Designing a Clucking Calendar

I began last night, gathering up images of the chickens I have already painted so that I can make the much-asked-for chicken calendar for 2016.

I have eight or nine (depending whether I end up combining the two Noble Hens, #4 and 5 in the squares above, into a diptych, which I may), so I need three or four more. Actually I have many more chickens than that, but for the calendar I'm only using the ones I've done in mixed media on paper.

For those of you who might be asking, "But what about the horses?", fear not. The 2016 horse calendar is also in its early design stages, but because I already did one of those last year, I actually have fewer horses than I have chickens.

If you feel this is unacceptable, send me horse photos. :-D

Springy Stuff! And I'm Sick.

A day or two after Saint Paul Art Crawl, I got sick. The cough still hasn't gone away, and I've been working steadily at my frame shop job all the while, because some other folks have been out of town.

The result of all this has been that I still need to ship two items that I finished a while ago, and I haven't created any new art to show you this week. What I did do was take the long way home a couple times last week, and let rush hour rush by while I wandered with camera, Kleenex and cough drops in hand, snapping shots and inhaling the scents that I could, amazingly, still smell.

I hope you'll all have the chance to do something similar, now that all the lilacs are blooming.

Poetry is for the Birds

What you see here is my design process as I prepare to frame this raven of mine. While I don't consider myself a poet, some of my art sprouts verses as I work on it, rather by accident. I have chosen to add the verse to this one when I frame it. 

In this draft, you can't read the writing well (and I've got some layout issues which I will correct in the final version). Here's what it says.

The Patron Saint of Storytellers

often flies away

just before he tells you how it ends.

If you keep on calling, he comes back another day

He brings you half the ending 

and you bring the rest to him.