Expected Due Date Approaching

It's hard to believe it's already December!! Though my official due date is January 12, I think it's likely I'll be induced sooner (maybe even by the end of this month!) given my diabetes. It's crazy to think that this could be the month we meet our new baby and become parents!

And with that in mind, I wanted to take this opportunity to give you a heads up of what to expect on this blog over the next few months...

The last several weeks have been a whirlwind of preparation for me - not only have I been getting everything set up for Baby's arrival (stocking up on diapers and clothes, making sure the nursery is organized, attending childbirth and newborn care classes, finding a pediatrician, making a birthing plan, etc.); I've also been trying to get ahead on holiday art orders and my own holiday shopping and wrapping - just in case Baby shows up earlier than expected!

More than that, I've also been going full steam ahead on creating lots of new artwork - colored pencil drawings and watercolor paintings alike - and planning blog posts waaaay into the future, scheduling them in advance - all so that I can slow down whenever Baby shows up and know that I still have a backlog of recent artwork to scan, make notecards of, sell on Etsy, and post to social media about, even if I'm a bit busy with new parenthood to make any new art for the next several months.

Currently, I have blog posts fully scheduled through February 2020, so that I have time to adjust to my new life as a mother without worrying about blogging. You can look forward to some blog posts wrapping up the end of my artistic year this month, a couple patterned watercolor paintings to appear in blog posts in January - and in February, a look at the artwork I created for my nursery. I will (of course) post some updates about the end of my pregnancy (and how difficult it was to manage my diabetes in the third trimester) and my new baby, but don't expect these blog posts until March.

2017 Art Year in Review

I spent a lot of time on my art this year - and accomplished a lot of cool things!

• Eight large format colored pencil drawings, five 8x10 drawings, and ten 5x7 drawings were on display at the Village Theater in Canton, Michigan throughout the month of November as part of a two-person exhibition "GRRRLS Like Us".

• I was commissioned to create eight custom watercolor bouquet paintings through this listing on Etsy, from people as far away as Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Washington D.C., and the United Kingdom. I also added a "Rush Order" option, which promises a finished custom painting at your doorstep in five days.

• I had artwork available for sale at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, Michigan all year - including original Michigan-themed watercolors, original floral colored pencil drawings, and lots of boxed notecard sets.

• My Great Lakes Notecards have been selling well on Etsy, with several orders places around the holiday season.

• I reached over 630 followers on Instagram (and received lots of great comments!) by posting pictures of artwork in progress.

• I was commissioned to create a large acrylic triptych (a painting on three separate canvases), which I'll be working on soon in early 2018. (More on that to come in future blog posts!)

• And I finished lots of exciting artwork (including the aforementioned colored pencil drawings and the custom watercolor bouquets)! Here are some of my favorite art pieces I completed this year:

"Anticipation" - 8"x10" Colored Pencil Drawing on Tan Paper (SOLD)

8"x10" Custom Watercolor Bouquet commissioned by Blake (SOLD) 

8"x10" Custom Watercolor Bouquet commissioned by Brent (SOLD)

"Great Lakes in Rainbow" - 8"x10" Watercolor Painting

"28 Years" - 22"x30" Colored Pencil Drawing on Black Paper

"Religion Bouquet (Stronger Together)" - 19"x25" Colored Pencil Drawing on Black Paper

"Shame" - 8"x10" Colored Pencil Drawing on Tan Paper

8"x10" Custom Watercolor Bouquet commissioned by Mark (SOLD)

"Great Lakes in Metallic Copper & Red" - 8"x10" Watercolor Painting

"Gender Bouquet (Stronger Together)" - 19"x25" Colored Pencil on Black Paper

8"x10" Custom Watercolor Bouquet commissioned by Michael (SOLD)

8"x10" Custom Watercolor Bouquet commissioned by Paul (SOLD)

"Sexuality Bouquet (Stronger Together)" - 19"x25" Colored Pencil Drawing on Black Paper

You can find many of these pieces for sale at my Etsy shop: etsy.com/shop/ArtworkbyAndreaArbit. I will be adding more inventory soon (including the items that didn't sell at the GRRRLS Like Us exhibition!) so definitely check back to see what new stuff gets added in 2018. :)

I hope you continue to follow me on this blog as well as my Twitter and Instagram accounts as I keep creating into 2018! Happy New Year, everyone!

2016 Art Year In Review

I got a lot accomplished this year with regards to my artwork!

• My watercolor "Silk Caution" (part of my 2010 thesis painting series) was featured in the Scarab Club exhibition "Blooms Beasts Bugs" in Detroit, MI in May.

• In June, I was invited to be a part of the Paint Creek Center for the Arts Spring Gallery Stroll. I displayed several watercolors, acrylic paintings, and colored pencil drawings in a "pop-up" one-night-only personal gallery in Smith Jewelers in downtown Rochester, MI - and even sold two drawings.

• My artwork was available for sale in the PCCA Art Market all year - including August, when I was given my own "featured artist" table.

• I scanned in many of my original paintings and drawings and created art print blank notecard sets, which have been selling moderately well at PCCA and through my Etsy store.

• I collected a lot of photographs to use for future art compositions - including photos of the colorful autumn leaves, a ton of pics from the Michigan Orchid Show in April, and many images of flowers and plants growing in my own backyard, the yards of my relatives, and public spaces like downtown Rochester and my local library.

• I gained new followers on Instagram and Twitter - and did my best to post an image of recent artwork on Instagram at least a few times a week to reach new people on social media.

• And I completed a LOT of cool art projects. Here are some of my favorites:

You can find many of these for sale at my Etsy shop: etsy.com/shop/ArtworkbyAndreaArbit

I hope you continue to follow me on this blog as well as my Twitter and Instagram accounts as I keep creating into 2017! Happy New Year, everyone!

Compliment Collections

One thing I have been trying to do lately is file away "compliments" or other things that make me happy, as I go through my day. If I'm in a bad mood or having a bad day for some reason, it's nice to have a wealth of things to look through to remind myself what I am capable of - but it feels like a chore to go searching around trying to find those memories. Instead of waiting for a bad day and then trying to find motivation to figure out how to cheer myself up, now I've done the "grunt work" ahead of time - by doing a little bit every day.

For instance, if I get a nice email at work (my boss is appreciative of the work I've done recently, or a client is excited about a new design), I take a screenshot of that email and put it in a special folder on my computer desktop. Or if I get a nice comment on a Facebook post or a blog post, or a thoughtful response sent via personal message or email, I'll take a screenshot of those, too. Even if it's not something that I wrote myself - just something I retweeted or reposted - if it spurs thoughtful conversation, I make a note of it.

Other things are comments that are said to me in person. When a friend notices a piece of art I created hanging on the wall of my house and compliments it, or when I'm having a conversation with someone and they appreciate what I've said - when I next have the opportunity, I'll quickly jot down what I remember (paraphrasing, usually). It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be enough to remind you in the future what you were feeling in that moment - i.e. "Someone told me they liked my painting." Maybe it's not even a specific comment you remember, but just a general sense of accomplishment. "15 people came by the spring art show and stopped to look at my artwork." "I'm really proud of the colored pencil drawing I finished today." "I sent out three query letters to literary agents, because I really believe in the novel I'm writing."

I might also include just general things that make me happy. A quote I really liked from a book I'm reading. A meme I saw online that made me laugh.

And I collect all these compliments and positive comments and "good feelings" and put them in a digital folder on my desktop, or print things out to tape to the wall in my home office, or email them to myself with a label that I can easily search for and find later.

Then, next time I need that reminder, I'll know where to find a bunch of them.

Daily Blog Posts

So I mentioned this at the end of a blog post several days ago, but never really got into more detail. I started a new job a couple weeks ago, doing graphic design work for Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, the largest Reform Temple in North America. Four hours a day (9 am - 1 pm), I'm there working on flyers and brochures other marketing materials for upcoming events at the temple. :)

It doesn't seem like much time, but it adds up - especially when you consider the drive there and back (about 45 minutes in the morning and 35 minutes in the afternoon). I crate Ginny during that time (she's still at the "chewing everything out of boredom" stage; if she wasn't crated she would eat all of our furniture while I was gone) - so by the time I get home she's been crated for about 5.5 hours. She barely has room to stand and walk in a circle in her crate, so I try to get her exercise before I leave and after I come home. This means some playtime in the morning, and a walk in the afternoon, and a second walk in the evening. And even after her walk, she's still full of energy and excited to play, since she's been napping all morning.

Long story short, I have significantly less time to work on my story, or my artwork, or these blog posts. The best time to work on these projects are in the evenings, after dinner - but I don't have enough time in the evenings to do all of these things.

So I'm afraid this blog is going to have to fall off my list of biggest priorities. If I'm not working on my art or my story, I would have nothing to blog about anyway; my paintings and drawings and novel necessarily have to come first. I am hoping to still post an entry on here a couple times a week, and I will certainly continue posting a quick picture on Instagram (and sharing that pic to Twitter) every day. But I don't have time to also write a blog post every day any longer.

It takes a long time to 1) make the art I post, 2) take photos of the art, 3) adjust the photos and add my website information to the image, 4) upload the photos to this blog, and 5) write descriptions for the images. Furthermore, I don't have as many things I could post about, if I'm using time that I could be painting or drawing to instead write a blog post about painting and drawing.

My goal is to spend my evenings working on my art or novel, and then use the weekend to take any photos of the week's art and write and schedule a few blog posts for the following week. (I already schedule blog posts ahead of time, so this is nothing new. It's just that I will be writing fewer of them when I do.)

Maybe I'll find that I have more time than I think I do, once I figure out how to work with this schedule, but for now it's easier to not worry about daily blog posts. Please follow me on Instagram (@afrownfe) and/or Twitter (also @afrownfe) to see daily pictures. When I do post a blog entry, I'll try to remember to also put the link up on Twitter, so if you're following me there you should see notice of these blog posts, too.

Six Months

I started this blog six months ago. My (main) purpose in starting it was to utilize another platform to talk about my artwork - a supplement for Etsy, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, where I could write in more detail and show more photographs of my drawings, designs, and paintings. To this end, I have several posts featuring the artwork itself - the physical process that goes into their creation, as well as the finished work.

But I've also been writing posts that are more like standard journal entries - comments on my religious/spiritual beliefs and philosophy, anecdotes about my life (past or present), and "think pieces" on feminism, or feminist issues that I feel compelled to comment on (typically commentary on privilege and oppression, whether strictly feminist or not).

These posts might seem like they have very little to do with art, but they are certainly indicative of the sorts of thoughts that go through my mind, and these thoughts (whether consciously or not) do influence my artwork, simply because they influence me. That is why I include these posts on this blog - because I think they give a clearer picture of who I am as a person who creates things and as a person in general.

I try not to write too many such posts. For one thing, they often take a long time to write (though, some of my other posts take awhile too, especially if there are a lot of photos of an artwork in process that need to be uploaded and discussed). But mainly, my concern is that to do so would be to turn this blog into a daily account of my thought processes or endless think-pieces on feminism, and that is not my true intent. I am an artist. I am also a feminist, yes - and a writer. But there are already a hundred other blogs and websites dedicated to these topics - and written by those with a greater knowledge of them. And my main goal in creating this blog was to have a space to focus on my artwork - with the hopes that I could inspire readers to look at my Etsy store, strike up a conversation with me about my art, and maybe make a purchase or two.

I would love to be a working artist - that is, an artist who regularly makes a profit on her work. I am not yet at that place. I do make the occasional sale, but it is not regular or predictable, and rarely does it actually cover the cost I've put in - for the art supplies, for the Etsy listing fees, and for the time and effort I put in to the creation of the work and into the writing of these blog posts. There is probably more I could be doing to try to get to that place, and I am working on figuring out what those steps are and getting the courage to do them.

On the other hand, it is often these exact posts that get the most response. They are my posts that have the most page views, my posts that get the most hits or likes on Twitter. They do not spur Etsy sales, but they do bring traffic to my blog. And for this reason (and because of who I am), I will continue to write them.

But they are not meant to be specific. If you are looking for commentary on recent events or political candidates, you have come to the wrong place. I encourage you to follow me on Twitter if that is your aim - I often retweet or like articles there that I find well-written and well-informed. But I want this blog to be more timeless; I want to be able to send someone to this blog in five or ten years to read about my artwork and my journey as an artist without said future person having to sift through posts about things that are no longer current or no longer applicable. Because this is, first and foremost, a blog about me and my artwork, and not about current events. So when I do write such posts, they will be about broader topics - i.e. systems of privilege and oppression. They may cite specific examples, but the aim is more far-reaching.

This is how my blog has evolved in the six months since I started it; this is the way it is now, or the way I want to be. I'm pretty proud of myself for posting an entry every single day for six months (that's a lot of work!), but I have seen a lot of hits because of this, so I think it's worth it and for now will continue to set daily posts as my goal.

As always, if you are interested in viewing my artwork, visit my Etsy shop: etsy.com/shop/ArtworkbyAndreaArbit. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram at the handle @afrownfe.

Thanks to all of my readers! I love seeing my page views climb!

New Acrylic Paintings - Instagram Posts

I shared many of these photos in the last two blog posts, demonstrating how I made the designs for my six new in-progress paintings, and how I transferred those designs onto acrylic paper. But there are also some new pictures here of the start of the painting process for those first two 8"x10" paintings.

These are all pics I put up on Instagram in the last two weeks. They're in reverse chronological order (newest uploads first.)

I've gotten some great feedback on these, with quite a few "likes"! :)

Remember - if you want to see my newest stuff, follow me on Instagram (@afrownfe)! I often post pictures of my artwork there while I'm working on them, but don't get around to adding the photos and descriptions to my blog here until days (or weeks) later, once I have time to upload the photos and sort through them and write up an entry.

These paintings aren't done yet - I still have to add the darkest background color.