Anatomy of Bliss - three ways

Painting in Photoshop. You know why it's so cool?

In a few small clicks...

you have a new mood.

This was done pretty intuitively, and in one go.

I didn't draw it out, or plan it to go any which way.

The part I like best about painting

(either with 'real' paints, or digitally)

is that the work takes on its own life and direction.

After that, it's only a matter of facilitating it,

and letting it manifest itself.

I could have gone on painting it,

but I stopped, and just changed the backgrounds.

In the end, I don't have a favorite - do you?

Caught in passing....

Happenning upon an article on Etsy,

I found this little gem and had to share:

What does handmade mean to you?

Handmade is the cliff swallow, bulding a mud nest on a wall where vertical meets upside down. It’s about finding the patience to slow down and accept the pace at which one person can progress through many detailed steps. It’s the power that we all have to bring something into existence that just moments before was a fleeting thought or curiosity.

What an amazing way  to put it!  Do read the rest of their story

- it's guaranteed to inspire.



Fine Art Photos

The latest listings in my shop are not paintings, but photographs that I've taken but never thought about selling.  But these are pretty nice for the shop, I thought, so I've listed the first three, and hope to put the others up soon too. 

(Listing Genie, where are you??)

Bangles from a trip to India earlier this year.

Foxgloves in our patio, long gone of course...

Geranium leaf from one of my four geranium pots.  This was right after I had watered them.  That leaf texture looks so much like suede!

Rose of Sharon, also from the patio.  They are purple actually, not this deep pink that I made them.

And dreamy white flowers from a tree by the lake.  The stamens are actually yellow, not pink, and I added those fuzzy yellow blobs as well.

Ocean In A Box

When we lived close to the sea, everytime I went to the beach I had the wild thought of somehow capturing the sea, the breeze and the atmosphere in a box to take home with me. That way I'd always have the sea with me, especially the pink and orange sunsets!

Once again, I started with a photograph of an acrylic painting I did on stretched canvas.  Then I digitally manipulated the colors and added several elements like the text (Korean - and I wish I knew what it means!), the blue and green bars, the turquoise fragmented area in the bottom, the circle and the hazy shapes on the right.  As well, the lovely vinatge illustration of the flower. 

I got a test print done, and it looks good enough to eat!  The pinks and the oranges together with the intense blues - yum!

Get it in my shop!

A New Day

And not ordinary, by any means!

Ramadan is over, and we are celebrating Eid.  The end of Ramadan is always bittersweet for me.  I feel good about having had one more year with this wonderful month in it, but I also wonder if I did justice to it.  Could I have spent it in a better way?  The answer to that is invariably yes, but it comes with the hope that next year I'll have one more opportunity to live it, Inshallah.  Meanwhile, it's important to hold on to the values of patience and generosity for the rest of the year and build on them.

So today is Eid, and we will meet a whole bunch of friends this evening - should be fun!  I'm also hoping I'll overcome my shyness about my shop and hand out some business cards already.  *shaking my head in disgust here*

And new listings in my shop!

Do check them out!

Home Delivery!

So, I sold a painting to - DaddyBoy! Well, I'm not letting him pay for it, and I don't have to go to the post office to ship it, but a sale's a sale!



More prints in my shop!

Featured on Etsy - again

I don't know how many times this particular piece of mine has been featured in a treasury on Etsy, but no one has ever bought it!!!

Featured on Etsy

Featured

On Etsy today:

Featured

Two of my yellow creations were featured back to back on Etsy.

Fab find from Etsy

How cute are these?
And there's more gorgeous stuff in lapomme's shop.


Adorable!

Metamorphosis

yes
I
had
to
do
something with my
orchid

collage

get it
in
my
shop

Finally some orchids

Couldn't get around to painting the orchids so I left them blank and painted the background instead.

I
like
it
this
way!

Experiments in fabric

A company in Toronto printed out this sample for me. The fabric is silk de chine and I really like its drape.




now
what
will
I
make?

(I have a few ideas :))

but suggestions are welcome!

RGB/CMYK

I figured out why my chairs wouldn't show up on Blogger in the right colors - they were in CMYK mode!

I changed the mode to RGB and voila!





Now if they will only upload on Etsy as well...

Two more chairs, I think

I'm not sure what's going on, but for the last three days (THREE) I've been trying to put up a couple of new paintings and I JUST CAN'T!

First, something kept going wrong with the scan, so I had to scan them mutiple times, one by one. Then Photoshop kept screwing up. Somehow the image size was always ending up wrong. If I use 1000 pixels my image size goes up to 14 inches, making the file too big. If I reduce the resolution, I lose the pixels. I am just not getting the right balance with these two. And If I leave it at a reasonable compromise. it's too big to upload on Etsy. It's not too big to upload on Blogger, apparently, but when it does, it's reversing my colors. I'm not even sure how it's managing that, since I checked and double checked, and Photoshop shows them normally.

I just cleared my cache coz it wasn't even letting me sign in to Blogger initially.

Oh, and after many adjustments, when it did upload on Etsy, the image is coming up blank with a red x in the corner, but it's not failing the upload. And Blogger is uploading other images just fine, but these two chairs are still coming up with weird colors.

I've never had so much trouble with any other pictures, and I'm not doing anything different.

Maybe I should restart the laptop and see if that helps...