realize until after I uploaded the image into Photoshop that I had not painted his cane. Guess I'm a bit tired, or a bit more than I realized. This is photographed as opposed to a scan. The colors are better but still not accurate.

The image to the left is more practice of trying to capture a likeness of a person as quickly as I can without getting hung up on complete accuracy and detail. Not an easy feat for someone who thrives on detail! If you were to see the reference materials, you would see that I did indeed capture a likeness of her, but you could also see many things that could be improved upon. This type of painting for me is a constant striving for balance - if I take to long on the drawing, I don't have much time to paint. If I don't get a good likeness down, no amount of paint is going to fix that. 

Yesterday morning (10:00ish) my husband was walking outside of the place where he works, when he heard the calls of a pair of Sandhill Cranes. He turned to watch these majestic birds fly over. What he saw instead was a hawk diving down and attacking one the cranes!! The crane plummeted from the sky in a straight drop to the ground from about the thirty feet. Chris said he expected to hear a gunshot report because of how straight and hard the bird fell. Feathers continued to rain down long after the crane had fallen. He sprinted over to the back of the parking lot that borders an old pasture to see what had happened.

I got a bit of sketching done! This a tree knot that fell from the oldest Maple in our front yard. It appears to have an eye looking out from the center of the knot. I enhanced it in the drawing, but not by much. This is the story of the Old Woman and the Maple Tree Spirit as retold by Richard L. Dieterle

There lived an old woman by herself in an oval lodge at the outskirts of the village. She was always doing good for the people. If anyone needed anything from her, she would not fail to give it to them. She always fasted and made offerings of tobacco to the spirits.

Now the time had come when sap was collected from the maples, and she went out with her bucket to see what she might obtain. She went from one tree to another, yet she hardly collected anything. As she was walking along in the forest, she heard a voice. She looked around, but could see no one. Again the voice spoke to her, and she discovered that the voice had come from the trunk of a maple tree. "Grandmother, I take pity on you. Come back to me tomorrow and you will find on my trunk a ball of sap. Take this sap and rub it around the inside rim of your sap boiling kettle. However much sap you have put in, that much will expand to the place you have scored. And when you make maple syrup, if you can remember me with a small offering of tobacco, you will be blessed."

Thus the Tree Spirit spoke to her. So the next day she retrieved a ball of sap from the tree, and did as the spirit had bidden. Indeed, no matter how little sap she put in the kettle, it would always boil up to the mark she had made on the rim. She never wanted for maple syrup. Thus had she been blessed.

Perhaps this is the Tree Spirit looking out for us.

This morning when I opened the refrigerator to get cream for my coffee I noticed a peculiar odor come wafting out. Hmmm, that's never a good thing. Never. When that happens you know you're going to have to suit up for biological warfare and go in there and extract whatever is giving off that odor. And it never comes out easily. Never.

So, in I went only to find that a cucumber had managed to escape to the back of the second highest shelf and die a slow, messy, smelly, stinky death. Now anyone who has ever had a cucumber die this kind of death in their refrigerator is scrunching up their face and saying "Eeeeeeeuuuuuuugggggghhhhhhh!" They know. It's BAD. Very BAD. In this case, the cucumber in question had cozied up to a package of pre-sliced deli cheese and used the plastic bag to run over to the side of the refrigerator where various glass jars live.

Having reached the glass jars that just happen to be TOUCHING the wall of the refrigerator, the cucumber continued its path of destruction down the side of the refrigerator to the shelf below it with more jars. Not satisfied to stop there, it continued down to yet another shelf, bypassing the jars but settling instead under the carton of eggs. Yuck!!!! Icky pukey!!!!!!

As much as I love getting caught up in the creative "moment", that in this case lasted a week, this is yet another down side. You see, I'm not big on housekeeping. My house will never win a "White Glove" award and I'm okay with that. It's just that when you live on the edge of good housekeeping/bad housekeeping the way I do, your house can go from okay to bad in just a week!

After getting my head out of the refrigerator, I noticed a pile of laundry almost as tall as I am. And I'm tall. This is not a desirable trait in your laundry pile. Going back to the frig for a moment, once all the ick was cleaned out, I noticed it was empty. Dang. That meant I was gonna have to cook too. So, washing laundry, folding laundry, putting laundry away, general cleaning, decluttering horizontal surfaces, detoxing the frig, cooking a huge pot of sauce for spaghetti tonight, and the general maintenance of my life was nearly caught up. Great.

Except I didn't work on the bunnies. They're going on hiatus for a few days. I'm sure some of you are relieved as you secretly never liked bunnies anyway, and others of you are seriously disappointed. They'll be back. Right now, I'm going to take an afternoon to go outside and sit in the sun and enjoy Spring (and try to get that smell out of my nose). Then I'm going to do a piece for a competition that's coming up way too fast. Then the bunnies will come back. Because they never really left . . .

"May I ask what the "C" in your name stands for, Van? I'm thinking Cherry or Cranberry?" I said to Van as I was painting his coat.

The look he gave me was not unkind, but it did seem to say he thought me quite daft. "Coolidge. As in Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United States. Mother was quite the history buff and she had to have names for all of us, so she would randomly pick a president's name" Van replied.

"Oh" seemed to be the most intelligent thing I could come up with at the moment. A little while later I asked "So "M" probably doesn't stand for Milk in Choco's name?"

"No, Madison. James Madison, 4th president" came the answer.

"Well why do you go by Van if your first name is Coolidge?

Again came the look that said he was sure I was daft as he answered with his own question, "Would you want to be called Coolidge your whole life?"

At that point I thought it best to let silence reign . . . .

This as far as I've gotten on Van. Unfortunately, the scan of the WIP (work-in-progress) looks rather peaked. His coat is a rich burgundy with brown overtones and his vest is two lighter shades of the coat. On my monitor, he looks rather sepia toned. I played in Photoshop, but he still looks off. Maybe I can get a photo of him tomorrow. Anyway, the tie, shirt, and top hat all need to be completed. I will probably go back and add some darker values to his face, but I wanted to get the clothes finished before I went too dark on his face.

As I said in a prior post, my right brain has been having a blast this last week or so. Until the left brain woke up and said, "What's that suppose to be? A monkey? A rabbit? A monkbit?!!" Needless to say, this comment sent my muse into a colossal snit-fit! She stomped out of the studio, refusing to be swayed or cajoled into moving past the incident. And that's the problem with getting so caught up in the moment (or the week) of creative abandon - you're not really seeing what you're creating.

Of course, if you're me, you post it on your blog for all to see so that they know you're nuttier than a Bavarian Nut House because you just posted a painting of an alien monkbit, AND you're calling it a rabbit. And no one says a word. Nothing. So you go on in your blissful state of creative ignorance until your left brain calls you out and royally ticks off your muse at the same time.

After that, you spend two days in Drawing Basics 101 (Hell) trying to learn how to draw a rabbit. You thought you knew what a rabbit looked like, but you don't just want a rabbit. No, you want him to appear gentle and wise, and of undetermined age, but definitely of determined lineage. Your muse is still ticked off and sulking in the corner, so you're pretty much on my own. And it's awful (Hell). You suddenly look down to see you're drawing Jim Carey's version of Cat-in-a-Hat! This is NOT a good thing when you're trying to draw a gentle and wise rabbit.

You see, this all started on Saturday night when Van showed up. You've seen what a handsome fellow he is and he looks like a rabbit! Which really makes poor Choco look more like an alien than ever. And since they're brothers there should be a family resemblance, right?! Except there isn't any! So back to the drawing board I went for two long days. The results of those two loooooong days are below:

The left Choco was painted next. I repainted the body as well as I wanted a slimmer Choco. The Choco on the right is the same body as on the left but with a new head and face thanks to a little help from Photoshop. Even though the bodies in the image above are the same, the one on the left "looks" slimmer than the one on the right. This is all because of the head placement and how much of his neck is showing.

And just in case you're still wondering, this is the really, really big change I told you about. You should probably also know there's still another Choco coming as I am not totally pleased with either of these Chocos. There will be an update on Van later today too! Thanks for stopping by!

. . . to Mr. C. Vanilla (Van) Bunny! As you can see he is still in tracing paper form. Van showed up on Saturday evening and I was so tired that I wasn't sure that I had drawn him just as he wanted to be. So I left him alone for a day and sure enough, adjustments needed to be made. That's why you see multiple overlays of tissue. 

I have some questions that need answers with regard to our story of Choco, and despite the lovely discussions that have taken place here in the Ferlita household, I still need answers. (It is often difficult to come to a consensus when there are only two of you to begin with and you happen to be total opposites!)

. . . . my left brain woke up!! My right brain has been having a blast the last week or so. I'm not sure why my left brain hasn't gotten involved before today, but I wish it had stayed sleeping a little longer! Of course, I had to laugh when I read Kelly's comment:

"You're very brave to do this. I don't think 

I could create on the fly like you're doing!"

The Apothecary (above)