tashina knight

Okay, this is kinda corny. I haven’t seen my best friend since 1991 so I drew a picture of us together - a visit is one of my ambitions for the next year. I made me the blonde and her the brunette because that’s how it was when we were inseparable through our high school years.

She left San Diego when we were 17 and for years we wrote long letters to each other and then long emails, and now with the cost of interstate calls lower, we have 5 hour phone calls. She has the best sense of humor anywhere.

In Dallas news, there is no news. We’ll probably know sometime in the next week or two but until we get the all important phone call, we won’t know a thing. It’s frustrating, because I am a control freak, but I’ll deal with it by calling by best friend and complaining loud and long.

Visit Illustration Friday for more anbitious artwork.

I’m not sure I’m going to be able to resist the allure of carrying a chicken around on my shoulder. I love them! They are a pattern from Needlesongs.

Also, one of my favorite artists, Teesha Moore, has updated her page so you might want to check out all the new wonderful things.  Most especially, check out her studio which is to die for.

Dollmakers, keep an eye out on the newsstands. The new Art Doll Quarterly is out.

And for paper artists, so is Somerset Studio. My work is not quite their style but that hasn’t stopped me from submitting two things in the last 6 months. One was just a little simple fiber art card, which is now in their ATC book. The other is a collage-y thing that I like a lot and they kept it for 6 months - I was hoping it wasn’t lost. They finally got it back to me this week with a note that they photographed it for possible inclusion in their Gallery 4 publication which is coming out later this year. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

I’m pretty happy though. I told myself in October that I would start submitting little things to magazines just to feel that I wasn’t going to die with all my work in my closet, and both pieces I sent out were at least photographed and one was published.

The last time (and only time) that I submitted something for publication was WAY back in 1992 when I painted an art chair for the San Diego Union Tribune. They had a contest where they had 5 plain unfinished chairs available for painting. You had to send samples of your style and a letter saying why you should be chosen. They had 500 entries! I went down to the office and picked up the chair and painted it in my monster/cityscape style and then brought it back to be photographed (we did get to keep the chairs) for the full color home/garden magazine insert. On the Sunday morning that the insert was coming out, I woke up at 6am and ran out to the porch to get the paper. When I opened it up, they had not only run the story of the 5 chairs, but they had picked mine to be the sole thing on the cover of the magazine! I was in such shock; I just danced around and around. Before that, my parents hadn’t really been too supportive of the idea of me being an artist (especially after paying to put me through UCSD with a math degree!), but after that they bought up copies and showed them to all their friends/family and it was okay for me to be an artist. :) 

Okay, that was the story of my shining moment of publication. But it was 13 years ago. Now I’m going to make it my full time career. Scary, but exciting.

So sorry to have been lax in the updating the past two weeks. I hope to do better soon. My husband and I live in an apartment and they are working on converting to condos AND our lease is up at the end of the month so we’ve been looking for what to do next. An opportunity with his company has become available in Dallas and we may be moving within a month or so. The decision will be made in the next two weeks so I’m all in flurry of activity trying to figure out how we would get all of our stuff including two cars, 3 cockatiels and a car-sick dog from the Bay Area to Texas.

We’ve also been trying to decide whether Dallas would be a good move for us. We could buy a house! I’ve only owned one house in 2002-2003 and I had just started painting it in funky colors and putting checkerboard waves over the media nook and all when we had to sell and come up here. The people that bought the house were going to paint it all back to white again I’m pretty sure. Grrrrr.

I’d love to settle down and mosaic pots for my backyard and garden and paint and all that fun stuff you can do in your own house. Also, it’s only a few hours to Houston for the big quilt show. And it’s 6 hours from my best friend in the world who lives in Missouri - we haven’t seen each other since 1991! We’ve decided Dallas sounds good - now we just have to wait to hear from the corporate boss people if we’re going.

Just wanted to draw your attention to a new entry about color from one of my favorite online journals, Superhero Journal. She’s a San Francisco jewelry designer, photographer, and she is very generous with ideas, inspirations, and feelings. Read my favorite post here.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the topic "travel" was that I keep seeing news stories saying the butterflies are in migration.

This illustration is in honor of the butterflies and also my favorite holiday today - the first day of daylight savings time (heralding long summer evenings to come!) .

I did this this morning in CorelDraw 9. Still getting the hang of it. But oh(!) the fun of instant coloring - unlike watercolor on paper where if I get the wrong color, it’s so hard to change.  I love choosing colors and then changing them on a whim.

Happy long evening to all fellow Daylight Savings Time people.