For a living

What a blissful weekend! *^v^*
On Friday night Robert left for a medieval battle recreation and wasn't home till Sunday morning, which meant I was home alone two nights (which I hate), but which also meant I set up my studio on the living room table right away and worked on my paintings on Friday night and all Saturday (plus I did the laundry, washing up and painted two t-shirts for Robert using his old stencils, knitted my TYC and reached the cable part and also changed the hood on my Lucinda Cardi into a neat collar, still need three buttons to add).

100 Day Challenge - day 9
I said that I wanted to paint for a living. Which has a double meaning in my case.
First of all, of course it means money - selling my works and buying bread and butter, and paints and yarn, and sour jellies, and sushi on the night out! *^v^*
But also, or maybe more importantly, it means - for a living, so I could feel alive.

I haven't been doing it for a long time now, but unlike with my other crafts - I'm learning more and more with every piece I paint, I'm always open-minded about it and not scared when I sit down to a blank canvas, I truly enjoy the whole process, I don't want to give up in the middle when something goes not exactly to the plan (you should see me sewing something...). I'm ready to experiment. It gets me going. I buy four canvases and in my mind they are already filled with ideas the moment I pay for them. *^v^*

Painting is my meditation. I spend hours and hours on every piece, using brush number 00 and taking with each dip an amount of a paint the size of a pin head, and drawing a line 3 mm long, and it goes on and on. You thought I make those swirly black frames with some stencil, a stamp or a picture transfer - nope, all done by hand, millimeter by millimeter. It goes back to the times when I was making many medieval manuscript copies for our meetings, and they all had millions of tiny ornaments to be painted this way. And when I paint those lines and swirls, I switch off almost completely and concentrate on what I'm doing. I even observed - this sounds stupid, but it's true - that my level of concentration is so deep I really have to recall myself to draw a deep breath from time to time because I forget to breath... One day I will choke and this will be my biggest masterpiece! *^v^*

A handful of other tips and observations from my painting experience:
- you can say goodbye to a brush if you don't clean it right after you used it, acrylics dry out to stone in a few minutes time!...
- as above, acrylic medium also dries out to stone in a few minutes time, it's an acrylic after all (who would have thought?...)!
- the best way to clean your brush after varnishing is to use hot water and some Timotei Bamboo&Shea Butter shampoo *^v^* (not too good for my hair though)
- yes, you can also use turpentine
- turpentine works great to smear the oil pastels
- turpentine smells like hell, although it smears the oil pastels well, which means that my art journal now smells like hell...

Okay, now a bunch of my new paintings.

"Be Brave" is a tribute to Krissie's "One Thing Be Brave" idea.
"Dream"
"Sacred""Red Hot", my favorite of the lot.In the last two I applied the glazing darker color over the lighter background technique from the book by C. Hellmuth, I love the results you can achieve with this technique! ^^

They are all on my ebay now, so please take a look if you like them.

In fact, for goodness sake, people, start buying my art because I have no space to store them!... Please?...
(Is this the lamest marketing strategy or what?... *^v^* But it's true, I may have to switch from canvases to canvas boards soon, they are thinner so more can fit into a space of a single canvas, but I don't like working with them that much. *sigh*)