October Recap :)

Hello!! I have been a very busy person, I put in my reapplication to go back to school, had to take a big certification test for my new position (which I passed and am now an official front end supervisor, not super exciting but its better then working fast food! ) and new longer, later work hours (getting home 11 pm then still have to clean and cook dinner!). I did do a few things in October and would like to share that with you :)

Firstly I had ordered a calendar from Juliette Crane in one of my splurge moments (I got some grief for it from my boyfriend) but although it was more costly then I would have ever spent on a calendar, I love that my purchase helps support an artists lifestyle and I think that in itself made it worth it. Along with the calendar I got a surprise of a few stickers too!

I also had a bit of time to do another of Willowing's Fabulous Face lessons.  This is the 3 quarter portrait:

I think she turned out pretty good, I can't wait to have a minute to sit and do another one!

Vampire Face

Hello!! Just wanted to make a quick post tonight.  I've been pretty busy at work with my new position and way too tired to even think about doing anything.  This has hindered my art and cooking, as lately I've been resorting to quick frozen meals or take out :-x blah I need to start cooking dinners again no matter how late or tired, eating this badly has left me feeling very blah and gross.

Anyways, I love halloween!! I love seeing the art and decorations everyone has been doing.  I've got up some orange lights around my living room and a few halloween decorations up.  I'm almost done with a ghostly wreath and I've seen a couple cute halloween banners I may try to make too :-D In the spirit of halloween, I mustered up enough energy to do a vampire face in watercolor pencils.

I had not planned on her hair being all those colors but alas that is just how it ended up being.  I hope to post again by the end of the weekend with the finished wreath and hopefully a few other things to share :) Have a good weekend everyone!

<3 Kristin

Painted face

So last night I moved on to week two of Willowing's Fabulous Faces and it was wonderful! My first time using watercolor crayons and now I am in love with them. They are amazing, I only have a small starter set from Michaels, thats all they carried.  When I get more money I want to order a bigger set from dickblick or something.  Anyways I only have one painting to show today, but I really liked how she turned out.  I want to do a halloweenish one next :-D I plan on doing several more before moving on to week three of the course, I should have more by the end of the week!

I did notice the watercolor paper kind of knotted/rubbed off, I assume that was because I am impatient and don't let it dry enough? Any tips on that?

Also for anyone that didn't know, Ady at Doll Dreams is doing a Halloween Dollie course that looks really awesome.  I recommend everyone to check it out.  I unfortunately cannot participate *pouts* but maybe around christmas I can get it with the xmas money I will hopefully get from distant relatives :-P Ahah I'll give out halloween pictures for christmas :-D hehe

And a Happy Birthday to Kristin's (Twinkle Twinkle) beautiful 6 year old daughter!! :-D

<3 Kristin

**Update: I did another face today! Instead of watercolor paper/crayons I used acrylic on canvas :)

 

Also check out Effy's giveaway!! She is doing an amazing giveaway of a spot on willowing's Life Book along with a couple other fantastic goodies! Life Book is an amazing course with several awesome instructors.  I really hope to win a spot in the class as well otherwise I just can't afford it.  But Good luck to me and to everyone else!! I hope everyone can take this course :-D

Some more Fabulous Faces!!

I have been out of town this week, I had taken a few days off to visit my mom and sisters.  I really wish I could see them more often, I miss them so much every time I leave.  :( A few times a year just isn't enough for me. My youngest sister who is turning 11 next month is growing up so fast!! She is already taller than me (and I'm 22) AND her feet are bigger than mine, she is wearing size 7s!! I wear 5 1/2.  She is a little brat but I love her so much and wouldn't change her for the world.  I wish they would all just move near me :-D I would be in heaven then and I could eat my momma's cooking all the time :) She is full Korean and makes the most yummiest dishes.  I try to make them but they are NEVER as good. Even if I cook it the exact same.  Nothing ever beats a mom's cooking.

 Me and my 11 year old sister. Can you imagine when she is done growing!?!

A wall is the greatest canvas

Hello!! So I have been extremely busy between work and my dad's birthday then my best friend's birthday so I haven't had as much time this week to work on willowing's fabulous faces as I had hoped.  I do have a couple more practice sketches but I am not happy with them.  I am going to practice a few more monday maybe then hopefully move on to the second week.

Art is a beautiful thing :)

Hiiii! So I finally have a few things to share, its not much but its something:)  To start off with, last month I had gone to the Ballston Art Fair and I had a few artists that I wanted to share.  Their stuff was awesome.
First was Tsai-fi. Her illustrations are adorable, I love her artwork!
Meg Murray of Red and Main Studio does the funnest clay / ceramic sculptures.  I love the emotion ones, especially confused.
Melissa Lew made jewelry with an asian flair to it. I loved it, being half asian myself I am biased, but I think you would like it too :) I bought her necklace and it had a symbol on it meaning beauty.  I bought it hoping that wearing it would make me feel like a beautiful person and that one day I would be too.
This last one was my favorite.  I wanted her necklaces soooo badly, especially the geektorian pieces.  She makes jewelry out of recycled motherboards and they are the coolest looking jewelry.  Its really amazing you should check out her shop.  It doesn't contain nearly as much of her pieces as she had at the show.

Alright next order of business. There is a blog I follow, Emily Jones, and she had a cool monogram tutorial on her site.  So I bought some frames and some fabric and I made two, one with my initials and one with my boyfriends, and underneath has our birthdays.  I accidently made them upside down though! so we weren't able to hang them up for a while but we got new pieces to nail to the back so it would hang they right way and now it is above our desk.  I love it!

I have also started Tamara Laporte's Fabulous Faces at Willowing.  She is a fantastic artist and person and I am so excited to work on this. I just followed along with week one and here is the result:

I definitely still have a long way to go but its a start :) I'm going to practice more with drawing and shading before I move on to the next lesson. But I might get impatient and move ahead anyways :-P
Another class I want to take when I can afford it is the ones over at Doll Dreams.  Ady is an AMAZING artist as well and I love her work so much.  I hope that my boyfriend will get me her classes for christmas :) (Fingers crossed).  But I may not want to wait that long.  I am in training for a new position so hopefully that will be a raise and I can get the class :) YAY

one more little thing is a birthday card I made for my friend. I am going to start off with, those of you who make amazing cards, you are awesome.  Card making / designing is a lot tougher than it looks, even for a simple card. I'm like, that looks easy, but it really isn't. Props to you. I have a long long long way to go before I'm ever that good.

this was the best I could do. But I still think its cute in its "what a newbie card maker" way :)

Well that is all I have for today but I hope to post again more frequently.  We will see how much of a toll this new position takes on me, its longer shifts and more stress. But I am closer to being debt free (not including my unmentionable student loans) so its worth it, for now.

<3 Kristin

Still in limbo

Hi everyone! I unfortunately don't have much time I have to be at work in 10 minutes, I hope to do a better post with a little art later this week! I have still been ultra busy and exhausted. I'm disappointed I haven't done any art! Everytime I get home I dream about what I want to do but I'm too tired to pull out the stuff and do something.  That will change though with a small project. I am making invitations for my friend's bridal shower so I hope to have something to show you this week :)
A few notes:
I loved seeing everyone's work in Summer of Color. It was fantastic.  I wish I could have participated more but I do plan to fully partake next summer :-D Thank you so much Kristen for the hard work and time you put into it and for giving me an opportunity to be exposed to so many new ideas and amazing artists.
I went to the Ballston Art Fair this month and it was awesome! There were so many cool things. I will share what I got and some of my faves from it on my next post.
I have also been canoeing.  It was so much fun but I didn't use enough sunscreen so my back is screaming at me :-x ooops
ALSO for anyone living around Virginia, did you guys feel the earthquake less than an hour ago!?! At first I thought a bunch of people were running on the stairs at my apartment then stuff started falling off my shelf in the laundry room.  I looked out the window and saw a bunch of people standing out there and realized it was an earthquake. 5.8 magnitude. I was scared and wanted to run outside too buuut I just got out of the shower and wasn't going out there naked! lol that would scare everyone even more!

Well I hope everyone is enjoying the last part of summer! I have been keeping up and looking at your blogs and I love seeing your stuff.  I hope to start posting more and more often. Stay cool out there, I know here we are in a drought. See you all later this week!!!

Kristin <3

M.I.A.

Hello all!! I am sad I haven't been doing much the past few weeks, I've missed brown and red for summer of color :( I've been so busy between work, birthdays, feeling sick and by the time I get home, I am too tired to concentrate on anything.  I have been browsing some of your works though and they are all so amazing and I'm sorry I couldn't share too.  I don't have a new piece for purple but I do have a painting I did about 8 months ago that has purple :-D
I can't wait to see everyone's purple piece. Growing up, I always HATED the color purple. Unless it was my hair (I wanted purple streaks so badly!) then I didn't like it.  I refused to wear anything purple, use purple, etc..  But in the past few years I have grown to love it a lot and appreciate it more.  Now I love purple eyeliner and clothes (the university I go to on and off whenever I can afford it, its colors are purple and yellow so I had to learn to like purple :-D )
On to this piece, it is something I painted on a huge canvas (it was almost as big as me!) using only acrylics,  for someone's daughter.  It is the pixie hollow tree and tinkerbell with some of her friends (copyright disney, I'm supposed to say that right?).  I used glitter in the tree and in their wings.  It took me about 35 hours total to draw and paint this but I love it! I hope you do too :)

Hello Yellow!

Here is a watercolor piece I did for yellow week over at Summer of Color! It was my first time playing with masking fluid (which at first did not work because I didn't shake the bottle!) I have a pretty busy week but I hope to do another yellow piece with metallic in it somehow, but I wanted to go ahead and post this one! I found with other pieces I've been working on, I was in the mindset that the ENTIRE thing had to be that color but I have seen so many great things with it just being the focal point. So I tried to do that here with the flowers :)

  

I love what everyone else has been doing! I can't wait to look at some more and I hope to have something else posted by the end of the week! Thank you Kristin for doing this, I am finding myself trying to think outside the box more and more and look at everything in the light of "how can I use that in art". I am trying to always think like that to open my mind to more possibilites! :)

<3 Kristin

Think Pink

I've been so busy at work and tired afterwords I haven't really had the time to work on a pink piece but I do have one thing.  On my one day off I went swimming at a friend's and she had such pretty flowers blooming there and I took some pictures. Here are a couple of pink flowers she had, I played with them a little too in my Iphoto.

 

About me

I realize I don't have a default picture of myself for you to see and once I have one I don't hate I will post one :) I do think pictures help to get a feel of a person though so here is one to show you all who I am! It looks like I'm shirtless but I'm not, I have a strapless shirt and am laying on the floor because currently I am extremely sunburnt and don't want anything touching my shoulders :-P I need to start using sunscreen!
So here is me:

 

 not pretty or made up but you can get a better feel for me now :) I am half korean but my two younger sisters somehow got all the asian gene and no one ever can guess my nationality.  I am only 5 foot tall and my ten year old sister is already wearing bigger shoes than me :-P

I love anime and manga and am a huge fan of fantasy. 

Its Not Easy Being Green!

This week was green week over at the summer of color!! So this week I tried to explore with figuring out some mixed media techniques and came up with this:

 

 This is a part of me trying to learn to be messier and free with art. It's not the greatest but its a start, the strip down the middle was painted with citron craft paint, which was a color "bonus" challenge. :) I've already started a mixed media for the pink one and I feel like I've already learned a lot just from this one to this next one. I also did a little piece on an atc card.  I'm not sure what I wanted from it, but this was it.  I wanted it to be very basic and a bit cartoony.  Just a fun quick coloring with marker.

There is a glare from the flash of my camera but I liked it, it made the sun seem like it really was shining :) 

And to everyone who has been participating, you all are doing such amazing work! I've been spending more time surfing everyone's blogs than working on my art :-P You all have inspired me in different ways and I have learned a lot of new things from looking at your things, keep it up! :) Can't wait to see what everyone does for pink week!

<3 Kristin

Lace Giveaway

Art supplies are expensive and there are some wonderful people who are generous enough to giveaways. 

One is at Missouri Daze , she is giving away some vintage lace. I looove lace, it adds a sexiness to everything ;)

Another is Kristin with her Summer of Color (I will be posting my green project tomorrow btw :) ).  Each week she gives a color prompt and you can create in your favorite medium something in that color.  Along with that she has giveaways each week that corresponds with that color.  She is amaaazing!  You can still join in the fun here: Summer of Color

Good luck to everyone! :)

A Blue Day :)

So I am a little late posting my blue work, I've been so tired from work I could barely keep my eyes open to do anything! Here is mine, done on an ATC card which I just discovered, this is the first one I've ever done. I used a stamp, acrylic paint and markers :) It is supposed to represent leaving your umbrella and not letting a little rain stop you. 

Just a thought.

I just want to say that you are all amazing! I was surprised when these amazing artists are taking the time to welcome me and to tell me they are excited to share the experience of the summer of color together!  I really wish I would have started this long ago,  just by looking at your artwork I have been amazed, inspired, and I have seen so many new techniques and ideas that I want to try out.  Thank you all and I can't wait to see what we all come up with. 

So while looking through many of your pages I notice art journals a lot.  That is something completely new to me and something that has intrigued me.  I would like to hear your inputs about them (to put along with research I will do).  What do you put in it? Do you make the whole thing from scratch or get a pre-maid journal? What are some ideas and techniques to get a newbie like me started?  Any other thoughts or ideas on it, I would love to hear. 

Another question on a more personal level, is art just a passion for you on the side or is it your career? I am in a rut and currently taking time off from school.  I wanted to get an art degree but is it worth it? Do you guys have art degrees or did you become this wonderful on your own? School is expensive (the main reason I am taking time off.  Trying to get the money to go) and I want to make sure that the time and money I put into it is worth it.  Do you all suggest majoring in something different and doing art on my own time? I thought about double majoring too.  My family isn't as art oriented as I am and I take their opinions very seriously, but maybe it will help me hearing from people who have art as a passion. Any thoughts you all have on this would be awesome.

Again thank you all for being so wonderful to me and making me feel so welcomed. I can't wait to see all the things you will come up with!

~Kristin~

Summer of Color

So I am new to blogging but I have found some great artists who blog so I have decided to join in so I can participate in their pages and possibly expand my own.  Please excuse any mistakes or changes throughout this blog as I work on learning all the ins and outs.

So starting right now an amazing woman named Kristin (not me, a different amazing Kristin ;) ) is doing a 10-week program called Summer of Color! Each week she provides a prompt and participants can work their magic with that. I am so excited to start.  She asked what mediums we would be using and I have a love of so many I'm not sure what to choose.  I love to paint with watercolors and acrylics, those two will definitely be used. I also just learned to sew so maybe that will be incorporated somewhere. Plus my wonderful boyfriend bought me a bamboo tablet for our 5 year anniversary, so this may be my chance to break it in :-D I have so many ideas!

I think for the first project I will start with watercolors.  I have recently learned some new techniques I am eager to try out.  Should be interesting!

For anyone who would like to participate in the Summer of Color, visit the link and check it out. The more the merrier! :)  Summer of Color

*Kristin*