My husband went exploring the neighbour this afternoon – mainly stooging around in our rural area. To my delight he brought home for me a lovely pale pink, almost fully blown rose. It’s a little bit tatty but I touched it up on Photoshop, deepened the colour, then brought it up in BeFunky and ended up producing this image, which I’ve called: Butterfly Lights. Don’t ask me quite how I ended up with this image as I just kept poking at the gizmo buttons until I got a piece of digital art I really liked. I am in fact using this as a basis for creating various canvases so that I have some base patterns available in future for creating digital art. 
art workshop
Forgiveness
I was going through my photo files yesterday and came across a digital art piece I’d mis-filed called “Forgiveness”. It really didn’t look quite finished so I moved it to my digital art folder and worked on it today.
I found it interesting that I re-discovered this painting as I’ve had a very interesting experience since I wrote on my book blog about my experiences with fibromyalgia and my father’s descent into rampant alcoholism (http://thecrazycrone.com/2014/02/16/fibro-follies-1-25/). For some reason, now that I’ve spoken publicly about a very difficult time and my relationship with my father, I feel much calmer, more at peace and I’ve lost the anger bottled up inside me.
Forgiveness is a tricky subject. I often see people misunderstand this issue as condoning someone’s actions if you forgive them. Actually, you are freeing yourself up from past troubles or injustices, as in forgiving someone you don’t condone what they’ve done, you simply let go of the bitterness in your own heart. It heals you. The other person still has to deal with the action they undertook. I know I mentioned “forgiveness” to a lady in a Tarot reading and I thought she was going to brain me when I mentioned the unmentionable. I also read how someone had stones with various words engraved on them, and the one that was seldom picked by people fossicking through the stones.
How you handle forgiveness is an individual matter, but I feel like I’ve finally managed to forgive my father for the difficult relationship we had in our lives together, it’s as if the bitterness has suddenly dissolved. I found that creating the digital image of “Forgiveness” was as if I’d had a window to the past where I could look back, not with anger, but with compassion and love. I hope this image helps you if you have issues of forgiveness in your life.
The Fool – New Beginnings
I’ve been reasessing my writing and art work and decided to leave the writing of my book as blog for a while. I felt I was getting mechanical and wanted to give myself time to approach my blog with a more fresh outlook.
At the same time I wanted to focus on my art work and set up my on-line presence in a more formal format. So I’ve established another website:
which will be for photos only of my art and photography. I want to continue with this blog as an outlet for digital art but with additional commentary to explain where I started and the steps I took to the final image.
To demonstrate my commitment to my work as an artist and photographer, I’ve also decided to commit to an art exhibition later this year and, of course, by stating this publicly, the only way is forward!
Here’s my path forward:
- Set up formal website for art and photos – done
- Formalise art set-ups on web – 2 weeks
- Set a date for art exhibition – 1 month
- Set a date for crystal workshop, including publicity about art exhibition
- Hold art exhibition – approximately 6-8 months’ time
Nothing like jumping in the deep end, eh?
So here’s my art piece for today, grasses and sea overlaid on a green background; lots of fiddling with PicMonkey gizmos to add in water and other bits of arty-farty colour and a final overlay of a photo of my Picasso PIcture Jasper expanded to show only the centre. And since I’m talking about new beginnings and more focused action in my art work, I’ve called it: The Fool, the 0 card in the Major Arcana.
