Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

I do believe that things happen for a reason though so, when my daughter wanted to paint something for her father yesterday, there was no surprise when I accidentally pulled out two small canvases instead of one. That was all the incentive I needed.

I have not had time for much more than doodling lately and my sanity from day-to-day is, typically, directly related to whether or not I get moments of creativity. I have been wanting to sit down and make something for weeks now and doodling wasn’t cutting it. I needed to dig into something, get paint on my fingers, a brush and pen in my hand, make a mess.

This year, I have had to do a big push for freelance work. Aside from college, homeschooling, household obligations (that tend to get put on the “do later” list), making food and…what am I forgetting, oh yea…sleeping, I haven’t had time to delve into anything. I have stolen moments here and there to write, much easier than dragging out all my paints, but it isn’t the same.

I was sent several small, 5×7 inch canvases in a thank you package from a friend recently. The package itself has taken up semi-permanent residence on the edge of my desk as I’ve yet to sort through it and put everything away. This week, in between work, school, and everything else, I will be completely reorganizing the largest room of our house; three computers and desks on one end, kitchen on the other, art studio/catchall in the middle. It is my hope to move our writer’s meetings here again as it is much more conducive to conversation, we can do and say what we want, and the kitchen is right there.

For now, I steal snippets of sometimes life-saving time to make memories with my daughter.

We laid newspaper out on the dining room table (the dining “room” being part of the aforementioned space) and pulled a few paints, a couple of brushes and palettes. Half an hour later I was refreshed and feeling human again…at least for another week.

I was sent an update earlier today for Noah’s CareBridge page; you might remember Noah from my earlier post asking for Christmas cards. As soon as I saw there was an update I just knew…

Our Angel
Posted 2 hours ago

After a long battle with Stage IV Neuroblastoma cancer, Monday morning at 8:02 AM, Noah Biorkman passed away at his home in South Lyon, Michigan.

Scott and I, along with our families, would like to thank everyone for the continued support over the past few years during Noah’s illness. As most of you know, Noah has received more than one million Christmas cards over the past few weeks. The outpouring of love and compassion has been remarkable and we are extremely grateful. We are now asking for everyone please respect our privacy during this very difficult time. The funeral services will be for family only. We are asking that instead of sending cards and flowers to Scott and me; please make a donation in Noah’s name to either of the organizations below. With your donation, Noah’s legacy will live on for many years to come, if not forever.

Thank you so much for your support and love.

Sincerely,
The Biorkman Family

Even if it is only a few dollars, please remember this sweet little boy and send a donation to one or both of the following:

Department of Pediatrics and Oncology
University of Michigan
1500 East Medical Center Drive
D4202MPB
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-5718
Checks payable to: The University of Michigan – Noah’s Pediatric Oncology Fund

OR

Make-A-Wish Foundation of Michigan
230 Huron View Blvd.
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48103
Checks payable to: Make-A-Wish Foundation of Michigan – Memo: Noah Biorkman

STOP SENDING CARDS! From what was relayed to me, they received 80,000 pieces of mail on November 11th alone. Wow. They need peace now though so they can focus on their son so thank you if you sent one! It makes my heart happy and gives me hope for humanity to see that kind of an outpouring.

Now, we need that for Sophia!

Wow!! Thanks! Please STOP!!!!
Posted Nov 13, 2009 1:03pm

Wow! The outpouring of love and concern for Noah is just amazing! Scott and I never in a million years thought that so many people would want to send Christmas cards to Noah. However, please note: We did already celebrate Christmas LAST Sunday — November 8th.

PLEASE STOP SENDING CARDS AND GIFTS!!!!

Noah is very ill. He is not getting out of bed and it’s time for Scott, our families, and I to concentrate on our son. His time is very short and he needs us.

Scott and I would like to say thank you so much for the support and continued show of love. However, we are asking that everyone please stop sending cards and gifts.

Also, everyone please post the stop order on Facebook and any other websites or organizations that you belong to. We need the peace right now.

Thank you for your understanding in this request.

Also posted to my original post…

I woke up this morning in a lot of pain. I have been dealing with an abscessed tooth for about three weeks now and, though I am on antibiotics and have had a full exam, many grateful thanks to Dr. Cayia at Baylee Dental, one of my clients, I really need to have both offending teeth removed and will not be right till they are. Working freelance has been an amazing experience, one that I continue to enjoy, but the pay is a hazard as it is good but sporadic and with the economy the way it is, there never seems to be enough when I need it.

My best friend Laurel and I are sisters in many ways. We share our loves of art and writing, and she has always been a great help to me on all levels. If I were ever to have been blessed with a sister in my life, a true kindred, it is her. This past week she offered me encouragement and help with some witchy goodness she had found.

I am an eclectic Christian…which basically means that I am “too pagan for the Christians and too Christian for the pagans”. I use cues in my daily life to remind me to be prayerful and, at times when I have one, I have an altar that is my quiet space, reminding me to take a moment to say thank you and keep the people in mind that are on my prayer list. I consider myself a natural witch and I believe that God has given us so many things to be thankful and to use to better our lives.

The lovely Laurel made up a mixture of the ingredients that I needed in order to work the spell, things like cinnamon sticks, cloves, cardamon, nutmeg and ground ginger in measured amounts. The spell that goes with it was simple but it was allowable to write your own so…

Money simmer in the air,
Money shimmer everywhere!

became…

Fire to water, water with earth,
Money simmer, air give birth.
Financial gain bring harm to none,
Solutions and a bit of fun.
This prayer I offer, resolutions asked,
with these words the spell is cast.

Just doing the spell made me feel better, taking action to give it to God and take it off my shoulders. I know that I was heard and my house smells wonderful. LOL I have gone back in over the last hour to stir the air with it and carried the simmering pan throughout my home in order to spread it, saying little prayers along the way as well as repeating the spell. Everything just fell into place. Despite the buys both being home they were sleeping in, despite my daughter being awake she was working on homeschool in the living room which kept her distracted; I had quiet that I normally do not get and it was amazing. I needed a small pan and the kitchen was a wreck. I haven’t been keeping up with the house with the pain I have been in and, miraculously, the one pan I needed to cast was actually clean. Of course, it was the ONLY thing clean but I am dealing with that next.

After I cast the spell, I started noticing things when I went to check my email. Now I realize that

I got a link from inspiration Paulette Insall whose blog I follow and was introduced to Sanctus Real. Funny how things seem to fall into place…

Sanctus Real’s “Whatever You’re Doing”

You can find the lyrics here.

If you had asked me earlier today who Margaret Moth was, I would have had no idea. I had never heard of her.

If you were to ask me now who Margaret Moth is, I would have to tell you that she is my hero in the most sincere form of the word.

To watch these full screen, go here.

I got a bit of a shock yesterday. I got an email from MTV Playground requesting one of my Moleskine images – “Frida Celebrates”, one of my newest ones – for their global events coming up. There was a link to their site in the email so I went to check it out and found my profile on their front page!!!

It cycles through, but my profile is on their Featured gallery page for the time being and I wanted to share the good news since the set they have chosen is my Moleskine spreads. What is funny is that I did not realize I had a profile on their site.

I found out that they apparently have a relationship with/to Behance; it was my Behance profile up there, which I had just updated with that set. It really goes to show you just how much smaller the world is getting and that you never know where you will end up.

On a side note, Flickr (and apparently now Behance) are turning out to be mainstays for client traffic for me. I have gotten more freelance work and exposure from people looking through my work on Flickr than I think I have on my own site. I have also noticed that there are a lot of people using Flickr as an actual portfolio. I think it is awesome considering Flickr has several “rules” about it being for photographers and not artists.

Regardless, creativity is flowing there.

[The post number creeped me out but is oddly appropriate considering we are talking Halloween. O_ Might change it. LOL ]

My favorite time of year has started. Back-to-school sales to satiate my office supply fetish and the lingering hopes of cooler weather starting to seep in. The ads turning to fall themes signal me to start flavoring my designs the color of fall leaves, candy corn, pumpkins, and skellies.

Here is little Frida enjoying calacas flying to celebrate life and the upcoming Dia de los Muertos (November 5th).

I love creating ways to use my little Zen Faces.  My most favorite are as the sun and moon which you will see more of soon. I may even have a giveaway coming up so keep your eyes open! The home page has the color version of this one.

I love henna, I love natural elements, I love organic shapes and playing with white space. Instead of doing henna this time, which my daughter had wanted me to do, I decided to play with the white space of my hand. Above is the Moleskine scan, below is the final for submission to Modofly. (which went out today)

The background (above) is acrylic on 140# cold press watercolor paper, which is my favorite media.

Sometimes I just like to freeform doodle to see where it goes. Organic shapes roaming around, spreading fluidly. My daughter found a couple of odd looking “animals” in the picture, can you spot them?

This one went to Modofly as well. I will post photos as soon as they have been accepted :::fingers crossed::: and go up for sale.

Still working on prints for some of my designs as requested. My cousin Terry owns Boulder Street Gallery in Colorado and does high quality giclees so I plan to go through him when I am ready.

I rescued my beloved from work this afternoon, change of clothes in tow, and told him we were grabbing food before he took me to a movie. We had talked about going to see Julie & Julia earlier this week, I have been wanting to see it when I’d first seen the trailer, but we had not made specific plans yet.

Meryl Streep was absolutely fantastic, portraying Julia brilliantly, making you love her and want to rush home to dig out your cookbooks. We left hungry for the recipes and for more of the movie. I have always ached to see Paris; its architecture, its people, and the movie made you feel like you were there with Julia. Meryl is sure to walk with some awards for this one.

Stanley Tucci ages like a fine wine. Bluntly, the man is hot. Playing Julia’s husband, he was respectful of the part and brought passion to the role. I have always enjoyed Stanley as an actor. He is very good at what he does and has played everything from Robin Goodfellow (Puck) in Midsummer Night’s Dream to his newest film, The Lovely Bones, that we saw the trailer for; he is playing the villain. It looks good, despite his toupe, so we will be going to see that as well.

Amy Adams was adorable as always and the whole story made me smile. She was funny, real, and made you admire Julie’s determination and perseverance. Amy brought a sensitivity to it that made it easy to relate to and love her.

We laughed, we cried in joy and sadness, and we came away with a special place in our hearts for a woman who was truly ground breaking in her own way. Julia Child was a force to be reckoned with and she truly did change the world.

The real Julie Powell has apparently gotten mixed reviews amongst the foodie crowd in the blogging community. I have not read her blog, in fact I had not even heard of it till I’d seen the movie. Some love her and some hate her though, that is apparent. One thing I do know though is that I would like to read the book her character was reading about Julia’s life; it was mentioned that her letters to her sister and friend, as well as her husband Paul’s letters to his brother, made it to print.

Overall the movie was fabulous and I would enjoy seeing it again before it leaves the theaters.  It has also made me want to post my own recipes as well so you might see a few here in the future. In the meantime, go see Julie & Julia, we loved it.

Hmm…now what to make for dinner.

One day at a time. Breathe in. Breathe out. Focus. Make a list of everything you need to do, everything you want to do, dump it all out onto paper then make your list for today. Make is small, make it guilt-free, make it manageable.

Staying focused is a constant battle for me. How do you prioritize everything into a list you can actually complete when everything is priority one, everything is due yesterday? You don’t.

The Master List

My “To Do” list is four pages long, typed with three columns in landscape format, literally. Each task is outlined in baby steps which helps me focus a little more. It gets added to daily and sometimes, if I am lucky, subtracted from. There is so much that I need to do and even more that I want. Writing it all down makes me accountable for it to myself and frees up room in my brain so that I can unravel a bit.

Daily Tasks

Index cards. Godsends. Praise be to the man who invented them. I keep them around for storyboarding but have given them new purpose lately. Each evening before bed I limit myself to ten (10) tasks the next day, one card to be completed in a 16 hour span if I want a solid 8 hours of sleep. You would think that would be easy, listing 10 things. It isn’t.

Filtering out 10 from the barrage of “but this needs to be done now” in my head is pretty hard actually. I invariably make notes in the very small margins all the while rationalizing that if I get done with everything else I can start on these next. Not, it’s sabotage. It quickly turns the simple, concise list into a non-condusive-to-getting-anything-done conglomeration of disorganized notes.

/sigh

Worst case, I pull out another card and force it to ten things. I tell myself, “I might not be here tomorrow, what ten things do I have to do to before I leave this life?” I restrict this to the obvious day-to-day instead of the “See Paris.Visit Africa.” things that I want to accomplish before I hopefully pass at a very old age. That is another list altogether. For this one it is the simpler, the better.

That Sense of

We all need that little pat on the back, that little sense of accomplishment to keep us going. Without it life seems to just drudge on from one day to the next, the lines in between blurred or merging. Making a small list of things for each day gives you the satisfaction of being able to mark it off which is the biggest motivator to forward momentum.

Guilt-Free

We all want to be Super Woman, Super Mom, the Perfect Partner. In reality, what we should strive for is being the Best Me we can be. Be yourself with your busy schedules and your less-than-perfect track records. Allow yourself to move forward and make things right no matter how long it takes you instead of allowing guilt and regret to immobilize you. “Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.” (Robert Schuller)

So that is where I am at now: Moving forward, making things right one thing at a time, slowly but surely, realizing that I am not perfect and letting myself off the hook for the sake of forward momentum.

Now to make tomorrow’s list.

The day-to-day has become a blur as of late except for a few frozen moments here and there that stand out that I thought I would share…

And the rockets red glare

Fourth of July

We love Fourth of July here and not just because it is a good excuse to play with fire. We get together with family, eat really good food (understatement), and watch the men get stupid trying to outdo each other with the mortars.

This year we brought my mother with us to my ex-brother-in-law’s house…and about 50 bucks worth of fireworks with us. He was already well prepared though with over 200 dollars worth so needless to say we had a good time.

I didn’t have my digital camera last year so I thought I would play around a bit this year. I was lucky enough to catch the shot above, an actual mortar going off, by using my Twilight (delayed exposure) setting on my CyberShot.

As far as the food, well there were meatballs in a crockpot full of sauce, to-die-for baked beans being served right out of the oven, some fabulous green beans, three different kinds of ribs that were REALLY good and a myriad of other snacky odds and ends. We ate just enough to be confortable plus two bites and spent the rest of the evening outside on the back deck under the stars watching the kids run around and the men see if they could blow each other up. It was a wonderful 4th.

Pigtail Day

You have to be pretty secure in yourself to wear pigtails as an adult. I have only seen a few people that could carry it off. Ysa asks me to wear them occasionally but I never thought I would be leaving my house in them. I did for our weekly write-in one week, in fact this was earlier in the day, and no one stared at me like I thought they would.  Ysa looks much better in them.

Objects in Mirror May Be Older Than You Are

We have a lot of car shows here locally and you can always tell when one is going on by who is out on the road.

I personally prefer the old Classic Muscle to the new vehicles on the road. They were sturdier, sexier, and it was about how you got there not when you got there. My favorite cars? There are three: The 1951 Hudson Hornet, the 1950 Merc Led Sled (suicide doors prefered), and the 1967Ford Anglia 105e. Yes, the Weasley’s car from Harry Potter, no clue why other than I would happily drive one and have a Golden Snitch hanging from the rearview mirror. LOL

Oh, and as far as the photo above. don’t worry I was sitting at a light.

Seeing Double

As an illustrator and designer, and even as a writer, I try to be as original with my work as possible. When I saw this in the bookstore recently I had to do a double take. Who designed the cover? It seems a little blatant to me. Twilight came out in 2005 and Words to Live By came out in 2007, a full two years afterward.

I have a shop on Cafe Press and one of the newsletter recently stated that apples were not to be used in any of the Twilight fan art posted to the public shops per the request of Meyers, author of the Twilight series.

The whole thing is amusing when you think about it though. One being a vampire novel and one being a book on Christian thought. I think C.S.Lewis might have had an issue with this.

Art Day

We had an “Art Day” play date over the weekend and my best friend brought me a lovely little paper mache box to play with. Having collaged and painted it, I decided it needed something to fill the empty space so I made a little mini book to go inside of it. We had a lot of fun and it was a much needed break.

Perpetually Catching Up

Ever feel like you dig out of one avalanche then get stuck in a blizzard on the way out? Things have been busy around here – full-time college student, homeschooler, freelance work or trying to get freelance work  – so I am always trying a new tactic.

I have tried assigning days for clients, assigning days for tasks, and something always seems to come along and disrupt my well-intentioned plans; normally it is my immune system. I am paring down my schedule so that I can focus more on school and the things that matter to me.

I am looking at my work as the Creative Director for PetsNPatients as a full-time job now and am devoting more time to it so that I won’t have to push so hard for freelance work which, up till now, has been my sole source of income. I want to get Art for Cures back on track, get the book projects off my plate, and be able to focus on my illustration work. The house needs seriously reorganized as well so I am doing that bits at a time.

With any luck you should see some major changes in the next couple of weeks including a lot more art from past and future projects as well as more bloggy goodness. It has been a long haul, one day at a time, and I know I have made some enemies, but it is going to be worth it in the end when I can get it all done and still retain my sanity.