Watercolor brilliance!

I have never commissioned art before.  I like to leave the ideas to the artists.  Today, I picked up the first piece I commissioned though.  Let me explain.  I was checking out my friend Todd's art blog back in 2012 and there were some pieces I really liked and thought would be great for the crib.  Todd's style reminds me of Quentin Blake, which of course I'm a fan of.  I discovered Blake after reading several of Roald Dahl's books.  I would like to write a children's book like Dahl some day. (The BFG is my fav).  Blake's work so perfectly compliments the whimsy Dahl. 

Anyways' Todd's work is fun.  I really like the watercolors he does of animals.  I sent an email out to Todd to see if any of those were for sale.  I wanted to support a friend and I like watercolors.  I appreciate them mainly because I've tried to watercolor and it is hard!  Nothing is ever permanent with watercolor until the painting is dry and done.  They are fragile in a way.  Only most skilled painters pull of a good watercolor.  Todd is one of those painters.  He replied with the suggestion that he would do a commission of anything I wanted.  I decided to have him do a scene from imagination, which I plan to use in a fantasy novel I have forever been working on.  I've been going through some writer's block, but this piece has me inspired to write again.  Thanks Todd!  Todd is also a kickass comic artist.  Check out his Web comic. 

Wedding gifts to ourselves

So now that I'm a mature adult with a house and wife (do those things make you a mature adult?), I want to have real art around the house.  What do I mean by that?  We won't just put things around the house we like, but perhaps some with value.  I want to invest, but stocks and business crap bore me and my comic book collection is barely getting my money back, so original art is!  So far, I have convinced Bethany to go with it.  No more dorm room posters! We've transitioned from thumbtacks to nails.  That's how you know something is real art, if it requires nails. 

Speaking of dorm room posters, if you are into the history of posters or follow the poster market at all, which I recently am, it seems that posters that may have been on a dorm room wall decades ago seem to have value now.  Well, as long as they are original printings, no reproductions.  People are paying hundreds of dollars for original printings of the Star Wars movies and Farrah Fawcett.  It's funny, but nostalgia pays.

Anyways, I though I would share some of the new pieces we have in our house.  The first is a sculpture that I bought for Bethany as a wedding present.  In our first year of dating, I was living in Texas and she was home in Delaware.  Since we had to fly to see each other, we would at times meet in other cities.  She saw this piece in Santa Fe years ago and I took a mental picture of it.  Bethany loves Giraffes and family, which I think is part of what drew her to the piece.  It's called "Daddy Long Legs" by Todd Warner.  It's part of series all featuring animals sitting on furniture that has the same print as they do.  If you check out Todd's Website, you'll see how he gives a dreamy humanistic quality to his animals.  We like animals.  Most of our art features animals.  She was stunned when she got this gift.  She couldn't believe that I remembered.  Given that it was five years ago, I'm glad she remembered too!

The next two were wedding gifts we bought for ourselves on our honeymoon in Hawaii.  I convinced Bethany that rather than using our gift money just to pay off our wedding, why not buy some things for ourselves.

The first is a Normal Rockwell print you may have seen before.  I have always been into poster art.  When I saw that the old fishing town of Lahaina had a vintage European poster store, I was hoping to pick up a cool European throwback.  As you can see that's not what we got.  Let's just say that me and Bethany have different tastes!  We looked at dozens of posters and this piece was the only one she seemed really responsive to, obviously because of the faith thing.  It's cool, though because I have always like Rockwell's realism and I don't mind reminders for her to stay faithful.  This one is War World II propaganda piece (1943).  It was part of series of four prints that promote buying war bonds in order to preserve our freedoms.  Maybe I'll convince her to let us get a European piece eventually!

The last is a numbered giclee by Robert Bissell.  It is part of a series called, "Hero."  All of Robert's works feature animals in whimsical manners.  We also got this in Lahaina.  I never get bored at looking at it and it makes a great statement piece in our house.  It's currently above our fireplace.

my new distraction...

Well baseball is over (well the Phils are over) and I'm barely over it.  It was heartbreaking.  I had such high hopes.  My whole life is all about hope it seems and not so much realization of hopes.  I just keep on hoping.  I'll survive I suppose and before you know it (probably next week), I'll start counting the days until next season.

I have had some of new free time open up in my life, both unfortunately and fortunately, and so I've decided to use my time maturely with self improvement.  It's time for Ped to continue to grow up.  So I've been working out some and exploring the arts.  Specifically, I've gotten into water color painting.  I'm terrible at it.  It probably doesn't help that water color is the harder of the painting styles.  I got inspired when I bought two small water color originals from my favorite website etsy.com from a super nice woman named Rachelle Levingston from SLC, Utah.  Pictures of the ones I bought are below.  I like buying original art.  It makes me feel good.  I get to fill my home with beautiful things while also supporting someone that is doing it for a living.  I also bought a cool hand carved owl thingy made from bark at the cranberry festival in Chatsworth, NJ this weekend.  Maybe at some point I'll post my own art on here, but don't hold your breath.