So here I sit, on my birthday, and instead of reading the comic books Blake got me, I’ve been up since about 4am thinking about Jenny McCarthy. Last week I read the Time magazine article, “The Autism Debate: Who’s Afraid of Jenny McCarthy?“, which spawned a lot of other articles, namely one at Bad Astrology called “Jenny McCarthy still thinks vaccines cause autism“. From that article, I started following links to other articles on Jenny McCarthy’s anti-vaccine crusade and near the end of my link hopping, I found an old article that said Jenny McCarthy believed her son to be a “Crystal Child” and herself to be an “Indigo Mom”. I even found an article she herself wrote about this prior to her son being diagnosed as having autism (which he may or may not have had all along).

Anyway, this blog post is not about Jenny McCarthy or autism or whether or not vaccines are harmful. This blog post is about how I am medicated versus non-medicated and the crystal/indigo thing was the catalyst. Longtime readers will remember that about 6 or 7 years ago, I was convinced that I was an “indigo child” and had a deep belief in a lot of metaphysical things, such as psychics and reiki. And I wrote about these things. A lot. And now, looking back at all of that, it’s embarrassing because I was clearly manic during this period of my life, although I wouldn’t know what the word “manic” even meant until many many years later.

This weekend Blake and I talked at great length about me medicated versus non-medicated because really, I don’t see much of a difference. I no longer have “million dollar ideas” though, so there’s one difference, and I don’t get as obsessed about random things as I used to, but other than that, I couldn’t really tell you any other differences. But then Blake reminded me that there was a time for about 3 months where all I did was sit on the couch and cry and I don’t do that any more. I don’t have suicidal thoughts as often or as persistently as I did before. I’m more rational, logical. My thinking is clearer, I’m more focused.

Apparently what I’m going through right now is really common in psychiatric patients, where they’ve been medicated for a long time and they feel normal so they forget how bad things were before and that’s when they tend to go off their meds, thinking they don’t need them anymore. I’m not going to do that, but I can understand how this all works because while I can identify that I’ve had bipolar disorder my whole life and could chart my peaks and valleys on a piece of paper from about age 5 to present, I do forget what it feels like to be suicidally depressed and psychotically happy. I understand that I experienced these things, but I think it’s similar to how women forget the pain of childbirth or something. The memories are distant and dull and only make sense when someone else tells you how it used to be. It’s a very strange thing.

Sometimes I miss the old days, I have to admit. I think I was more fun when I was manic, definitely more interesting than I am now. The depression I’m glad to be rid of, though.

I dunno, as I said, it’s a strange thing. I don’t really know where I’m going with this post, nowhere I suppose, it’s just been what’s on my mind over the weekend and I wanted to throw it out there so I could stop thinking about it.

Super old cam pic from when I made hundreds of wax paper hearts for mobiles that I put up over our windows for Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day has always been one of my favourite holidays, even though these days I don’t do a whole lot for it. In past years, I’ve been known to do special creative projects for the holiday, such as the mobile pictured above, or I’ve sent out Valentines to my online friends, but as I’ve gotten older (and poorer and busier)  these things have fallen by the wayside. That’s okay though, because I know it won’t always be like this and I’ll be able to do more in future years. (Kind of like my attitude toward Halloween. I want to be one of those families that decorates their house and gives out awesome candy but alas, we don’t get any trick-or-treaters where we are and couldn’t afford to do it even if we did.)

Anyway, Blake & I aren’t doing anything special today, especially because he, Wes & I seem to have a particularly nasty stomach bug of some kind and our bathroom has practically had a revolving door all weekend.

Valentine’s Day means two things, however. It means that there’s only two weeks until my birthday and everyone should get me lots & lots of presents and it also means that there’s one month until Steak & Blowjob Day. Since my article on giving head is linked on the Steak & BJ Day website, it means that my site is currently getting twice the traffic it normally gets and by the time the actual holiday rolls around, my traffic will have tripled. That’s a whole lot of new people around here reading my crap! So hello new people! Welcome to Sunnyland! Glad to have ya. :o)

Another thing Valentine’s Day means, to me and some of my friends at least, is that it’s Love Your Vulva day, or V-Day for short, something that we’ve been celebrating all month over at Buttercup. Buttercup’s actually been pretty hoppin’ all month, you should pop over there and check it out. So far this month we’ve had articles on VDay.org, Katie’s sexually repressed upbringing, how chicks dig porn, Blake’s experiences growing up in a penis-centric world, an article on our featured site, Camwhores.com, an article on vulva art, phenomenal woman, Holly Hughes, who you’ve probably never heard of but probably should, and finally an article by Jade about some of the strangest vulva-centric products we’ve ever seen – with much more to come during the rest of the month! We’ve also added two new groups to the mix. S/he is a group about sexism and so far the conversations have been really interesting and enlightening and we also added a group for sports, which needs a better name than “Sports”, so if you have any ideas on that, we’d love to hear them! Along with the new groups, we’ve also redesigned the front page a little bit and we have plans to redesign it further for next month. Lots of changes thanks to the feedback we got from the Buttercup community at the end of January! Thanks readers!

So, things over at Buttercup are doing good. You should take a peek if you get the chance. :o)

I realize this month I’ve been fairly quiet as far as blog posts go and there are a million reasons for that, namely preparing for and celebrating Wes’ 7th birthday, but also I’ve been hard at work painting ACEOs for my Etsy shop since art is pretty much all I can do when I’m in the kind of pain I’ve been in for the past couple of weeks due to endometriosis issues. I plan on doing nothing but working on ACEOs until this batch is finished because so far, they’ve proven to be pretty popular items in my Etsy shop, having sold half of the first batch I put up 2 weeks ago with the other half getting plenty of views. This first batch that I put up was of gold & black and purple & gold cards and right now all that’s left is the gold ones. The ones I’m working on are more purple & gold ones, some green & gold ones and a whole bunch of red & gold ones. I’ll, of course, make a post when this batch is ready and up on Etsy. In the meantime, you should take a look at the gold & black ones I have up there currently as I think they turned out rather well and hey, these things are supposed to be collectible, so if you buy a gold & black one this month, there’s no reason you can’t buy a red & gold one next month! *cough*

As I’m reading the Etsy forums, I’m learning that ideally what you’re supposed to do is market to people outside of Etsy and bring them into your shop. For that reason, I spent yesterday afternoon designing Moo cards with my artwork on the front of them and my website addresses on the back to include a couple with Etsy orders. By including more than one, it means the buyer will probably keep one and potentially give the other one(s) to friends. I’m also working on getting the funds for another promotional item, which I’ll write more about after I have the money to order them and actually send them out to people. If all goes as planned though, they’re pretty cool – or at least I think so – plus they have sentimental value, which again, I’ll write more about when I actually have them in my possession. (I’m only 1 ACEO sale away from being able to order them!)

And I guess that’s all I really have to say at the moment. It’s been a busy month and it’s going to continue to be busy. My neighbour’s daughter, Ashley, is due to have her baby any day now, so since my neighbour (Judy) doesn’t have a camera, I’ve lent her mine and that’s why there haven’t been pictures of anything in my recent posts. Ashley was actually due like, 4 or 5 days ago, so she could literally pop any day now and I should get my camera back soon.

Okay, I hope you all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day! I’m off to watch the Olympics and work on these ACEOs.

I fully and completely understand that not everyone can afford to buy one of my sparkly paintings, so I’m going to show you how to make your own…or at least the sparkly background part. (I’d show you how to make girls too, but I think Suzi Blu would have my head if I did that and understandably so. That’s her gig, not mine.) Really, my backgrounds are pretty easy to do, there are just a lot of layers and you have to sit around waiting for stuff to dry a lot. You’re also probably going to have to use products you may not be familiar with, but all of them are easily obtainable and while I don’t know American websites to buy these things from, I do know Canadian ones that ship to the US, so I’ll link those ones. People have been asking me to do this tutorial for a while now, so I hear you! Here it is. :o)

First of all, if you haven’t seen the video I made a few days ago, this is what you’re making (minus the girls):

Now that you’ve seen that, let’s get started!

The first thing you need is a canvas (or wood, but I prefer canvas because you can sew into it). I buy mine from Curry’s and the ones I get are called “gallery stretched canvas” (and I buy them in value packs) which means that they have a thicker frame and the staples are on the back instead of the sides. They are also pre-primed with gesso. Now, on the Curry’s page that I linked to, you have to be careful because some sizes are the canvases with the thinner frames (you can tell by the picture which sizes are these ones, the thicker good ones are usually even, square sizes) and while there really isn’t anything wrong with the thinner-framed canvases, I just don’t like them. I like things sturdy. And I actually just checked and I don’t think Curry’s does ship to the US, but I’m sure you can buy similar, if not the same canvases on Dick Blick’s site.

So you have your canvas, put it on a surface you don’t mind getting paint on. We’re working with acrylics which clean up with soap and water…most of the time…but still, don’t do it on your antique coffee table or something. I just use my desk, which is easily wipeable for wet paint and scrapeable (am I spelling these words correctly? spellcheck is having a fit) for dry paint.

Now the first thing we’re going to do is a basecoat of paint, which is pretty straight forward. Just paint your canvas in your painting’s primary colour. I always use a metallic paint for basecoating and in this case, I’m going to be using “Splendid Gold” by DecoArt.

DecoArt’s Dazzling Metallics come in a fairly wide range of colours, with like, 10 different shades of gold alone (but no goddamn pink or turquoise because they discontinued them!) and you should be able to get them at any Michael’s store for I think, $2.99 CDN for a 2oz bottle. Alternatively, you can buy them at this site I use a lot called Stockade, which definitely ships to the US. Dazzling Metallics can be found on their site here. The other metallic colour I’ll be using, which I didn’t take a picture of, is DecoArt’s Black Pearl, which is a metallic black. (Oddly, Stockade’s site doesn’t appear to have Splendid Gold, which is actually kind of weird because they’re usually pretty good with having the whole line when it comes to DecoArt’s stuff.) Anyway…

So this is our basecoated canvas. “Splendid Gold” is actually a fairly translucent paint and while you could do two basecoats so it’s more opaque, I only did one because it’s just a basecoat and we’re going to cover it up anyway. So once your basecoat is dried completely, you’re going to add a tick coat of crackle medium. Now, there are several different types of crackle medium, which I’ll go into another time if people want me to, but for this we’re going to use DecoArt’s “Weathered Wood“, which is probably my favourite product ever and I’ve been using it for, god, as long as it’s been around.

So once you’ve added your thick coat of Weathered Wood, you’re going to want to let it dry completely and at this point, I usually let it dry over night because with doing a thick layer of it, sometimes it can take that long to dry completely, especially if it’s in the middle of the summer and it’s humid. Now, a cheap alternative to Weathered Wood (even though Weathered Wood itself is fairly inexpensive) is mucilage glue, which is the kind of glue you probably used in your early grades of school. It’s sort of a golden colour and has a rubber applicator at the top with a slit in the middle. I’ve seen it at the dollar store the odd time, but other than that I haven’t really seen it anywhere. If you’re going to use mucilage glue though, in my experience you’ll want to do TWO coats. Do your first coat, let it dry, then do another and let that dry. Honestly though, Weathered Wood is easier, works better and is just as inexpensive, I only mention mucilage glue in case it’s what you happen to have around.

Here’s what Weathered Wood looks like (in a dark room, sorry, my office is a damn dungeon at night :o/) when it’s wet:

So once your coat of Weathered Wood is dry, you’re going to do a layer of plain old white paint. You can use any non-metallic colour you want (the metallics won’t crackle), but I always use white because the splatters , which we’ll do later, show up better than with any other colour. Now, doing your top crackle layer is a little tricky and you have to work fast. First, you want to use a large flat brush (this one’s a good size, although you can buy much cheaper brushes than this one) and second, you want to SLAP that friggin’ paint on. Load up your brush with as much paint as you can and just slap in on, all over the canvas, as fast as you can because the second the white paint touches the crackle medium, it’s going to start crackling and if you move it around too much with your brush, the paint is going to slide around on top of the crackle medium and your cracks won’t look very much like cracks, they’ll look more like weird, cracky, chunky streaks.

Another thing to remember when doing your topcoat on top of crackle medium is to NOT use cheap craft paint. Arguably, some snobs would consider DecoArt’s Americana “cheap craft paint”, but what I’m talking about is the value brands you can buy at dollar stores or even at Michael’s or A.C. Moore’s for less than $2 for an 8oz bottle. These cheap brands don’t work so well with crackle medium because they don’t have enough pigment to get the kind of coverage you want and when you’re doing your topcoat on top of crackle medium, you don’t have the luxury of adding a second coat, so you want to start off using a highly pigmented paint for better coverage. My favourite brand is DecoArt, in case that wasn’t obvious, and their standard acrylic paint line is called Americana. The other main one, which I’m not a huge fan of but it gets the job done too, is Delta’s Ceramcoat, although according to my mother who knows every single thing there is to know about every single kind of paint ever made, DecoArt’s Americana is more highly pigmented than Ceramcoat. Long story short: As long as you’re not using a cheapo store brand, you’re good. (And don’t ask me about Golden’s acrylics…I’ve never used them and probably never will because I think they’re overpriced and not worth the cost for what I do.)

So you’ve got your topcoat over your crackle medium and I hate to tell you this but you’re going to want to let this layer dry for a while, especially if it’s summer and humid. (Humidity really affects crackle medium, in fact when I’m using crackle medium in the summer, I use a hair dryer on the “warm” setting to speed up the drying process and to create bigger cracks because crackle medium doesn’t behave the same way in summer as it does in winter.) Honestly, unless I’m in a hurry and use the blow dryer, I leave this layer to dry over night and I put the canvas on my coffee table in my office which is right in front of the furnace so hot air is blowing in that general area. It’s perfectly okay to use the blow dryer though if you’re impatient, just make sure it’s on the “warm” or medium setting and you’re blowing on low or medium. Even with using the hair dryer though, it’s probably not going to dry completely, but it will speed things up and it doesn’t necessarily need to be bone dry for the next step. (But I prefer it to be.)

The next step is splatter painting! Fun right? Now the very first rule of splatter painting is that acrylic paint does NOT wash out, so make sure you wear something you don’t mind getting paint on because it’s inevitable that you will no matter how careful you are. It may only be one little speck, but it’ll happen. Trust me. Just about every single pair of pajama pants I own are covered in paint splatters because I generally paint in my pajamas.

Anyway, you need to make your “splatter mix”, which is equal parts acrylic paint, Golden’s Acrylic Glazing Liquid (which I’ll show you a picture of further down) and then enough water to thin the mixture to a specific consistency, which I’ll show you too. I make my splatter mixes in an old ice cube tray because you really don’t need very much:

The other thing you need for this part is a spray bottle full of water. I got my spray bottles at the dollar store for $0.50 each.

Now, for thinning your splatter mix with water, what I actually use for ADDING the water is actually kinda funny. You ready? I use a little eye-dropper type thing called an Aqua-Leash that came with Sea Monkeys. I used to be obsessed with Sea Monkeys and had like, 6 tanks going at once of them, so I’ve got a bunch of these little yellow and blue eye-dropper type things kicking around that work wonderfully for adding small amounts of water to things like splatter mixes. If you don’t have an eye-dropper (recommended) you can just use your tap to add water but do it very very very slowly, checking the consistency regularly. Really, you’re only going to be adding a few millimeters of water which is hard to do with the tap, so I highly recommend an eye-dropper or something similar. This is the consistency you’re striving for:

Add just enough water for it to drip slowly from the end of a paint brush. Getting the right consistency really just takes practice, honestly.

The next thing you’re going to do is spray your canvas with water so that when the paint hits the canvas, it’ll kind of melt a little bit, giving each splatter a softer edge. You want to have your spray bottle set on “spray” as opposed to “stream” and you want more than just a light layer of water but you don’t want to flood it either. This part takes practice too and even I add too little or too much half the time. In the case of this particular canvas, I actually added too much water in the middle and not enough around the edges, but even if you screw this part up, it’ll still end up looking good.

For splatter painting, don’t use your good brushes, use crappy ones (any shape, really) with long handles because what you’re going to be doing is putting paint on the bristles of the thinner brush and holding it over the canvas while tapping the brush with the handle of a heavier brush. Here are pictures and a short video on the process:

Now, here’s a little bit of splatter painting wisdom for you: if you have a dark colour and a lighter colour, do the lighter colour first because you can always add more of the lighter colour if you didn’t use it enough in the first place, whereas with the darker colour, if you use too much, you can’t exactly correct that, but you can tone it down by adding more of the lighter colour over top of the darker colour. Make sense?

Here’s the canvas after the splatters were added:

Because of all the water in this step, the canvas is going to have to dry over night. You DO NOT want to blow dry at this stage to speed things up because the force of the air will mix your colours all together and ruin your splatters. Again, I put my wet canvases on my coffee table in front of the furnace and they’re usually dry by the time I wake up. If it’s NOT dry by the time you wake up and isn’t exactly wet per se but tacky, THEN you can use the blow dryer to speed up the process if you want, but me, I just let them dry naturally at this stage to make sure I’m preserving the splatters.

Once the canvas is dry completely, you’re ready to do the final layer, which is the glitter. On this canvas, I used DecoArt’s “Craft Twinkles“, which is a glitter paint, (mixed with Glazing Liquid and water) but on other canvases I use dry glitter, which I’ll explain after the pictures.

So with the Craft Twinkles, you want to mix equal parts of it with Acrylic Glazing Liquid and then like, 10-15 drops of water, then mix with the end of a paint brush.

If you’re using dry glitter, I recommend Martha Stewart’s because it’s ultra fine,  super sparkly and I believe it comes in about 30 different colours (available at Michael’s and at some Wal*Marts). With dry glitter, you’re going to want to fill your ice cube tray about 1/3 (maybe a touch more) with glitter and enough Acrylic Glazing Liquid to give it more or less the consistency of paint, then add about 5-10 drops of water and mix with the end of a paint brush.

With these amounts, for both the Craft Twinkles and dry glitter, you’re going to make enough of the mixture to coat a 12×12 inch canvas, which is exactly what you’re going to do with it. Just take a large flat brush, probably the same brush you used for the white topcoat, and paint the whole canvas with your glitter mixture. Use all of it. If it’s a thick layer, hey, it’s just going to be that much more sparkly! Then let that dry overnight. (I don’t recommend the blow dryer for this part.)

Now you’re ready to add whatever it is you want to add to the painting, whether it’s a pretty girl or something else. Whatever you want on there, just do it. Once you’re finished and everything’s dry, you need to varnish, which is the key to making these paintings sparkly like the metallic finish on a car.

I use Triple Thick Gloss Glaze varnish by, you guessed it, DecoArt because I think this shit is awesome. It goes on very thick, dries fast, is non-yellowing and I always use two coats. (Make sure it dries between coats.) As the jar says, the finish is very glossy and it really makes the sparkles shine. I cannot praise this product enough, I love the stuff. I get paranoid they’ll discontinue it so every time I go to Michael’s, I grab two 8oz jars of it just in case. It also comes in a spray but I’ve never tried that. I’m sure it’s good too, though.

And that’s it! You now know all my secrets and can make sparkly paintings of your very own. :o) If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Now, when I told people that I was going to do this tutorial, a couple said that I should add a “donate” button at the end, but honestly, I wouldn’t feel good about that, so if you found this tutorial useful and happen to have an Etsy account, just do me a favour and add my Etsy shop to your favourites so I can start gaining some street cred on that site since I’m brand spanking new over there. Thanks in advance! Happy glittering!

Now that I have a new video camera, I decided to make a new little video of some of my recent paintings to show how sparkly they are, something that doesn’t really show up in photographs and is really frustrating. I’m going to add a link to this video on my Etsy store so hopefully people will get a better idea of what it is I do. Anyway, here’s the video. (I’m not embedding it because full-sized, it covers up my right column and I think it should be seen full-sized.)

“just like honey” is finally finished and I just listed it for sale on Etsy!
There are more pics over there, so go check it out. :o)

Also finished is the painting I was working on for Ashley’s baby shower, although there were some technical difficulties after varnishing…the girl’s petticoat? It should actually be purple with flowers, but for some reason the varnish turned it more reddish. This has happened to me once before (pink paper turning orange) so some papers, I guess, just turn different colours when the varnish is added. There’s nothing I can really do about it and thankfully the colours have never been so far off that it looked bad, it just doesn’t look as good as it originally did.

Anyway, I’m tired today so without further ado, here’s the pics of Ashley’s painting:

Anyway, realistically I don’t think I’ll be going to the baby shower, but as I think I said in my previous post on the subject, I doubt Ashley will care.

That’s really all I have to say today. As I said, I’m really tired. For some reason I decided to get up at like, 6:30am and I’m just dead on my feet right now considering I didn’t go t o bed until around 1am. :o/

I don’t know what’s been up my ass lately but I’ve been super productive over the last 4 or 5 days. My bee girl painting is almost finished and so is the one I’m doing for Ashley for her baby shower. All I’ve been doing is drawing/painting and watching Six Feet Under starting from the first season (I’m now on season 3). Today I’ll continue to work on both paintings and watching Six Feet Under and then I’ll watch the Leafs game and repeat.

An artist once told me that in order to produce work in more volume, I should stop watching TV and I thought that was insane advice because I paint while I watch TV. Or more to the point, I paint while I listen to the TV, looking up when i need to, but mostly just listening to it while I concentrate on whatever’s on my desk. The very odd time I’ll paint while listening to music, but that’s pretty rare and usually only happens when there’s nothing on TV or I’ve seen all of the good movies on The Movie Network On Demand that month. And even then, I’m more likely to put in a DVD of a movie I’ve seen a thousand times than to paint while listening to music. Music is for writing. TV is for painting.

Perhaps predictably because I never finish anything, the story I was writing last month has been put on the back burner.  I was going strong on it, got 10 pages down easily and then Xmas happened and I just kinda lost steam. I fully intend to go back to it, but probably not until the spring when painting urges start slowing down.

The ACEOs/ATCs…I haven’t really been working on them. The ones I posted a while back are still sitting on my desk without arms (because I really really fucking hate doing arms, I cannot say this enough!) but as soon as I’m finished the two paintings I’m working on right now, I’ll go back to them. I mean, I have to, I have no money for more canvases so unless I want to paint on wood (which I don’t), ACEOs it is. A lot of people have been asking me about them and when they’ll be ready and the fact of the matter is, I’m going to finish all 60 of them before any of them go up for sale. Because I’m working on them all by colour, I don’t want to release them for sale as I make them because say I release the ones I’ll have finished in a couple of weeks. Those ones are purple and gold. So someone buys a purple one and then 2 months later I put the pink and turquoise ones up for sale and the person who bought the purple one thinks “dammit! I like those better!” and regrets their purchase. I don’t want that, so that’s why I won’t be putting them all up for sale until they’re all finished. Or at least that’s the plan at this very moment. I’m glad to hear that there’s interest in them though, that makes me very happy. Sometimes when I’m painting I get into negative self-talk and think “why the fuck am I even doing this? No one’s going to like it, not enough to buy it blah blah blah” but I don’t with the ACEOs because I know people want them. So that’s a good thing.

Anyway, onto what I’m working on now. My bee girl is almost finished (she needs arms), or at least I thought she was. When I was drawing her, I made her slightly smaller than 8 inches tall to give me headroom for her antennae on a 12 inch tall canvas. Well, I needed less headroom than originally anticipated, so now there’s all this space above her head that I need to fill with something. Warning: Shitty picture…

She needs words. I just don’t know which words. The idea to paint her came from the “No Rain” video by Blind Melon, so “No Rain” is the obvious choice here, but truthfully I don’t think she’s  grungy enough for that. The girl in the “No Rain” video was an outcast, with nerdy glasses and a plump body. This bee girl is obviously a little more glamourous. (After she’s varnished, she’s going to have a fluffy black tulle tutu.) I think if I were to see this painting when I was out somewhere with the words “No Rain” on it, I’d probably laugh at it for trying to hard. So that’s out. Also out is a play on words (unless it’s very clever) on the word “bee”, like “Bee Yourself” and stuff like that, but I’m not opposed to bee references in general like, “It’s good to be Queen” (although I think that’s too long and doesn’t fit with this painting). So if anyone has any suggestions for this one, I’m all ears because I’ve been looking at it since last night trying to think of something and I’m at a loss. Later today I’m going to look up bee facts on Wikipedia to see if anything pops out, but if anyone thinks of something in the meantime, shout it out! Just try to keep it to 3 or 4 words, if possible. (And thank you in advance!)

The painting I’m doing for Ashley’s baby shower is pretty straight forward, just a pretty girl on a REALLY REALLY sparkly background. (And I mean REALLY REALLY sparkly, I kinda went nuts with the glitter on hers.) Her background is crackled white paint over metallic purple paint, with light purple, light yellow, champagne gold and metallic purple splatters and light purple sparkles over top because the baby’s room is being done in all purples and yellows, apparently. I asked Ashley to send me samples of the paint she bought for the baby’s room, which she did, and I matched the samples to my paint pretty much perfectly, she’s going to love it.

The girl for the painting is basically Ashley herself in a fancy dress:

That pic (and the bee girl pic) is kinda crap because I took it outside thinking the white light from the grey day would make for better pictures, but it didn’t and I didn’t really realize it until I’d already uploaded the pics. Her eyes are a metallic light blue which is essentially the same shade as Ashley’s eyes and Ashley’s hair is long, straight and dark brown and she wears it in pretty much that style every time I see her. I’m assuming, since her boyfriend also has dark hair (but I don’t know what colour eyes) that the baby will have dark hair too. They’re both Italian and everyone in their families has dark hair, so I figure that one’s a given.

If I have time before the shower (and money) I’m going to make a trip to Michael’s to see if I can’t find metal words for the girl to be holding. I’m pretty sure Making Memories makes a set that includes the word “family”, which would work, but I’d really much prefer “daughter”. If I can’t do that then the girl will just be clasping her hands in front.

The baby shower is on the 24th and is in downtown Toronto. I told everyone I’m going and Judy’s excited for me to come, but in all honesty, there’s a very good chance I won’t go. Being in a hall with about 50 strangers with weird food 2 hours away from home for a baby shower is not my idea of fun at all. I’m gonna need so many drugs to pull this off that I just don’t even know if I’ll be able to. Judy really wants me there though, so I’m going to try my best to make it. (Ashley probably won’t care either way, as long as I send a gift. That’s just how Ashley is.)

Anyway, I think it’s time for me to make my eggs, start watching more Six Feet Under and get back to work on these paintings. I hope you’re all having a wonderful day!

PS. Buttercup’s got lots of interesting stuff in store for January, you should check it out!

Embedding disabled by request (I hate it when they do that!)

The bee girl I’m working on for the painting I’m planning right now is going to be different from the bee girl in the video, but the idea was very much inspired by her and the new “Splendid Gold” metallic paint I got at Michael’s a few weeks ago. I haven’t drawn my bee girl yet, but that’s on the agenda for today (after I have a nap, this getting up early thing is FOR THE BIRDS) and as I type this, I’m attempting to tea-stain white tulle for the bee girl’s tutu. I’ve tea-stained material before and it’s always worked out well, but I’m thinking that the tulle I have might be too plastic-y to take the tea properly, which sucks. It’s extra fine tulle and I have no idea what it’s actually made out of. It feels a little plastic-y though. If the tea-staining doesn’t work, then I’m going to have to get Blake to pick me up a metre of fine black tulle, which is cheap so I’m not worried about it, but I really wanted the tea-stained look and unfortunately, you can’t buy tulle in that colour. You can get sort of a tan/beige colour, but that won’t work for what I’m doing. And hey, if he has to pick up fine black tulle then while he’s there I can get him to pick up skinny yellow ribbon too, which I don’t have and which would add a finishing touch to the bee girl’s shoes, like in the video. Ah, we’ll see how it all works out.

Anyway, this bee girl painting is the one I’m using for my background tutorial, which I should have up by next week.

We’re supposed to get a crapload of snow in Sunnyland tonight and tomorrow, 10cm each day with whiteout conditions from snowsqualls. To those who don’t live near a giant lake in The Great White North, a snowsquall is kinda like a snowy thunderstorm, minus the thunder & lightning (most of the time…on the odd occasion we get both & it’s pretty cool, lightning in winter is green). Snowsqualls, apparently, are a result of the wind & snow crossing the lake and we’re close enough to Lake Huron (it’s only 10 mins from me) that we get these storms. Often during the winter, our road is closed because of them, although I doubt that’ll be the case tonight (and I also doubt we’re going to get as much snow as they’re saying.)

Anyway, this afternoon the snow looked really cool, it was coming down slowly and softly like a white curtain and I tried to take video of it but I think the framerate on my camera is messed up somehow because when I came back inside and looked the the video, the snow was falling much faster than it had been in person. Regardless, I uploaded it to YouTube anyway and if you care to see it, here it is…it’s only 40 seconds:

This morning I had to get up early to go to the lab and get a blood test done, which had be thrilled beyond belief because needles and veins and blood are just my favouritest things in the whole wide world! Almost as awesome as getting up early in the morning! They chastised me for taking my pills with about 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero instead of water (some of the pills I take are capsules with powder in them and I find taking them with water really gross because the damn things dissolve REALLY fast and then the capsules feel like they’re stuck in my throat, for some reason this doesn’t happen if I take them with something carbonated) because they claimed it would affect my cholesterol reading. Truthfully, I’m not sure I believe them and they almost wouldn’t do the test but I told them it was my last day to do it, that it was Blake’s last day of vacation and that my doctor’s appointment was on Friday so if I didn’t get it done today I was screwed, so they said they’d do it but to make sure I told my doctor that the cholesterol results might be a little off because I was a VERY BAD GIRL. I’m not really worried about it though.

Remember last year when my GP freaked out about my cholesterol and put me on cholesterol meds? My shrink thought/thinks he was being a bit extreme because apparently my levels weren’t really anything to be worried about, especially since I wasn’t taking the medication that caused the spike anymore and while I’m still taking the cholesterol meds because I figure I might as well, I’m not worried about the 6 mouthfuls of Coke Zero I had this morning skewing my test results one way or the other. I am a little interested to see how my cholesterol looks since I began eating all these eggs though. Oh, did I mention I lost 2 & a half lbs last week? That’s almost 11 lbs total since I started eating eggs for breakfast 10 weeks ago. w00t!

After my blood test, Blake & I went to the post office where there were two packages to pick up. One was an Amazon box for the kids for Xmas from Blake’s mom & Charlie and one was a book called the Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin from Lia! THANK YOU LIA! I flipped through it when I got home, but then I got sidetracked and haven’t had a chance to pick it up again. It looks pretty wicked though, so many different kinds of cards! I plan on spending some time with the book later tonight. Again, thanks Lia, you’re awesome!

And of course, speaking of artist trading cards my first 8 are almost finished. They just need arms and a coat of varnish and then they’ll be done. And I guess when they’re “done” I have to figure out a way to put my name & stuff on the back…honestly, I’ll probably just write it. My printer is slowly but surely dying and there’s no way it would print labels nicely, even if I had any. I could also glue my business card to the backs of them, but I don’t really want 40 “internet people” having my home phone number. I’ll figure it out. Anyway, here’s a group shot I took of the 8 after I took the books off of them that were drying them flat:

Throughout the rest of this post, I’ll show you some of them close up. All images can be clicked to enlarge.

Doing the smaller girls has definitely been a lesson in trial & error. For the 8 that are almost finished, I screwed up just as many because like I said in a previous post, drawing them so small is actually kind of hard. I’m getting the hang of it though, and last night I started a sheet of 15 more, which I’ll work on while these ones’ arms and varnish are drying. Once the 15 I started yesterday are finished, I only have 1 more card with gold sparkles to do and then that stack is finished. The rest either have iridescent or silver sparkles.

While I’ve been doing these, because this is just how my mind works, I’ve been thinking about the ones that I’ll be selling and I’m not sure how I’m going to do that. I know that each card is going to be $30 + $2 shipping, but I don’t know if I’m going to sell them on my site or the site I linked a while back where all they sell is ATCs (or more properly ACEOs) in an Etsy-like setting. That site, from what I’ve been able to tell doesn’t take a cut, so I don’t have the issues with it that I have with Etsy and eBay, but I don’t know how popular it is or if the artists actually sell their cards. Another thing with that site is that you have to scan each individual card and list each one separately, which I guess makes sense, but that’s a lot of extra work and if I can avoid extra work and achieve the same result, I’m more inclined to do that. Selling on my site I have 2 options: scan, post and make a PayPal button for each one or DON’T scan them all, just show examples of each colour and then the card(s) the person gets would be left to my discretion. What do you guys think? I’m thinking that I’ll sell more if I scan each card and post them all with their own PayPal buttons, but I’m torn as to whether I should do that on my own site or on that ACEO site that just sells ACEOs. I suppose I could sell some on my site, like all on one page, and then on that page say that there’s more for sale on the ACEO site and give people the option to buy them there too, if the card they want happens to be there. I really really suck at the business of art, seriously.

Another thing I thought I could do, if I ever sell a freaking painting & actually have some money, is I could matte (mat?) and frame say, 3 cards and sell them as one piece. I have no idea how much framing costs though, so I don’t even know if that would be realistic or if I’d end up ripping myself off in the end because you can only price something like that so high.

Maybe it’s tacky that I think about selling things as I make them, but I’m a really utilitarian person and my grama, aka The Antichrist, is/was an artist’s worst enemy. I’m sure I’ve talked about this before, but when I was Wes’ age, I would make things and sell them in my grama’s furniture store and that taught me early that you only get to create things if you’re going to sell them. Even when I was an adult and we were living above her store and I started painting on canvas, I’d show her what I’d created and her response would always be, “Okay so you made it, now what are you going to do with it?” and when I’d tell her I was going to sell it, on the internet, because I knew that was the “right” answer, she’d say “Well who in the hell is going to buy that?” (This was back when I was going through my “fetal phase” and fuck you, grama, I sold every goddamn piece!)

While my mother definitely raised me (at least until I was 15), I spent just about every weekend of my life with my grama and the attitude that you can only create to sell is very deeply ingrained in me. The only thing I’ve painted for myself, in the 8 years I’ve been painting, is the covers of my sketchbooks and even those are extremely hard for me to do because as I’m doing them, I’m thinking that I could be spending that time and those supplies on something that’s going to potentially make money.

And back to the utilitarian thing for a second, I’m not a keeper on “nicknacks”. You will find very very few of these in my home and the ones I do have were given to me as gifts, I would never in a million years buy anything like that for myself because I think they’re a waste of money. They just sit there. Also the only pictures adorning my walls are my failed attempts that I don’t really know what to do with.

It would be lovely to say that I have this fabulous home and studio full of inspirational things, but I really just don’t. It’s the same thing with the way I dress, I mean people expect artists to be these crazy dressers with crazy hair & all that, but I’m pretty plain & boring. Today when I went to the lab, I wore grey trackpants, a brown t-shirt and a grey hoodie. Other times I just would have worn my pajamas because A) I live in sleepwear and B) I just don’t care. If I’m dressing up to go somewhere, whatever I’m wearing is usually pretty simple and usually pretty black. I suppose sometimes my hair, when I dye it crazy colours, is more conducive to the artist stereotype but it’s never really a conscious “oh I’m creative so I must look the part” thing, it’s just “hey I feel like having pink hair this month.”

I was actually reading about this very thing in the book Living the Creative Life a couple of months ago. Most of the artists who were interviewed for that book were like me when it came to dress and a lot of them said that they’d rather put their creative energy into the things they created than into looking the part of the “creative artist”. I couldn’t agree with that more, obviously, and it made me feel a lot better hearing it from other artists. I mean, why the hell wouldn’t I paint in my pajamas? I have nowhere to be, no one to impress and y’know what? I’m gonna get paint on them! And it won’t matter!

So there ya have it, my take on living the creative life.

Something else I’ve been doing this week is taking pictures and video for the background tutorial I keep being asked for. Today was the last step. I’m still not going to post it until after the new year because with Xmas & Buttercup & everything else I have to do these days, the tutorial is fairly low on my priority list. And actually, in writing this down, I’ve realized that I have one more picture to take for it and then all that’s left to do is edit everything together and make it into a post.

What I will tell you about it though, is that the background I made for the tutorial is the same as the black & gold ATCs on this page and the girl that’s going to be going on the painting is going to be a BEE GIRL wearing a tutu. I haven’t drawn her yet and I’m not sure if the tulle I have is tea-stainable, but she’s in my mind and I’m really excited about her. Again though, I’m not going to start working on her until after Xmas when things have died down a bit.

As per usual, all things Xmas have me stressed out beyond belief. I know I’ve explained this before, but every year for the past few years, we’ve gone up north to my dad & step-mom’s Xmas Eve, stay there Xmas Day, have Xmas dinner across the road at my uncle Paul’s house and then have to drive home Xmas night to do it all over again with my mother on Boxing Day. As I also explained in a previous post, last year my dad really disrespected my dogs by not cleaning out the garage and it upset me quite a bit. I didn’t sleep at ALL on Xmas Eve because I was worried about the dogs and felt sorry for them, only having the space of a blanket to lay down or move around on that wasn’t flooded or full of my dad’s van.

This year, to avoid all that, the original plan was to have my neighbours come and let the dogs in & out while we were away but as we get closer to actually having to do it I’m having a hard time dealing with it. Agoraphobia is the fear of the outside world, yes, but part of it, at least for me, is a fear of letting people into my inside world and the idea of people in my house while I’m gone really bothers me. I mean, I trust Wayne & Judy to look after the dogs, but I don’t know if I trust them not to take a tour of my house and inspect how clean my toilet is.

Last week I was really considering staying home with the dogs and not going to my dad’s at all because honestly, that sounds like the perfect Xmas to me – no Xmas at all – but even that stressed me out because like it or not, there are all of these societal pressures put on people during Xmas that you either have to adhere to or people will think you’re a shitty person. If I don’t go up north for Xmas, I’m a shitty daughter and a shitty mother (even though my kids couldn’t care less if I was there or not) and it’s going to look weird when they go over to Paul’s for Xmas dinner and I’m not there. People are going to expect Blake to explain and there really isn’t an explanation that would make anyone happy or us to seem less weird (when they already think of us as pretty fucking weird).

So after a lot of inner debate, the original plan stands, that the entire Crittenden family, those on 2 legs and 4 (well, minus Pixel who gets a nice vacation from all of us for Xmas), are going up north for Xmas and Blake’s going to call my dad personally and tell him (in nicer terms than I’m gonna put it here) that if that goddamn garage isn’t fit for MY dogs, we’re turning around and coming home. Blake also called the vet today to see if you can give dogs Gravol and yes, yes you can (1/4 of a children’s one, apparently), so this year we won’t be pulling over on some back road to clean up Lucky’s vomit with a box of Kleenex because that’s all that’s in the car.

To make matters worse, ALL of our Xmas shopping is being done on Thursday’s paycheque because we haven’t been able to afford it until now. And even then, and I’m sure Blake will love me for posting this publicly, we’re looking at deferring this month’s mortgage payment to even have Xmas this year because we simply don’t have the money to give the kids the kind of Xmas they’ve enjoyed previous years. Also, everyone who isn’t under the age of 12 this year is getting gift certificates because I just don’t know what the hell to buy anyone. When I’ve asked, I’ve been told gift certificates, so that’s what everyone’s getting. Our kids are getting clothes because they need them and we can’t afford to do “fun stuff” and clothes, so that’s just the way it’s going to have to be. My sister Raili  (aged 4) is getting Barbies and my sister Rachael (aged 10 months) is getting Little People because that’s what was asked for.

Also, I don’t even know for sure what the hell is going on with my mother this year and I’ve been too afraid to ask. The “tradition” has been that she comes here Boxing Day and we do presents and have dinner, but with her moving in with John, first of all, I don’t know if he and his son will be coming (which means extra gifts/extra food) and second of all, now that my mother has an actual HOME, she may want to start doing Boxing Day there like we’ve done for most of my life. The thing is though, with going up north and all the bullshit associated with it, we don’t want to have to do more traveling on Boxing Day and if she comes here, I hope she’s fine with pizza or Chinese food because I’m NOT leaving halfway through Xmas dinner at Paul’s house to make it back home in time for me to get enough sleep to cook Xmas dinner the next day for my mother.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking hate Xmas? Seriously, it kills me. I wish it was never invented. I wish I could sleep through the whole thing. I wish I could stay home, with my dogs, watching bad movies and pretending it wasn’t happening.

On a more positive note, did anyone see the Leafs game last night? Was that fucking beautiful or what? My throat is still sore from cringing/yelling at the TV.

And with that, I’m out and you’re probably thinking “thank god” because this post is 3,100 words long.

PS. My review of the new Sims expansion is up on Buttercup for those who were waiting for it.

PPS. I stand corrected about the snow. I just went outside and we got at least 15cm in the time it took me to write this post.

This is my first ATC girl who is much larger than actual size. She has no arms yet and her shoes aren’t painted, but when they are, she’ll be going on one of the black & gold ATCs. I have 3 other girls in this state of being finished but I didn’t take pictures of them because their dresses look stupid the way they are now and won’t look proper until I cut them out. To explain, they’re in the same style as “Sparkle“, so the tissue paper is kind of everywhere until I cut out the shape of their skirts.

Tonight I’m going to work on the other 4 who are on the same piece of watercolour paper and are ready for their dresses. Two of them will be going on purple & gold ATCs and the other two are for the gold & black.

While I’ve definitely been procrastinatey with the ATCs (I’m also working on a canvas for the background tutorial), I am absolutely loving doing them. I like doing very small, detailed work and always have, especially when I’m in pain and I’ve always liked “cut & paste”. When I was little, like in kindergarten and grade 1, we would have art class and I would always get excited when the activity was “cut & paste”, whether it was cutting up magazines or construction paper. That’s why I like doing these girls so much (and the bigger ones, of course), the painting of them is actually very minimal, it’s the cutting & pasting of their dresses that I find fulfilling. It’s the mixing of media and little details. The backgrounds, of course, is all painting, but I see that as a separate thing from doing the girls themselves. All of my paintings are done in 4 stages: the background (which is like, 5 stages in and of itself), the girl(s), the varnishing and the addition of details, like jewels or fibers or thread.  I take pleasure in each step, but I have to admit that it’s the cutting & pasting of each girl’s ensemble that I like the best.

With the little ATC girls, I haven’t decided yet if they’re going to have thread (for the ones with corsets) or jeweled details. I’m kind of thinking “no”, because people will want the cards to be totally flat to put with a collection or whatnot and with the threads for the corsets, half of the thread would be on the back of the card where my information is supposed to be. (I realize I could do the sewing before I put the girls on the cards but I’ve found that when I do that, they don’t adhere properly because the thread is so bumpy and it makes their busts slightly curve.)

Making these little girls is definitely a lot harder than making the full-sized ones. Just to draw the first 8 took me about 3 days and shading them took another 2. Then another day to paint their faces and another to paint their eyes, lips and eyeshadow, which had to dry overnight. Making the backgrounds, the cards, was so easy, but these little girls are gonna be the death of me, I have no idea how I’m going to all 60 of them when 8 is taking me forever. But I figure I have all winter and have nothing better to do, so I might as well just keep plugging away. I’m out of canvases and have no money, so it’s not like I’m going to be painting anything else for a while.  I do have a pile of wood that Blake cut for me at Jesse’s house a while ago, like a dozen or so of them in varying sizes, but I don’t like working with wood because I can’t sew into it and I don’t like adhering watercolour paper to it because it just doesn’t seem right. I guess if I get really desperate, I’ll use it, but for now I’m pretending it doesn’t exist and just keeping my head down getting these girls finished.

Today Blake downloaded and burned the movie Julie & Julia for me and he has another 2 or 3 on the go so my plan is to just watch movies tonight and work on my girls. I got up this morning around 11am, but got tired again around 1pm and ended up sleeping for the rest of the afternoon, so I’m guessing I’m going to be up late.

Blake had half of Thursday off, plus Friday, then this weekend and then he has Monday & Tuesday off too because his boss made him take the rest of this year’s vacation days before the end of the year. That means that on Monday he’s going to help me take some pictures for the background tutorial because I can’t splatter paint and take pictures at the same time and then on Tuesday morning I have to finally go in for the bloodwork my shrink ordered 4 months ago which I’ve been putting off because nothing is worse to me than having your blood drawn. (Okay maybe getting an IV is worse. Veins and blood are just gross.) Hopefully my shrink will get the results before my appointment with her on Friday.

Anyway, my dinner just materialized in front of me, so I guess I’ll stop babbling, hit “post” and go eat. I hope you’re all having a lovely weekend and the snow isn’t keepin’ ya down.

I woke up today at 1:30pm and I was amazed when my eyes adjusted enough for me to look at the clock. I got up at 8am on Sunday, for some ungodly reason, and last night I ended up staying awake until around 3:30am because someone on a forum I go to started a thread about this A&E show called Hoarders, which I’d never heard of and it sounded interesting so I (stupidly) decided to start watching episodes on Ninja Video.

Also last night, I wrote one of my articles for Buttercup, called “So This Is Xmas“, all about why I hate this particular holiday and it left me emotionally ravaged. I know I’ve told the story as to why I hate Xmas on my site before and last night I promised myself that this would be the last time I open that wound ever again because afterward, I was a complete mess. (Mom, if you’re reading this, you probably wanna skip that article. You know what it’s about and I really mean it when I say it’s the last time it’s going to be brought up.) It’s strange how something that happened so long ago can leave me a a crumpled mess on the floor wanting to throw up more than half a lifetime later.

Anyway, that’s what I did last night.

There are a couple of arty things that have been topics of discussion lately and I figure now’s as good a time as any to talk about them. The first is that some friends of mine have asked me if I’ll ever start making videos on YouTube, specifically art tutorial videos and vlogs and the answer to that is quite simply “no”. There are millions of art tutorials already on YouTube, I suck at video editing software and have no intentions of improvement in that area and I just don’t want to. Vlogs? Why? I already have a blog and write quite well, thank you, so I don’t see the point of sitting in front of a camera essentially talking to myself and saying everything I’m saying here only a hell of a lot less eloquently. No thank you. One person said that there’s no difference between recording a vlog and doing a streaming show at Camwhores and I guess that person has never been to Camwhores before or seen any of my shows. Yes, there is similarity in the fact that you’re in front of a camera, but that’s where the similarity ends. At Camwhores, there are people watching you and talking to you, it’s live and to me, that’s a lot less awkward than sitting in my office talking to myself about the weather.  Plus, there’s no editing to be done and only a select audience is going to be viewing it after it’s been recorded and put in the archives. So it’s completely different and no, I won’t be making art tutorials or vlogs for YouTube in the new year. I may do little videos of my finished paintings so people can see how they sparkle (which we’ve found impossible to photograph), but that’s about the extent of it.

The other thing I’ve been asked recently is if I’ll do a tutorial on how I do backgrounds and the answer to that one is “sure”. If people want to know how, as it appears they do, then the next time I make a painting (which should be in the new year, unless I become inspired before then) I’ll take photos of the process and whip up a tutorial on all that goes into the background. It’s actually extremely easy, as long as you’ve got the right products and I think the end result is pretty cool. So that’s something I plan on working on in the new year.

Since I have nothing to read right now, I dug out these back issues I ordered last year of a magazine called Artful Blogging. Yes, even I was amazed that such a publication existed. Basically, last year someone suggested that I write a piece about my blog for the magazine so I ordered the back issues to see what it was all about and then someone else told me to “let them come to you”, so I kind of put the idea out of my mind. Then last week when I was looking for something on one of my bookshelves that I haven’t read yet, I found them and started reading. Long story short, I don’t think I want to be in this magazine and the suggestion of me being in it is actually kind of laughable because I so wouldn’t fit in. This magazine is not for people who say “fuck” a lot, it’s for people who inspire and make friends through their blogs and network and all kinds of other flowery “uplifting” bullshit. And while yes, I’ve done all of the above with my blog (or more to the point, my Live Journal) and I’ve had mine longer than any of the people in at least the first two issues of the magazine, I’ve done so with a hell of a lot more edge than the women profiled (and they’re all women) and this magazine doesn’t appear to be the place for that. I’m going to read all of the issues I have, even though every article is practically the same, and then I’m going to forget it exists again because it’s, well, boring. Hopefully I get some new books for Xmas.

And with that, I think I’m off to my Sims Bunker since I have to write a review for the expansion next week and I still haven’t been to Egypt.