Ever since I started painting again, my kids, my niece and my niece’s best friend have been asking me to teach them to paint. I’m not actually very patient as a teacher in most things, and have sent my 9-year-old to both a sewing and cupcake decorating class because I knew I’d want to throttle her before it was done due to my lack of patience. For some reason though, I don’t have that issue with painting. Read More

As part of the kickoff of the monthly featured artisan feature, I am happy to bring you the second featured artisan: Sarah of Small Shiny Objects. Sarah creates beaded jewelry and other beaded gifts that she describes as ‘comfortable elegance.’ In Small Shiny Objects you will find necklaces, earrings, bracelets, crystal suncatchers and a couple of crafts from her little girl Laura! Most of her jewelry is made with a combination of semi-precious stones, Swarovski crystals, czech glass beads, and silver or gold-filled wire.  The occasional vintage piece makes it in there as well, when it suits her fancy. While she does not have a blog, she is frequently on the Etsy forums!

Now let’s see how Sarah responds to this month’s 20 Questions!

Sarah’s 20 Questions:

Let’s start at the beginning. What is your earliest crafting memory?  
My mother and grandmother would always find something to do with the materials we had at hand, whether it was crafting dolls out of wooden clothespins and cloth scraps, or cutting out ornaments from old wallpaper samples.  It was always something new! Read More

As others have become familiar with this blog and with my art and crafting interests, I’ve begun being asked more and more what the secret is to prioritizing so that I can paint every day, do multiple blog posts, work on other crafts and still have a life. The sad answer for everybody is that I have no secret. I just do it! See the calendar above? I put that up when I moved into my apartment in July of last year. As you can see, it’s never been changed. I must have at least 4 separate calendars around the apartment and of them all, only the ‘Art of Star Wars’ day calendar on my desk gets updated and that’s even hit-or-miss. I don’t even wear a watch! That said, I do have some guidelines I try to stick to for myself, and two golden rules, so let’s talk about those. Read More

Well, I have hit am impasse that is starting to wear on me a bit. Despite lots of people liking my art and craft items, so far I have not made a sale. My painting supplies are running low and I’m a bit torn on what to sew next as I really want to make clothes, but not just for kids and I don’t know what sizes I should make for sale to non-family members. Thus I started rummaging my brain for art that I could work on that I can easily afford. The first, and most obvious choice, is drawing! However, it’s been years since I worked on drawing, and I dropped out of my two art school classes years ago because I was frustrated by my lack of talent.  But I’ve been thinking that maybe I stopped prematurely and should work on my drawing technique again.

To that end, I pulled out my old art school portfolio and found a couple of examples I could stand to look at for motivation (above). I still had my sketch pads and pencils in the portfolio, so I am good to go. I did use a 40% off coupon to go to the bookstore and pick up a copy of ‘Drawing for the Absolute Beginner’ and am going to work through that. After a couple of rough wireframes using a ‘Deleter Doll’ (poseable doll for artists) that I had, I feel pretty good about getting back into it, even if I never do anything that I’d want to try and sell.

Well, thanks to some great sunlight (finally), I felt energized to finish my first painting aimed at kids. As you can see, I made some additions from my last post and covered my larger, fancy star with a big sun! Here’s the description I am using on Etsy and DeviantArt:

The creator has gotten tired and decided to start anew… or the universe is building up to the next big bang… or maybe some cosmic entity is draining the universal pool. Whatever your take, this bright and colorful painting is perfect for a child’s room or in anyplace a little whimsy is desired!

Painted using glow-in-the-dark additives, it takes on a soft glow when the lights go out!

We’ll see if it catches anyone’s interest but I definitely had fun painting it!

A sneak peek at a work in progress! This is a space painting that I am working on for kids. It uses glow-in-the-dark paint and lighter colors that hopefully will go with most kids color schemes! I’ll post another photo later this week as the painting progresses so that everyone can see my progress!