I was hoping to get my meditations saved at Libsyn and create an RSS feed through Feedburner, but I wasn’t able to get that far this week.  I did however create a logo that I hope you’ll be seeing on iTunes next week.

My audio logo for Meditations:

My new logo

And now it’s off to the windy city in the middle of a notably chill February.  There will be good friends and good beer, who cares how cold it is :-]

~B~

My Painting, Columbus. Night. Life.,is now for sale at Celebrate Local. The kind people there Facebooked the announcement last night. I’d love to be cool, calm and collected, but it’s pretty exciting for me:) So head out to Celebrate Local, buy some of their stuff and my painting if you’d like. If you like the style, but aren’t in town I have others available at my online shoppe at Etsy: Artistic Avenues Explored with Joy, check it out!

And a shout out to my partner in all this, my Lady, thank you so much for all the help and encouragement!!!

~B~

So the painting isn’t complete, but I wanted to post it before I got out of town.  I should be able to finish it Monday and hopefully get it to Celebrate Local Tuesday.

Columbus. Night. Life.

So I’ve been working quite diligently at a new painting for the art wall at Celebrate Local.  You can see the fun art wall if you click on the link.  I’m hoping to get it to them Tuesday next week and I’ve been told there is a great chance that it would be up and for sale fairly soon after that. So I’ve had the happy necessity to work on things like artist’s statements,  short descriptions of art and all the stuff that one needs if one is going to sell their wears anywhere, but on Etsy. I’ll get a pic before I get it too them, maybe one before I leave tomorrow so I can make family look at at it this weekend;-)

Parting thought, I did an exercise today from The Magic by Rhonda Byrne which has added to my enjoyment of the day:

5 times in a day, take 5 breaths and try to feel as thankful for the air that you breathe as you can and after the breaths say out loud, “Thank you for the magical air I breathe.” For those who don’t like the word, magic, please leave it out and feel the thanks anyway.

I was finally able to get some good pics of a Christmas tree project that I had been working last month and get it up on my Etsy page. Here it is for anyone who missed it on my Facebook Page:

Oh Tannenbaum your star is brightly shining.

Time to get on that 3rd mediation for me, peace to you all in the still fairly new year!!

~B~

So my new Pittsburgh and Columbus paintings are completed and available on my Etsy Store.  Its been a fun challenge to try to set these up and complete them, but I’m pleased with how they have come out and all that I’ve learned in creating them.

The skyline of my city in one of the home town color sets.

My parent’s hometown skyline silhouetted against a golden moon.

Here is the second of my home city paintings. Blue and silver with an outline for contrast.

I’ve added two new pictures for sale at my Etsy store, Artistic Avenues Explored with Joy.  I’ve sold two similar pieces in the past and they have become one of my favorite things to paint. If you have time, check them out and let me know what you think!

~B~

I worked over the weekend, if you can call it work.  It was a lot more like learning to do something I’ve always wanted to do for myself…framing!  So I took a class at The Columbus Idea Foundry called Framing and Matting.  I chose two 5×7 ink pieces that I had done with brushes and with a calligraphy pen.  I didn’t think that something this interesting was going to be an option, but I’m glad that it was. It was 6+ hours for me but it was great. Check out my handiwork.

While there’s room for improvement I’m proud of this work.  The framing itself I found a bit difficult, but I was better by the time I was putting the last corner together than I was doing the first.  The glass cutting while simple was really neat and the matting tricks to get the pictures to float while keeping them from touching the glass was perhaps the most interesting part of all.   My time away from traditional work has been an exciting and wonderful time.  Thanks to those who read this for sharing in my adventure with me, please feel free to leave a comment and if you’d like to check out some of my other artwork please check out my Etsy page.

Remembering that I truly want to be happy is the first and often hardest step of living the life I want.  I’m doing a great job of that these days and it is starting to show.

Peace,

~B~

I’m hoping my new equipment shows before I head out to catch up with a long time friend from my old job and get some social gaming time in tonight with other friends, but it seem fairly doubtful from what my tracking info is telling me.  I’d like to have the new set up ready to go for tomorrow.  In the new world I dream of being super productive on Fridays instead of just wishing I wasn’t working.

I used my time this morning to take some pictures of the art work I promised to post last week and work on cleaning them up in GIMP 2.8.  Between Gimp, Audacity, Inkscape and WordPress I’ve had my hands full learning about worlds I didn’t really know existed.  It’s been fun:)

Here are the new yet to be named trees:

I hope to have more pictures ready tomorrow for my Etsy store so please check them out there if you’d like to make my art part of your personal collection!

I’ll end this post today with an ancient prayer that I learned from Jack Kornfield’s book I mentioned before.  Just saying it and listening to my heart has been a growth experience in ways both subtle and profound:

May I be filled with loving-kindness.

May I be well.

May I be patient and at ease.

May I be happy.

I wish the same for whom ever reads this.

~B~