Finally!  Baby Oscar is starting to grow some hair!

I’m not holding out hope that he’ll have enough for me to actually run my fingers through for a long time since my daughter didn’t have much hair until she was 2 years old.

By the way, it’s no small feat trying to photograph a baby’s hair.  The entire time I was attempting to focus in on all those tiny hairs, Oscar was doing this:

It’s a good thing I have a digital camera otherwise rolls of film would contain blurred images.  I wonder how I ever managed to get any decent pictures of my daughter in the pre-digital camera era.  Babies are so wiggly!

This is what I’ve been working on lately.  I listed it a few days ago and it sold today right before I could finish writing this blog post.  Here it is anyway because I was rather proud of how this one turned out.  I’m rather fond of these colors together.  Of course, there are other flower paintings currently in my shop.

Thousand Pound Goldfish — Original Watercolor Flowers 8×10″

I have some other new paintings that are just waiting to be listed.  Hopefully I can get that done over the weekend!

The Pink Ninja Girl was off school Friday.  So we (plus baby Oscar) packed into the car and went on a little adventure to lunch on the East side of Portland.  We met up with an old friend of mine from elementary school and her two young children.  The bakery where we met for lunch is owned by another friend  whom we both met in the 6th grade.  She didn’t know we were coming and I hadn’t seen her since graduation so it was a sort of sneak attack.  For all you Portlanders out there, Sweetness Bakery is a really nice place to go hang out.

They have incredible baked goods, excellent sandwiches, coffees, etc.  Plus, it’s very kid-friendly!  Pink Ninja Girl liked it as well so I might have to take her there for our Mother-Daughter outtings (that is, when we’re not going out for sushi!)

I have a new product in my shop:  mini-prints!  They are all under $5 each!  They are (mostly) ACEO-sized images printed onto 4×6″ paper.  So they are ready to pop into a standard frame without the need for a special matte.  In fact, the way I have the image placed on the paper with a nice wide border, it gives the appearance of already being matted.  I think this would make a really nice gift for the Holidays this year!

I often wish that Etsy had a developer’s API available for us to geeks to poke around on.  I’d really love to see right now how the listing volumes and selling volumes are changing leading in to Christmas and especially in light of the current market conditions.

There are already projects of this sort for eBay.  I found this site

The above chart shows the daily listing volumes for September.  The chart for October continues to rise at a similar rate.  I’m very curious to know if Etsy has seen a similar increase in listing volumes during September.  Seems like it would be very difficult for a seller to get noticed.

Anyway…on to the eye-candy

I’ve been taking some time to develop new work.  This is very different from what I have currently in my shop on Etsy.  For some reason around Halloween I always get the urge to do altered art and collage.  The following collages are from 2 different artists books I’ve been working on.  Each one incorporates ‘paper cuts’, collage, vintage images, watercolor illustration, as well as hand-dyed papers using natural dyes (coffee and tea mostly).  The bottom collage was especially difficult to photograph–and the flash only made it worse –there is a lot of subtlety in the colors of the background papers.  However, if you look carefully at the last picture, you can probably see the light gray tree against a light pinkish sky.

Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays.  This will be baby Oscar’s first Halloween and my daughter’s (lucky number) 13th!  So a very special year for us indeed!  I painted a few of these ACEOs in honor of Halloween and they are currently available in my shop:

Halloween ACEOs!

This is not weird in the omg-I-can’t-believe-it sense. Just funny strange. In fact, I think I might get this as a playset for my baby Oscar when he’s a bit older

Playmobil Airport Security Checkpoint Toy Set

I was thinking that this would also make a great gift for someone to keep in their cubicle at work (I’m a recent escapee from the tech industry where Nerf Guns and Starwars Lego sets are a common sight).

Now that Summer is almost officially over, I thought that I should take the time to show you around my garden a bit before it’s too late and everything fades away.

I planted flowers this Summer for the first time in many years. Since I left high school, I’ve moved from place to place about every 2 years. Which is fine…I don’t mind moving. I always felt that it gave me an opportunity to do a little forced Spring cleaning. However, it also didn’t give me a sense of permanence. At least not where I was going to spend a lot of money on Perenial plants only to leave them behind in a year or two.

So now I’m trying to make the garden space around my home a bit more interesting and vibrant! I think it will be a source of inspiration for my paintings as well.

Here is a small peek at some of my outdoor surroundings:

I planted these cute little plants that have pink speckled leaves. My mom always called them “Pink Polka-Dot Plants” when I was a kid but I know they have another name. In the past, I’ve kept them as houseplants so I was delighted to find them at my local nursery for outdoor planting.

We also have a nice fuschia plant which was already in the garden before I moved to this house last summer.

This is one of my favorite Flowers in the garden! This is a red spikey Cock’s Comb flower.

The Cyclamen are finally popping out of the ground. I always think these look like a swarm of butterflies taking flight!

A young fern plant … and …

This gorgeous beast is a Blood-Leaf plant. I had no idea when I bought it (at a mere 3″) that it would soon be over 3 feet tall with these gigantic black-and-pink leaves. If it gets any bigger, I might worry about a certain giant sliding down it onto my back patio!

Oh yeah… I have many new items in my shop. Many paintings have sold before I could finish this post. I get so busy with baby Oscar that often I’m thrilled when I’m able to actually spend time painting in the studio!

I have 3 new Halloween ACEOs in my shop!

I found this jar of moldy pickles on eBay.  Which reminds me–I should probably clean out my refrigerator tomorrow.  I wonder how much I could get for that long-forgotten Tupperware container stuffed waaay in the back.

Jar of Moldy Pickles

Lately I’ve been feeling frustrated trying to find enough time to paint, manage orders, and the million other little things I must do in order to grow my little cottage industry.  As you may know, I have two children–a teenage daughter and just had a baby 7 months ago.  The last couple months Oscar has been staying up for longer periods during the day and sometimes is cranky because he’s teething.  I find myself working for 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there which is terribly inefficient since every time you return to your task you have to put yourself back into the mindset of what you were doing.  In an attempt to have more time for painting, I was trying staying up late at night.  This was a complete failure!  I was just too tired after a busy day of baby-wrangling.

One morning after returning from my vacation in Ashland, I woke up with the baby at 3:30am for a feeding and by 4am I was putting him back in his crib.  As I was returning to my room, reasonably sure that the baby would sleep until 8 or 9, I had a sudden inspiration that right then I had time to work.  So I went to my studio/office and worked for 5 gloriously uninterrupted hours!  It was like being alone in the house.

I’ve been waking up at 4am for 2 weeks now and feel I get more done each day in those pre-dawn hours than in 12 hours during the day.

On to some pretty pictures!  I’m very excited to have so many new things to show you for all my effort!!!  Here are a just a few of my latest paintings.  Please visit my shop for the complete selection.

This is the first of a new item that I will be carrying–giclee prints of my original watercolors printed with archival, pigmented inks onto canvas and gallery wrapped.  I love the square size and the simplicity of being able to just hang it on the wall with no need for a frame.  I’m also working on developing more and different types of giclee prints on canvas.  More on this later.

Yellow Poppies — Print on Canvas 8×8″

Bleeding Hearts — Original Watercolor ACEO

Halloween — Little Ghost — Original Watercolor ACEO

Is it Wednesday again already?!?  The weeks are just flying by!

Say hello to Marsall ‘Dillo:

Marshall Dillo – Stuffed Armadillo on eBay

There are few things weirder than dressing up a stuffed armadillo in a silly hat and holster.  I mean, c’mon…he’d never be able to reach the gun with those stubby little arms…let alone pull the trigger!

Note: The picture I refer to in this post is now gone from the eBay site. *sigh* …in the future I will remember to save the pictures locally to save them for posterity :-O

It’s time for another installment of the strange and unusual. I missed last week because I was on Vacation so I will endeavor to make this week’s finding a little extra weird.

This curious little fellow is something I found on eBay:

I’m really curious about what this thing is. When it was sold brand new, what did the manufacturer call it? The seller doesn’t know but thought maybe it was a game piece of some sort. At 5″ tall it seems too big to be a game piece. I have to admit that I was really tempted to bid on this. However, I feel the need to finish organizing and setting up my work space before I can start bringing anything new into it.