My local town has an Art League, which is mostly little old ladies doing still-lifes and landscapes, and they have a Christmas Gallery every year to sell their work. I managed to find it today, and there were the expected landscapes, etc, and also unexpectedly there was some quite good stuff, which is always cool to find. Even more unexpectedly, in a "bargain bin" of loose, unmounted watercolors, there was this gorgeous watercolor of a diamond-paned window with flowers and shrubbery. Really, quite lovely, and marked only for $2.63.
So I totally bought it. Paid them $6, which was all the cash I had on hand, though it was definitely worth more.

Hee! I got pretty original art!
I don't have much of that, and I definitely should get more. It's very green, though, and doesn't match anything in the house, so likely I'll frame it and give it as a gift some time.

I'm definitely thinking of working on more physical media, sellable art. Broaden my horizons. Things like Bluefooted is doing: fairytale-based, rich and textured and gorgeous.

Things I need to work on: backgrounds, and placing figures in a setting. HARD. SO HARD. Portraits and pin-ups are so much easier. But a fully-compositioned artwork with setting and character is so much more powerful. Yeah.

The little old ladies who were working the Art League gallery today were of the fun, scatter-brained-friendly-artistic type, instead of being the perfectly-coiffed "I and my daughters were all Homecoming Queens" type, which means perhaps I would really enjoy joining them in their painting/arting sessions. XD I totally should try it out.

Speaking of art as gifts, I just discovered Etsy.com: "Buy and Sell All Things Handmade" and it is awesome. I love their "Buy Handmade!!" campaign as well. I'm going to be making/painting several gifts this year.
Merimask has an etsy gallery (those dragon keychains, oooooooh).

I've just finished an awesome scifi series were the author makes a point that in a world where everything is mass-produced cheaply and homogeneously, that the real way to show wealth is to surround ones-self with high-quality handmade items: hand-carved furniture, hand-calligraphed invitations to high-class parties. :} I think that that is AWEsome and totally true. When you can get anything and everything exactly the same all over the country at Walmart, how to you truly one-up the Joneses? Buy and commission handmade items. They can't be copied, reproduced, they're totally original. And expensive, because it is human labor and skill.
(sci-fi series is the ~~Vol~~Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, and deserves its own post. In a word: LOVE.)

So, yeah, GO HANDMADE!

Oh, Dickens on the Strand, this weekend! And I can't find my bustle-y type skirt! Ack!

Tags: handmade

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