2019 Art Year in Review

I finished a LOT of art in 2019 - first as a way to distract myself/give myself other goals to work toward other than trying to get pregnant, and then, once I was pregnant, to finish as much new artwork as I could. I wanted to make sure I had plenty of recent art to sell and make notecard prints of in 2020, even if creating more new artwork was less feasible once I had the baby - and therefore less time (at least temporarily, until I settled into parenthood) to devote to art.

Below are some of my art and social media highlights from 2019:

• I was commissioned to create a Great Lakes watercolor, with colors to match an old watercolor painting I completed in college (and which the commissioner also purchased). It was a lot of fun to create a new piece of artwork with the same color scheme I'd used a decade earlier! (Read the blog post about the process here.)

• I had three large colored pencil drawings - Race Bouquet (Stronger Together), Gender Bouquet (Stronger Together), and Sexuality Bouquet (Stronger Together) - shown at the Northville Art House's Fine Point Colored Pencil Exhibition in May. Even better? The set was awarded an honorable mention - which is that green ribbon hanging on the wall next to them! (Read the blog post about the exhibition here.)

• I completed two sets of alphabet watercolors - a floral set and a rainbow/paint splatter set - totaling 52 small watercolors altogether. I then scanned in each painting and created initial notecards, which have been selling well in my Etsy shop (you can find the listing for the floral letters here, and the rainbow letters here), and at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in downtown Rochester, MI. (I made several blog posts about the process of painting the originals and creating notecards, but you can read the posts about the finished notecard sets here, and here.)

• I finished thirteen 8x10 colored pencil drawings of flowers. Though I like them all, my five favorites would probably have to be Strength (on tan paper), Transformation (on green paper), Fame (on red paper), Immortality (on blue paper), and Balance (on gray paper). (I haven't posted the in-progress pictures of Balance on this blog yet - but look for that post coming in 2020!)

• I completed some watercolors for our nursery (more on those to come in blog posts scheduled for Jan-Feb 2020, but here's a sneak peak, above).

• I also painted several patterned watercolors, ranging in size from 4x6 to 8x10. My hope is to frame a lot of these patterned sets and find a gallery to show my entire pattern watercolor collection soon. (More on these in future blog posts scheduled for 2020 as well!)

• And of course, I wrote several vulnerable blog posts about my journey trying to conceive, being pregnant again after my 2018 miscarriage, the problems with people refusing to acknowledge that my first pregnancy ended in loss, quotes I've turned to for inspiration in the last year, and dealing with diabetes management during my first trimester and second trimester. Many of these posts got several views, bringing my total pageviews for this blog past 19,400. It warms my heart to know that so many people have taken the time to read about my experiences and opinions, and that I'm surrounded by such a loving, supportive community!

(Want to know what I was up to in 2018 as well? Check out this post.)

I'm proud of myself for how much artwork I churned out in 2019, and I'm excited to see what 2020 will bring!

As always, if you want to purchase some of my artwork, you can check out my Etsy shop here, or you can contact me to commission a piece at afrownfe@gmail.com.