What My Week Looks Like: Playing, Learning, Loving

I've been playing with a few new toys on my computer.  I FINALLY got photoshop (I've been using Pixelmator for all my photo editing).  The excitement here is that there are so many fun tools and brushes that are made just for photoshop and I can finally play with all the cuteness that I see going on in the blogisphere.  Anyone who isnt aware of Pugly Pixel should be.  I picked up this super cute template from her blog and made a quick valentines collage for my mother.  I've also been experimenting with using a Bamboo writing tablet (so many possibilities for design and edits with my artwork!).  Still getting the hang of it, but there is something so cool about having my doodles done right in photoshop ready to be manipulated, and, I was finally able to get a set of photoshop actions to play with from Radlab that I've been dying to try out.  I've been drooling over these effects for so long, and I am so excited to pump up my picture editing with them.  That's what I've been up to... oh and a lot of this...

and this...

and some of this...

Hope you have a creative week ahead of you.  If not, there are always many spaces able to be filled with something unique and out of the box in every mundane routine.  What will you do this week to add a spark to your imagination?

XO, HARMONY

Discovering New Friends... Sponsor Love.

Today is a rainy day outside my window.  A perfect day for cuddling with my kiddo reading books, building sheet forts in the living room, and baking our favorite chocolate chip cookies, oh yeah and drinking as much caffiene as I am allowed, being preggo and all, because this grey day makes me want to nap.  It's also a perfect day to share a few of my bloggy friends with you.  These amazing women are also bloggers, fellow creatives, and are recent supporters of Feed Your Soul Art!  I am really excited to collaborate with them this month, and you can look forward to seeing them again throughout September with some really fun guest posts, creative process interviews and a REALLY big group giveaway.  Here are the first group of them.  I would encourage you to click on their links and visit their virtual worlds.  They really are super talented and very very inspirational. 

Get to know more about Jill here: BLOG   TWITTER   PINTEREST   FLICKR

Get to know more about Kristin here: WEBSITE   BLOG   ETSY   

Get to know more about Ashely here:  BLOG   PINTEREST  or EMAIL to ashgreeno@gmail.com

Get to know more about Shari here:  BLOG   ETSY   FACEBOOK

Get to know more about Ryn here: WEBSITE   BLOG   FACEBOOK

Get to know Citlalli more here: BLOG  ETSY  FACEBOOK

Thanks for giving a little love to my new sponsors.  I'll be back tomorrow with lots of new art journal pages to share with you.  Have a lovely Tuesday!

XO, HARMONY

Free Sponsorship! Getting Dreams Off the Ground

Happy Friday Everyone!  Today I am talking directly to those of you who have a blog or site that focuses on anything in the artsy/crafty/creative world.  I have a friend request for you.  (Yes, that is a doodle of my 28 week pregnant self with paint on my face.  It's pretty much how I look right now)

Now that I am finished with my graduate school degree and am so excited about finally going full time into my dream of creating a business from my art and this blog.  So this is where I need some help from you.  Actually this is the part where we can help each other!  I currently pay for advertising on other wonderful artsy/creative blogs and really want to expand my readership to others from different sources.  I am working as hard as I can to offer new and dynamic content and inspiration on this blog and am posting every day.  I cant afford to buy more advertising, but I thought maybe I don't have to.  I am sure that there are many people out there just like me putting their heart and soul into getting their creative blog's wings up and going and are looking for ways to get their stories more visible.  Is this you?

 What if we teamed up? Basically, what I am talking about is swapping sponsorships on each others' sites and then offering a few different promotions during the month to help offer our readers a chance to get to know our new creative friend.  I am really excited about this idea! It would be free!  I would love to do joint giveaways,  have guest posts, perhaps do some shared themes one week where we could do our own takes on the same idea, and/or share sales or feature a product that you might make and sell.  I am totally open to any ideas that you might have as far as how this could work and will do as much or as little as you feel comfortable doing yourself.  If this gets you excited and you want to be my bloggy friend, send me an email to feedyoursoulart@gmail.com and let me know what you are up for.

More information about this can be found under my Sponsorship Tab at the top bar, so please check that out.  Thanks for listening to my idea, and I cant wait to hear from you!  Tomorrow I'll be posting a new creative play video, documenting art making with a three year old.  It's messy, fun, colorful, chaos.  This week we painted fabric to be used in some future exciting projects that I'll be sharing with you, so please stop by and say hello.

XO, HARMONY

Hello Again

"Home Love" 2011

5X7 original 

available here

So I've obviously been on an unannounced break from the blog.  Whew! Its been almost 3 months since my last post.  This has been a particularly full season of life for me, and I found that I needed to prioritize.  I am now starting the second half of my graduate internship, and just as I had predicted, I reached the halfway point and am just so ready to be done.  I find that I have to work more and more at keeping up my motivation for being creative in my therapy sessions with clients.  My three year old has transitioned into full time "No Mommy"-mode and takes lots of patience, consistency, and tons of activities to successfully get through the day.  I've also been very very preoccupied with another BIG project that I have been working on for the last few months.  This one has taken over almost everything else, and in many ways has drained much of my creative spirit. 

Yes that's right.  Baby # 2 is growing and currently demanding a lot of my attention, well mostly ALL of my energy.  Its very hard to feel motivated about painting when all you want to do is nap.  We are super excited about our little apple (that's the arbitrary item that the books assign to a 4month old fetus' size).  God willing, this little one is due to arrive in mid-November.  My little man is going to be a big brother!

So I have been practicing the discipline of slowing.  Taking time to sit and be and just take each moment one at a time. My energy has slowly started to return, and I am really excited that the start of the summer will soon bring much more artsy creativeness my way (the fact that my husband will be off all summer and more available for entertaining our son being a HUGE factor in this).  So I hope to have lots more fun stuff to show you that I am working on very soon.  Dont be alarmed if much of it is a bit nursery/mommy-themed.  That's just where my life is right now.  Thanks for sticking with me through my much needed time away.  Your support has always been a blessing to me.  

time for some tweaks

Hi friends, I am doing some renovations...please excuse the messiness :) the blog should be cleaned up and ready again by tomorrow. thanks for understanding :) - harmony

Making some adjustments...

I am finally taking the plunge and trying to adjust my blog to a 3 column design.  so the blog will be looking a little wrecked for a bit today.  Please forgive the mess while I hack away at this.  (and if you have any tips on good 3 column blogger backgrounds - hook a girl up! :)

work in progress

I am reading this book right now, trying to really get into the blogging world for artists and creatives.  I think my biggest struggle is going to be learning to be more precise with my words, less flow of thought, which tends to run on and on.  The book says blog readers like short blurbs, the bigger posts tend to get skimmed and not fully read.  My posts are quite long, and honestly if it were me reading them, i'd skim them too.  You know first couple sentences, last couple sentences, get the gist and then move on.  I really want to connect with people, gather more readers, make friends who "get" me, and build a community of artists and creatives at heart.  So short posts and lots of pics is my new mantra.  Here goes...

Starting over, again...will I ever get this right?

Hello world. If you are here through my previous blog, welcome and I apologize for my chaos. I am working out the kinks in my own system and hope that you can follow along as I get it right. I am tweaking both my intention and focus behind this blog and felt a new address was warranted to help me transition and let go. Its been a year of struggle for me to find my motivation and momentum to propel me into my dreams, but I have finally built enough disdain for my own waste of time dreaming and doing nothing. I am tired of dreams and ready for life. real life. the messy, put myself out there and allow myself to be seen fully even when it makes me very vulnerable. so here goes... sometimes its just best to start over again.

I have been struggling to find myself today. such a lame excuse for laziness, i know, but still... its like a have a sock in my brain, dulling my senses, clogging my neural pathways, making words come more slowly and ideas crumble apart when they are only halfway created. I have a creative-void in my heart. an inattention to detail, a lost of interest in interesting things. Adulthood does it to me, fills me with socks that is. Could I just get lost back in my childhood, when I knew nothing of expectation, responsibility, deadlines. or judgment of talent. I am 31, nowhere near childhood these days. Stuck smack into adulthood, feeling so small and ill-prepared, today I am a mother, a wife, a home owner, a pet owner, a daughter to aging parents, a sister, a friend, a mentor, a grad student, and where in all of that do I get the gall to try to be an artist? I have been waiting for transformation, but the adulthood keeps shoving more dirty laundry at me to clean. My husband, my partner, is supportive, loving, sweet, and totally doesnt get the Me that is the Artist. He loves to watch me create something new and artsy, but in the end if I try to talk to him about it, he listens, nods, smiles and says "thats great, hun", then moves on. I show him prints from the latest mixed media artist that I just discovered. It moves me, inspires me, makes me want to freak out making gloriously chaotic creations, but he apologizes and says he just doesnt like that kind of stuff = my kind of stuff = a section of my soul that he loves but will never completely understand. So here I am now, trying out the internet for size on my body, will it produce people from the unseen closets in webspace that "get me", share that head space for creating something beautiful from something unexpected and experience the same war with self that I feel, to keep the adulthood from smothering the artist within us. I am many things, and I am an artist. I have to be or something really important and beautiful will die inside of me. I felt it fading those years in between when newly married, swamped with grad studies, and then pregnancy swallowed me up. I am working to reclaim it now, but have a lot of cobwebs and lost socks blocking my process. I want to be creative in some manner every day, to bring my soul alive! To feed it and grow it back from the shriveled size that I have rendered it over the last 5 years. I started exploring art journaling, mostly because I felt less pressured to produce something incredible, but can still keep trying to. I make art journals to sell and fund my art supply needs, and hopefully to help someone else discover the smothered artist within them as well. I spent the last year seeking my own spiritual journey, along with my husband and young son, we traveled across the nation, seeking a mentor and community to guide us to our own awakening within our life journey as followers of Jesus Christ, but dont fit into the model of church that our nation promotes. What I found along the way was that it is my times of creating/making art that I feel closest to God, NOT in a church pew. It is in the times that I am surrounded by friends doing a collective art experience, and NOT in my singular prayer time. This is meaningful and must be paid attention to. Could it be that the ultimate Creator meant for us to be creating as well, both making art with our hands and bodies but also enjoying the art of others to inspire our own process!? This connects for me. This makes me believe in God and love Him even more. So I believe that if I keep trying, as clumsy and untalented as I feel, I will clear the dullness and find myself as my Creator intended me, in a beautiful mess of paints, paper, string, fabric, markers, and glue.