Sleigh Bells Ringing

Oh would you look at that! The holidays are back again! I once again created the necessary signage for our town's Festival of Trees and for the first year since helping out with this part of the project I have created the whole thing myself. The images are all painted in Photoshop by yours truly and the typography is mine as well. I'm no master typographer, but I think it's pretty good.

The bells turned out so well that I can't wait to do next years already. I am so ready for an artistic challenge. It's been a while since I've had a set goal for my artwork. It is surprisingly hard to look at a blank page and "create" without any guidelines or requests.

Another side effect of helping with this event is that I get to decorate my own tree with the theme of "Sleigh Bells" and I also get to assist in the decoration of the town hall itself. Now, we've been known to tackle some pretty hefty challenges to keep ourselves busy... a real gingerbread village modeled after our town and a Ski Slope made up of dozens of little clay figures and trees to list the most recent projects. What will we do this year you ask? Well you'll have to buy a ticket for the Preview Event to find out because I won't be posting pictures til after the fact. I'll say this much though, it will definitely jingle!

Charlie Chaplin Speech

A video to share today. "The greatest speech ever made" by Charlie Chaplin

I have heard this one before, but it really is an amazing speech. It's a little bit depressing but greatly motivational.

Also, more camera fun, the butterflies have found our garden!

Irene

I have a new pattern to introduce you guys to. It's the first pattern I've named and it is a little more complicated than patterns really ought to be. It was inspired by a woven rug at a camp house I was at last fall.

Me and some of my relatives were having a "hagfest" (What we call reunions with just us ladies.) out in the Adirondacks of NY. Our weekend was lovely, but come Sunday and Monday we found ourselves entirely rained in by the Tropical Storm "Irene". As some of you may know, Irene wiped out many of the Vermont roads so driving home was a chore! But as we sat around enjoying the rain I started trying to dissect this amazing carpet on the porch.

The pattern along the edge of this rug was my inspiration, I thought that it had to have a "solution" somehow.. it's so geometrical! This is what I ended up with, I call it "Irene".

I know it looks a little daunting at first, but I think it just takes a little practice and you can start to really have fun with it. It works best in larger spaces and when you use pencil to shade it in a bit. :)

Fascinating!

I am so pleased to say my blog has been nominated for the Fascination Awards top Zentangle Teacher blogs. :) Voting has started, and I'm proud to be among these great blogs they have found. Please click the badge below to cast your vote,

Here's how to vote:
1. Make sure you have upgraded to Google Plus. If not, you will find the Google Plus UPGRADE Button on the Top Left of the page when you view their post in step 2. Creating your profile will only take a few minutes.

2. Click on the badge above to view the Fascination Awards post. Upgrade to Google Plus there if you need to, then click on the double arrow beside comments to view the entire list of nominees and look for Katts Creations!

3. If you hover your cursor at the end of the blog url, a red  "+1" will apppear that you can click on. Its in the same location where you see the votes for the other blogs. 

4. For blogs that already have some votes, the  "+1" should be immediately  beside the vote count, to the right.

I am the 11th down on the list of blogs. Thanks!

New Toys and Balancing Acts

I haven't been updating very frequently, but I hope you all like the content that does make it out here. I love to share my art, my thoughts and what I learn. I've been so busy trying to balance my friends, relationship and my new job that my art side has taken a backseat. I hope to find a happy medium soon and I should be posting more frequently as I "figure it all out". For now I hope that the sheer imagery in this post will make you drool enough to come back next time I post! :)

Fujifilm HS30 EXR
(Image from Google Image Search)

I have been looking for a new camera for a while now (ever since I used my boyfriend's until it wore out) so I went into a camera store near my work to get my hands on the actual thing. They let me play around with a couple different models getting the feel of what features I really wanted. My biggest feature, the one that I'd drool over, is the manual focus. I am so happy to have found that in a camera that doesn't have a detachable lens. I don't need a gazillion lenses. I don't even need two. I ended up with the Fujifilm HS30 EXR. It's got a manual super-zoom lens, manual focus, and a bunch of other sweet features I haven't even started to play with yet. It's only downside is that it has difficulty with low-light situations. It gets really noisy if the scene's too dark.

Overall, I love this camera.We went camping and I took photos the entire time.




The left photo was taken from the side of the state highway. It's zoomed in about half as much as my camera can do. The photo on the right is zoomed in as far as it will go, and it's still just amazing detail.

On the left is a nice photo I took of a daisy, the right this time is a small part of that image enlarged to show detail. :) a little bit of grain, but not too bad considering I shot this macro, zoomed in, manually zooming and focusing.

And why not a picture of a chipmunk? This little guy was just digging in the pathway as we walked down to the beach. Thanks to my zooming capabilities I was able to get a pretty neat photo without scaring this little guy away.

And last but not least, this is my piece de resistance for this blog post. My friend Chrissy spinning Poi at sunset. I am just so happy with how this photo came out. It's got some spectacular sun spots and rays and she's such a lovely person all on her own. I love the natural sense of this photo.

Burning Man 2011

It seems I've been stuck finding sources of inspiration more often then I've been actually painting.. but here's another inspiration I found. This one is a video of a Dr. Seuss story from Burning Man 2011. I wasn't there but I hope to go someday.

A New Blog and Zentangles

My Mom

My mom has started a blog and I will be posting some material on there as well. It's name is Inspiring Serendipity. If you like delicious recipes, crafty explorations and good old advice, check it out! =)

My first post on there can be found here. It's got a tip on how to get inspired to a task you might be putting off.


On another note, I'm still trying to figure out how to juggle my Zentangles with my Watercolors. Sometimes I feel artistically bi-polar. I was glancing around The Cool Hunter site, when I saw this photo:

This is a photo of a high-end olive oil shop - yes, a shop entirely for olive oil! - but notice the floor? It's Huggins! (click to see how to draw that pattern on TanglePatterns.com)