A Christmas Gift Of Peace & 'Thank You'

A big ‘Thank You’ to our eBay and Cafepress customers. We have had a wonderful Christmas season and hope our greeting cards and gift items add to your holidays too! Merry Christmas and looking forward to 2007.

'A Christmas Gift of Peace' was as usual, a collaborative effort between my husband Frank and myself. For my models, I had photographed he and our Corgi together, with him offering 'Maggie' a treat, because I had planned to have Santa offering the Corgi in the painting a wrapped gift. However as an image it just didn't work. Somewhere in my sketches I had done a snowman offering the Corgi that same gift, and I love to paint snowmen. Frank suggested the bone instead, a cat to give it a story-line and the name 'A Christmas Gift of Peace' & the rest as they say 'is history'.

The little cat ‘Twinks’ loves our yard because we feed the birds. She is very furry and friendly with no fear of Lily our Corgi. She has a tendency to nip playfully when she gets excited, so we’ve learned not to pet her too much, but she’s really just a big lovable ball of fur. Here's how we use A Christmas Gift Of Peace as a Christmas Card.

Most pet lovers (the lucky ones) at one time or other have a pet that you just connect with, & Maggie was mine. I think our personalities were similar and she always made me feel special. This card is dedicated to her and that rare bond only a very special companion can bring.

Merry Christmas Maggie.

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.
My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Friendship Going Downhill Fast

There is a cute little Basset Hound that lives two houses down the street from me. He lives with about fifteen cats. I really don’t know anything about him, I just see him sitting outside enjoying the day surrounded by all his furry friends.

Taking a little 'artistic license' - he now has a Corgi friend to share a Winter's ride with, and I confess I still enjoy Tobogganing myself. The original painting is in oil on hardboard & I think my husband came up with a great title for this one.

Here's how we used Friendship Going Downhill Fast as a Christmas Card.

Let It Snow !!!

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.
My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Trim'n The Tree

This is the finished painting

This is my initial sketch

I love painting snowmen, the rounder the better, with big wide grins and twinkling eyes, wearing colorful hats and scarves. You just have to have some bright colors to jazz things up a bit. After all it’s the holidays!

This is the sketch I worked off of for this year’s Corgi Christmas card - I do a new card every year. A very 'Rubenesque' snowman is helping to decorate a “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree” (I think I have had a few of these). Shiny beads, some glass balls and a star for the top just overwhelm the flimsy little sapling. I really don’t think that these two Corgis will actually be able to get all of the decorations that they plan to on this poor little guy.

My first Corgi was a 'Fluffy' and I drew the Corgi in the foreground much like him. He was built like a tank, solid as a rock. If you look at the sketch you will notice that I moved this dog several times and you may be able to see the erasure marks.

I started out with the snowman since he is the biggest object and central in the design. Next I placed the two Corgis around the tree and tied the elements together with the string of beads that run thru the tree.

My husband & I work together on these cards. I may start a sketch or an idea and then we bounce it back and forth. He adds elements or has a critical eye that notices things that I may not because I'm too close to a painting.

Here's Trim'n The Tree as our new Christmas card for 2006 in our eBay store.

Happy Holidays!!!

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.
My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Boo To You Two !

Happy Halloween - the season is here & most of the yards in my neighborhood are decked out in their scary best - blow up witches, goblins and even some good old-fashion hand carved pumpkins. With our new kittens this year I have been a little careful about what I put out, as they get into everything. We have had a beautiful Autumn weather-wise, however the colors seemed lacking. And as I was driving home tonight you could feel and see November in the air.

Thought I would just share with you my version of the 'Great Pumpkin'. He rises up in the pumpkin patch just in time to surprise two Corgis that were using it as a shortcut. Here's how we used Boo To You Two on a daily journal in our Cafepress store.

This painting is oil on stretched canvas. Oils are my favorite medium to work in. I am a slow painter, and oils allow me the flexibility of being able to work in one area without the paint drying for a couple of days. For awhile I was painting on small stretched canvases, but now have gone back to gessoed hardboard. With hardboard I can get the detail that I want.

I should say that when I started this blog I wanted to at least do one post a week. I knew that I would not be able to post every day or two, so I approached this with a workable goal. Of course intentions are good and then my computer decided to act like the 'Wicked Witch' in The Wizard of Oz, and had a small melt-down. All is well now and we are back up and running and I will try again.

TRICK or TREAT!!!

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.

My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Pumpkin Head & Francine

Here's my second pen & ink drawing for Halloween. This work, which I call 'Pumpkin Head', came from old photos I had of decorations on my parent's porch, and what a trip down memory lane this one has been. The Calico cat is Francine - actually she was my sister's cat when we were growing up and she had a natural mean look.

Francine loved my sister - it was just the rest of the family she could have done without. Francine is long gone, and I now live with a whole new 'Fur Family'. No one in this current batch has the evil eye, although Ember (our oldest male) is having to adjust to kittens in the house. He just looks disgusted!

You can see 'Pumpkin Head' on various products in our new Cafepress store - here's an Art Tile Coaster as an example.

The trees around here are just starting to show some fall color & we actually had one night last week in the high 30's. I have not had a frost yet which is nice as I get to enjoy my Cosmos in the garden a little while longer.

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.

My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Wanna Be My Late Night Snack!

This is one of my pen & ink drawings done with a crow quill pen on Bristol board. I used a stippling technique, dot after dot to produce different shades of gray. While I love pen and inks they are exceedingly time consuming, as well as a little tough on the wrist. My fist Christmas cards were done in this technique, I must have done twenty designs in black and white before I switched over to color.

I had such a good time using this image in my Cafepress store. Halloween is a great season to have fun with. I came up with three versions of products for this image, Late Night Snack, the slightly risque Wanna Be My Late Night Snack (sexy version) & Big Boo & Little Boo Boo (Mom & Baby matching 'Scary' T-shirts).

If you love Halloween as much as I do, check back next time to see what else I've come up with.

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.

My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.

Hello World - My First Post!

This is my first post - welcome to my little corner of the Universe. Here I hope to share my love and passion for art and creativity. My happiest moments of the day are spent at my drawing board. You Are My Sunshine - is a pastel inspired by my corgi Lily resting on her sun pillow. She is not always this calm and quiet, and that sun pillow was destroyed long ago.

Pastels have opened up a whole new world for me. The intensity of color that you can achieve by laying one color over the other is exciting. I have even found that I work from a richer palette on my oil paintings. I work in Faber-Castell hard pastels, Sennelier soft pastels and Derwent pencils on Sennelier La Carte Sanded paper.

This blog will continue to be a work in progress & I will be posting new work frequently, so please check back often.

My eBay store has prints & greeting cards of this image & others.

My Cafepress store has more samples on my 2nd new website.