I've been reading blogs for inspiration

Like "Colour Me Happy" by Maria Killam. Very inspiring; shows this novice what a REAL blog should look like!

Anyway, lately I've been doing computer artwork, particularly one Christmas card, one collage, and one computer portrait of Greta Garbo. (She has my favorite all-time face.) I'll admit it, the Christmas card design is not entirely original. I took a silhouette of a Christmas tree, filled it with stars, and added some emanating rays and a beautiful old-world font. This is how it turned out, and it is of course for sale at cafepress.com/feelgoodgraphix.

I was also noodling around on some of the older card designs, and I think I really improved them. My original Halloween card was a photo of a lamppost with a spider web hanging from it in appropriately spooky fashion, which struck me as ... unfinished. So I superimposed a pumpkin stem on top of the lamppost, which made the whole design MUCH more interesting. Here's the original:

 and here's the improvement:

What do you think?

Also, just in time for Valentine's Day, I messed around with my "Love is Always Right" design, and made it into a true Valentine. I took what used to be a static, right-angled design and made it much more dynamic and swingy with a few swipes of the virtual eraser tool. Here's the revamped version of that card:

Previously the red background was in a rectangular border, and the text area in white was rectangular also. Just too many rectangles! I swapped the rectangles for hearts and now it sparkles (partly because I also added ... sparkles.)

Hey, I also made a calendar! They have a calendar-making feature over at CafePress, so I rounded up 12 of my better photos and made a calendar! I'm all excited. Here's the cover of the calendar, along with a link to where you can see all the pages:

www.cafepress.com/feelgoodgraphix

Oh, and then there's Greta. Good old Greta, with the most perfect face ever to gaze out from a movie screen. I took an old studio portrait of her, in black and white of course, and jazzed her up to look like the Snow Queen from a Tchaikovsky ballet. Here's the original:

 You've seen this one, right?




And here's my Snow Queen version:

She's not available for sale right now. (But I think she could be because that photo's gotta be in the public domain, right?) But she graces my bathroom mirror now, bestowing sparkly goodwill to all who brush their teeth before her.