JoDee Luna is a portrait and mixed media artist who creates captivating eyes and images to inspire. Her Etsy Shop features her original artwork while reproductions can be purchased on her Fine Art America Shop.

Bio

This author, artist, educator describes herself as a creative eclectic due to her diverse history, multiple talents, and various career pursuits. She enjoys a host of creative expressions as evidenced by her various portfolios on her creativity website.

She believes the creative process infuses with courage to try on new artistic identities, take inspired risks, and explore imaginative ideas, so she seeks to share insights with others through her art, book--Refrain from the Identical, Insight and Inspiration for Creative Eclectics--and her creativity website by the same name.

By day, she works as an instructional coach, overseeing educational technologies that accelerate literacy for struggling readers and co-leads district-wide art integration initiatives. JoDee understands how difficult it is to balance a career with the pursuit of her artistic passions, so her book and blog offer tips and inspiration for busy creatives.

Her journey into portrait painting began with a collection she titled "The Faces of Goodness," in which she sought to capture character traits of tenacious women in their pilgrimages of faith. She then envisioned mixed media portraits with various themes and used her own photography to create the backgrounds. She creates her portraits through photographs of people she knows or uses Photoshop to design digital models from a variety of faces.

JoDee’s creative journey traces back to childhood. Raised with a paintbrush, crochet needle, or sculpting dough in hand, she inherited her creative temperament from her Italian mother, who she sees as a master of living comfortably with shifting creative rhythms.

Her own creative shifts took her to the Netherlands as an early adult, where she worked as a leader with a creative arts urban mission. Her artistic quests led and comforted her through a divorce, a long period of single parenthood, a journey back to school, and a career in education.

During her free time today, when she’s not painting portraits, you will find her gardening, blogging, dabbling in mixed media, crafting hand-made masks, writing, shooting photos, arranging flowers, dancing, or collaborating with her daughters on any of the above. When she’s not creating, she’s most likely sleeping…and dreaming about the next project.