Fulfilling Lifelong Dreams
I've been drawing and painting for pretty much my whole life. It has always been a dream of mine to see my artwork go out into the world and find new homes. With Etsy and RedBubble I'm hoping to eventually make that a reality.
I've reached a point where I have the ability to make a new painting weekly and I'm going to do that. With each painting, once its finished and I have scanned it or taken a photo, I plan to use my digital programs to remake it into a coloring page that I will upload here as a downloadable PDF. Every coloring page you see in my store will be based on one of my actual physical paintings or drawings. My goal is to have a new one each week.
The thing to remember, is that I do not have a specific "niche" that I like to stick to. My subject matter will vary based on my mood when I pick up the pencil or paint brush and start a new piece. Hence, the "Random" portion of my shop name. You might find cartoony images, you might find landscapes, you might find realistic images, you might find mandalas, you might find educational themes for children. But what you won't find is mature content themes. I like to try to keep everything friendly for folks of all ages. But my main focus here will be art related in some way.
I think I'll likely only be selling the coloring pages here, though. The scans and photos of the artwork itself will be put into RedBubble for selling prints (same shop name over there), and the originals will go to local festivals and community events to be sold in person.
However, there will be some yarny stuff too!
I learned to knit and crochet 13+ years ago. It didn't take long to discover that I was able to knit and crochet various items without following a pre-written pattern to do it.
My favorite projects were socks. Socks are actually still my favorite things to knit. I like that I can toss a sock WIP into a Ziplock bag and take it with me in my purse to work on wherever I go. They're lightweight, compact, very portable, and they don't cover me over and make me sweat if I'm knitting outside in the summer.
After I posted some photos of my "pattern-less" sock projects on social media, I started getting requests from folks asking if I would be willing to write them up and sell them because they also wanted to make them. So, for a year (back around 2014) I wrote up one pattern each month. One month I would do the toe up version, the next month I would do the cuff down version. I was lucky to have a lovely bunch of buddies who tested each write up and searched for mistakes that needed corrected before the patterns went live. These same ladies also agreed to let me insert into the patterns the photos of the socks they knit during their testing, for which I am very grateful!
Credit has been properly given within each pattern.
Originally, I had planned to do themed sets for each one of those sock patterns, like I started to do with the Lattice patterns. There's a toe up, a cuff down, and there is a legwarmer/boot topper version. The plan had been to make a legwarmer version, a fingerless glove version, and a scarf version of each design and sell them all separately and then later combine them into bundles. I may still do that; I haven't completely abandoned that idea. I just haven't done it yet because life took a different direction and all of that got put on hold.
My kids are teenagers now and no longer need my constant attention. So, I find myself having more time to go back to doing the hobbies that I enjoyed before life got busy. I have re-uploaded my old patterns and put them back out there for the world.
In the evenings I'm working on putting those sets together so that I can eventually get those out there too and create those bundles once and for all.
And I'm revisiting those paint brushes during the day!
I always wondered what I would do with myself once my kids started wanting to do their own thing without Mom being right there all the time.
Now, I know!
