Illustrated Lemons, Raspberries, Easter Bunnies and Nano Fiction

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I'm into Spring colors this month thanks to the beautiful weather announcing the advent of budding flowers, fresh veggies and fruits from the garden and Easter coming up. These colors are working nicely with my new hand drawn style illustrations for my own product line of fine art giclees and products for my online store. (You can click either image above to buy that Martini Art on things like tees, aprons, coasters, cups and other fun products.)

This new sketchy, cartoon style illustration work also sparked another idea - illustrated fiction for my upcoming Martini book. I've been working on this idea for a while and somehow these new doodles brought it all together. I have several little micro stories I've written with a martini theme for the book and they were just waiting for these illustrations to happen. I did a quick black and white one for The Martini Diva but it's really more of a nano story - only 2 short sentences tell the tale. I'll keep the one page stories for the book but I like the idea of these nano stories for the martini website/blog. They'll also make great little spot illustrations for the book.

And, finally getting smart, I am now doing my martini recipe cards at the same time as I do the original art for my website and boutique. I wanted to come up with a new look for my recipe cards that worked in with the new sketchy style hand drawn art and thought why not use the same design? Duh, took me long enough to figure that out. So here's the new martini recipes for the last week. You can click each recipe card for that martini recipe and the full sized, free martini recipe card:

And with Easter coming up I had to do this kinda snarky humorous Easter design called Easter Schmeaster - it includes a recipe for rabbit stew! Yes, my humor does get a little dark at times, especially when I'm bombarded with so much fluffy cute like I am at Easter! If you're kinda snarky about Easter too - or just like a nice chardonnay with your rabbit - click the design to order some of my apparel, home decor or gifts.

I also finished and uploaded a website for a client and started work on another. I am not a web designer, I don't like it doing it - except when I'm doing my own sites and even that is more hard work than fun. But I do it if a client insists - I am good at optimizing for search engines and helping them get their content SEO friendly. I do like doing the graphics for websites - the logos, mastheads and images they need to use. That's more of a branding/image approach and that I enjoy. But the coding for web design and all the glitchy crap that happens trying to design for multiple platforms, screen sizes and resolutions and internet speeds drives me nuts. It's like math, ugh. It's too hard to really make any website aesthetically pleasing.

So, it's been a week of Spring and renewal for me - I'm redecorating my home too! This all has brought my mood up and away from all the fear that is floating around about the economy. I had to turn off the television and get that negative crap out of my head and this new line of spring-ish sketching and art has been a great way to do that. Plus it seems to have tied up several loose strings in my business plan goals! The martini book now has a very clear graphic direction, I'm designing one image that works for several design requirements and I'm hearing the birds starting to sing outside in the mornings. Spring has sprung for PopArtDiva, the Normal Challenged Artist!

VISUALIZE, VISUALIZE: Since I'm redecorating my main focus has been on seeing some cool, retro furniture and great textures and colors in my home. No surprise, I'm going with accents of turquoise and lavender with a bit of light magentas and a teeny dash of lime (spring colors - Break Out the Martinis will give you an idea of my color palette!).

IT'S ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT: I have been allowing the generalized fear about the economy to get me down. Last week I just got over it, I decided not to let that in and to focus my energies where I am happiest - on my art, writing and creative endeavors. Funny how the minute I did that my emotional level went up, huh? I am always at my best when I'm creating.

ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE: I am grateful I got out that anger, fear and frustration that had seeped in (I use my Brat in the Hat blog to vent - it's my personal therapist!) and got my "good" back. I'm grateful for my sense of humor which somehow always restores my sense of balance as it did about all that banking/economy stuff. I'm grateful it's warm enough that I can have Pixel groomed for Spring. I'm grateful for coffee because without it I wouldn't have enough sense to be writing this blog at 6 a.m. on a Sunday!


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