Joining the Ranks

I've been recovering from a blow to our little family - BOTH my husband and I were laid off from our jobs at the end of January the same day (we worked together). We've joined the ranks of hundreds of thousands of others sadly unemployed in this beautiful country we call home. I can only pray the economy picks up - and soon! This also means we need to put our house selling efforts into overdrive, we thought we could take our time fixing up the old house before putting it on the market but I'm thinking it needs to go sooner than later before the taxes on both bury us!
Now for better news, I've got tons of time on my hands for my art, and have been working like mad to get some paintings done and perhaps some notecards printed from some of my favorites so I can open up an etsy shop to sell my work...paintings...notecards..I've also been playing around with some floorcloths but they are very time consuming especially since they have to be durable enough to take the wear of walking on them.
I cut a rather elaborate stencil the other night, actually the subject is on the odd side but it came out pretty good I think:

BREATHE

It was done with my new stencil and spraypaint, acrylics were used for the background and the flowers are decoupaged on with painted stems - it's about 6x8...weird?? LOL most would probably think so!

Next I was in a swap for an ATC where "Color" was the theme. One of the most colorful places I've ever been was Venice, Italy - the island of Burano...crazy beautiful colors there: 

WHERE CRAYOLA & BURANO COLLIDE

And lastly, I was on Facebook when a friend (the same friend I painted the "When a Tree Grows in Brooklyn" book jacket for in a previous post) changed her profile picture - just as soon as I saw it I knew it would make a neat photo transfer and this is how it came out:

SUSAN

It's a packing tape transfer, some papers and embellishments, I don't do a whole lot of collage work but probably should as much fun as this was to make. I ended up sending it to her as a surprise! BUT the surprise was on me - I just got the most awesome piece of art lovin' from her made with a gorgeous wooden cigar box from Columbia: 

Susan's Box of Dreams

Gorgeous! And a ton of fun to go through, how lucky I am to be the recipient of this : )

Ok, this is what happens when I don't blog enough - I ramble on for much too long, we'll see if I might just be a bit more faithful to my blogging. It's noon and I'm still in my jammies drinking coffee  ............................at the Shores