artist life

  • Finding Joy in Every Season: Tips to Cope with Seasonal Depression

    Finding Joy in Every Season: Tips to Cope with Seasonal Depression

    I used to hate Winter. I wished I could avoid it like the plague. The cold, the dark, the brown and gray of nature when everything had died for the season. But some time in the past few years, I began to change my tune. My feelings about Winter began to evolve when I started…

  • Exploring Colorful Horse Art

    Exploring Colorful Horse Art

    When I was a young girl, I was obsessed with horses, and not just My Little Ponies, but that was a big part of it! My room was decorated with horses and unicorns and I was constantly making horse art. I’m sure it started with coloring books, then there was the barnyard scene I won…

  • An intentional 2021

    An intentional 2021

    This past year was a wild one, everyone knows that. It wasn’t exactly the worst or hardest year I’ve ever experienced – our family has been through much tougher stuff. However this was unique in that it was a difficult, strange, and overwhelming year for EVERYONE to different degrees. The collective anxiety and tension over…

  • 3 things I’ve learned from portrait painting

    3 things I’ve learned from portrait painting

    When I started experimenting with dog paintings a year ago, I never really thought about doing human portrait paintings. Dog portraits seem so low pressure, and it was just playing around mostly. But then I painted my daughter, as a gift for her, and it wasn’t long before my friend asked me to paint her…

  • Art as Therapy

    Art as Therapy

    2020 has been a real doozy! I say that lightly but in all seriousness it has been one of the weirdest, bumpiest, stress-inducing and even tragic years of our collective lives. I’ve been through some really hard times, and you’ve been through some tough times too, but it’s rare we’re all going through the same…

  • Swimming in anxiety with COVID-19

    Swimming in anxiety with COVID-19

    Anxiety comes naturally to me. I know I’m blessed and unique in that way (said no one ever). Big news events like this COVID-19 stuff and the stuff with Iran back in January can really do a number in my brain. I’ve come along way with managing my daily anxiety through exercise, sleep, nutrition, meditation,…

  • How to take great pet photos

    How to take great pet photos

    One thing I’ve learned from doing pet portrait paintings from photos and having pets that I like to take photos of, is that taking good photos of your pet is not an easy task! Whether you want to learn to take great pet photos for Instagram or print, or to use as a reference photo…

  • Embracing the ugly stage of the creative process

    Embracing the ugly stage of the creative process

    The creative process contains the space in between the start of a portrait painting and the finished piece that is filled with discomfort, frustration, impatience, and skepticism. While the initial concept and sketch is all optimistic energy and possibility, the next stages of the painting process are the start of the ugly part: the base…

  • Labors of love

    Labors of love

    This weekend I spent a lot of time on the administrative aspects of this little art biz. Making tweaks and adding functionality to this website, setting up an email newsletter and automating as much of that as possible, starting a Facebook page, converting my Pinterest account to a business account so I could get some…

  • Music, painting, and alcohol

    Music, painting, and alcohol

    The last couple months of 2019 were both joyful and frantic. I had a surprising volume of pet portrait painting orders for Christmas which was all a new business to me, so I just buckled down and spent my evenings and weekends cranking them out in time for the holidays. It was exciting and scary…