Artful Adventures

Arte Y Pico Award & a Tag, too!

Isn't this just the most beautiful flower?  First flower in for the season, it apparently wasn't a happy camper all winter, but it's blooming again now.

Recently I was given the Arte Y Pico  award by the lovely Tricia Anders.  It was a more than pleasant award to recieve, especially since I've been slacking on blogging lately, but am working on changing that right now!  Thanks Tricia for thinking of me, I'm honored!  There are 5 rules attached to this award and they are :
1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and that also contribute to the blogging community, no matter what language.
2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.
4. The Award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of "Arte Y Pico" blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5. To show these rules.   

The problem I always have with these awards are almost everyone on my link list should be listed, so consider yourselves all winners, but I'll still list 5 that I think everyone should go visit!  So here goes, some make you think, some make you smile, but all are great places to go visit! Elizabeth Bunsen, always has the most fantastic photos and lives such a full life and is quick to share it.  Bonnie has a blog full of color, Tourist Tuesday, and a way of writing that just makes you smile. Tammy Vitale, I've mentioned her before and I'll keep mentioning her until you all go read her blog!  Amazing art and her thoughts for the day are always on target-not sure how she does that:) This next one is The Flying Pig Blog, interesting to see art & artists through the eyes of a gallery owner.  And last but not least, is  Kim Boehm, having met her in person I can honestly say she's always got a smile on her face, a fellow dog lover, and she just simply enjoys life & everything in it!  Over the last couple of months, I've been tagged several times, and I promise to get to them all, but for tonight I'm doing the one that Caren tagged me with, a book tag that I've seen floating around for awhile.   Here are the rules of the book tag:
Pick up a book of at least 123 pages
Open the book to page 123
Find the fifth sentence
Post the next three sentences
Tag five people to do the same  I always have a stack of 3 or 4 books sitting around waiting to be read.  Moat are technique books that I page through more than read through, and always at least a  couple of books that do need the traditional start to end kind of reading.  So I'm choosing one that I have the best intentions of reading, despite the fact that it's an Oprah book club book, and of the few of them that I've purchased, I haven't liked one yet-lol.  Hell of an endorsement, isn't it:)  But this one sounded good-we'll see!  It's A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle.  The passage required for this tag is : "Cooperation is alien to the ego, except when there is a secondary motive.  The ego doesn't know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you.  When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe-in the form of people and circumstances-gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole."  Hmmm, quess I'll start this one from the beginning soon!  I'm not going to tag anyone for this one, but if you so desire, I'd love for you to tell me what good book you've read lately, something that will give me an excuse to run right over to Amazon.com & place an order:) 

         

To wrap it up for tonight, here's our very own "Sassy Cat", and she's earned the name, she bites me every chance she gets!!  I haven't shared many photos of her, so here she is, in all her glory!   

One World One Heart Winner!

Participating in the annual One World One Heart event, hosted by Lisa from Heart of the Nest has been a wild, crazy, wonderful ride!  Over 400 participants, and 193 of you left comments to win my collage, unbelieveable!  The list of everyone will be kept up until the end of the year, so even though the drawings are over, there's plenty of time to go back & really look around at all these blogs.  So many were new to me, and so many deserve to be read and lingered over, now that the rush is over.  I'm hoping this event happens for many more years, it was so much fun-thank you, Lisa!!

Anyway, the winner of my drawing is Melba, chosen by using a random number generator.  She's already been emailed, just waiting to hear from her to get the address and then wait for it to quit snowing to get to the PO.  Thanks everyone!! 

Have you Heard??

These well worn books that I grabbed at a garage sale last summer, are patiently waiting for me to do something with them, give them a new life, new use, new something.  But then again, I kind of like how they look just sitting there.  How's that for justification of putting something off for another day:)  Truth be told, I've been siting on this computer so much lately, totally blown away by the bloglandia event One World One Heart !  If you haven't been to the site yet, go see for yourself, there are now 374 participating blogs!  Do you believe it??  I have a long ways to go before I get through them all (fortunately, the list will be kept up for a long time so that everyone has a chance to go through & really read them) but have already met some wonderful people, seen beautiful art, and met some of the most gracious & generous bloggers ever.  I've met new friends, found old ones (waving to Lilla here!), and the eye candy, well, it's enough to make your head spin!  One of the blogs that's new to me, is Dawn Edmundon a.k.a. The Feathered Nest, it's a wonderful place to visit!  She's having a couple of separate give aways herself, beside the One World One Heart, so be sure to go see her.  As if that's not enough going on for her, she's got this
beautiful piece of art entered into a challenge.  To see all of the entries, choose your favorite & help someone win a sweet prize, just Click here to vote.  I believe it ends on Valentine's Day, so you'll have to hurry!

And on to winning more prizes (don't you love to win something?) in the words of my friend Deb Trotter, you'll have to ride that Art Pub Pony to win her wonderful art by visiting her other blog over at Art Pub Studios, a group of artists brought together under one roof in bloglandia.  Last week, Debby Harriettha named me for the
Make My Day Award, which really did make my day!!  Thanks, Debby! The rules are to give the award to 10 people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and makes you feel happy about blogland.  There's just no way that I could choose only 10, so if you're reading this, you're making me happy!  See, I really can be easily pleased-contrary to what my husband may say sometimes:)  Seems like "Debbie" is the operative word here tonight for blogs, keep an eye out on the blog of
Debbie Overton, she's having a birthday in a few months and rumor has it that she's planning a blog event for it-so watch for a party!  And have you heard that my friend Jen Worden is hosting a weekly art challenge on her blog?  Jen is so talented and her brain never rests, the ideas are always whirling around, so go check it out, it's going to be fun!  A local art friend of mine, Amanda Davie, just opened her Etsy shop and has some very cool art in it, go check it out!  And she's spurred me on to do the same, so I'm in the process of opening my own Etsy shop, I'll let you know as soon as I have it loaded!  Lots in the works, just nothing quite done, soon, very soon-I think I've said that recently, but seriously, I'm working!                                                          

One of the things I've been meaning to do for all too long, is to try to get a better handle on color mixing, trying to follow the steps, read all the directions, and you know what?  I can still manage to screw it up:)  But I've learned that adding white paint to a color makes it very matte & opaque, and that it takes a lot (I mean really a LOT!) of white to get a lighter tint.  That said, I had a lot of extra paint leftover that I used to paint tissue paper to use in collages later-I'm way too cheap to toss out paint!  Almost 4 exercises done, about 42 to go, and I planned on doing them all in both heavy body acrylic as well as fluid acrylic-what was I thinking?  This will take awhile, so I'll report in with any new discoveries as I go.  Since I've been sitting here forever staring at this computer, time to pry myself away for a bit, and give you all a chance to check out all these links:)                            

ONE World-ONE Heart Event

Lisa Oceandreamer of

Heart of the Nest and

Imagination Cafe is hosting the 2nd annual

ONE World-ONE Heart Event, starting Feb.1 and ending late night on Feb.13, with the winners of the drawings being announced on Feb.14.  That's right-everyone participating will be giving something away! My offering will be this beeswax collage, it was a piece I was going to keep, but this seemed like a good time for it to move onto a good home.  All you have to do is visit the participating blogs and leave comments if you'd like to have a chance at winning whatever each of us is giving away.  Just click

HERE to see the list of participating blogs.  The purpose of this event is to bring bloggers together, meet new people that we may not have met any other way, forge new friendships, and have some fun.  If you have a blog and want to participate by giving something away, just go

HERE where you can read the rules and join in this event.  And don't forget to leave a comment here if you'd like to own this original beeswax collage!

Thanks for stopping by to enter to win this collage, I  can hardly wait for this to happen again next year!  And now to choose the winner--be right back:)  And the winner is Melba!!  

I'm speechless-almost:)

The generosity shown by my friends in both real life & in this blogging world of ours, regarding my last post about the cane, has literally blown me away.  You'll never know how much your thoughtful comments, emails, and offers to art up a cane for me, have meant-you're all amazing!  And the stories some of you have shared about your own health struggles, truly made me feel like I'm far from alone in this, and I'm convinced that we can all help each other.  I'm still working on gathering up canes (wouldn't you think that medical supply stores would carry more than 1 of each kind, but not here!) so stay tuned for the next step:)  And did you check out my new banner??  It was created by the talented

Susan Tuttle who had the patience of a saint to put up with me sending her a ton of scans to choose from & work her magic.  She was a pleasure to work with and I'm so glad that it gave me the opportunity to get to know her a little better, another friendship in the making!  So, don't you just love it?  I do!!

Something to Smile About

Last week, Debbie Overton handed out awards to 10 people, the Something to Smile About Award, thanks Debbie!  Glad I make someone smile:)  Here's the deal, I'm supposed to name 10 other blogs/people that make me smile, but everyone I have on my link list makes me smile or they wouldn't be on there!  So what I'm going to do instead, is to point out some folks that are "new" to me and well worth checking out their blogs, and maybe even a few that I've had linked for a long time, that I want to make sure you all go visit them.  But remember, you all really do make me smile!  And now these 10 that I'm listing, are supposed to do the same-list 10 blogs-this could go on forever!

Meet Andrew, I had the pleasure of meeting him at Valley Ridge recently while attending a class taught by Michelle Ward.  Not only is he very talented, but I love the way he views the world.

SuziBlu not only makes me smile, she makes me laugh out loud, then haul out my journal & actually work in it!

Elizabeth Bunsen was the force behind the Bloglandia Ball, and now I see there's a Halloween Bash in the making-gotta love a party!

Judy Wilkenfeld because her works so amazing, and you don't want to miss her new Etsy shop that's she's planning on opening soon.

Leslie Marsh is so much fun, talented, and her husband makes an appearance on her blog occasionally!

Deb Trotter, well she just cracks me up all the time with some of her sayings!

Caren, my friend from New Zealand, not only is art jaw dropping gorgeous, but her photographs are so beautiful-go see, you'll love it all!

Corinne Stubson, even though we've never met in person, we yak on the phone and always make each other laugh-the kind of friend we all need!

Tammy Vitale is the most consistent blogger I've ever run into, she's talented, shares her insights on life & art in general, and her "thought for the day" is always, well, thought provoking:)

Annie Lockhart can always make me smile, maybe because we've met & I can picture her talking as i read what she writes, or maybe it's because we share a birthday & are fellow Scorpios, or maybe it's because she likes to play practical jokes and I still owe her one!

There are so many more that I'd like to mention, and some friends of mine that don't have blogs, but should be on this list-Kim, Becky, Linda-we want to hear you!!