Where is my cherry? Are you stepping on it?

Well, I hope Sad Troll has your attention. She's been in a mighty bad mood since her hair won't stand up anymore and she feels rather ugly so give her your best smile and let's get this show under the bridge... or um, on the road.

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Hello crafters and bloggers alike. This is my first attempt at blogging outside of that elephant graveyard formerly known as Myspace so be my friend and don't yell at me when I suck at it. Advice is more than welcome though and I have a thick skin, so don't be afraid. The purpose of this little endeavor is to a) get some of these voices out from my head that won't stop yapping about what I'm doing and what I should be doing, b) to support my Etsy store and other future career options I might plan, whether in the real world or here inside the glowing box with buttons and c) to find a community that actually reflects me, unlike the neighbors I have right now 50 yards from my front door.

Aside from the random blogs I would StumbleUpon and find in Google searches I'm pretty unfamiliar with Blogger.com, so again expect a few kinks from me in these wonderfully early days but know I am awesome at anything I attempt. I can't wait until this becomes so popular I can write a book and then have a movie made out of it, with Meryl Streep playing myself. I would want a cameo, of course.

But enough about dreams of having Meryls shining hair on display in my parlor, I wanted to show you my latest painting. I call her Sad Troll for reasons I already mentioned. I liked doing this type of painting because it differs from my regular work in that it's a Hell of a lot more fun. When I do caricatures (which are always in popular demand for some reason) I get all kinds of internal stresses with HAVING to make it look like someone it drives me crazy, to the point that I've created a blog to vent about it (among other things).

Even though it makes me go a little wolf-moon dogshit-nuts I can't resist the pleasure it brings when I give them away to smiling faces and I get to compare and contrast the real versus cartoon. Right now I'm planning three caricatures, five people altogether. That's a project that may actually be too big for me but I have a couple weeks to do them and I'm already almost done, if I don't get hit with gravity and have to stay low for awhile, that is.

While I'm sure you're already bored I just wanted to throw out the teaser that I will be posting pictures throughout the process since it always amazes me how much they change, so expect some crap-to-craptastic images popping up in the next episode of 24, or 24 hours. Whichever comes first.



These scissors were a gift to a hair designer that I know (so original...) and were done in a similar style to our sad troll from earlier. The fun I had while painting this really makes it one of my favorite ways to paint.

Every time I make something (whether a painting, felt work, clay crap) I wonder, "If I would have started this painting 20 minutes ago, yesterday or tomorrow, what would it have turned out like? Surely not the same.... or would it have?" I suppose some people wonder the same things about their past and how they've been treated by the fates; I know I ponder that too at times.

Do the things you make turn out the same each time? Are you good at duplicating or do you make a million originals like I do? Can you control what you reproduce or are one-of-a-kinds the only kind you can make? Unfortunately I have to say I'm the latter because no two things of mine are even close to mirror images, which came to great frustration when I attempted to make my own ear gauges and one would always be larger or fatter than the other.

That's another post though... and until then, keep your imagination at hand.