I was able to start the paper mache figures for the Celebration of Dance, still need to be painted.
I used a wire armature and foil then added the paper clay. Pose File 4: Dance Action (Pose File, Vol 4)
Looked at a few books for ideas and may even try some Yoga positions.

Here is a one painted. I plan to try a larger one,

THE LITTLEST HERO - The First Book in the Woodland Bear Saga  One webstie I just found is called Kickstarter.com, we plan to see if we can get funding to move the book along.
Still not sure how it works so it looks like I will be doing some reading.

Also have a few other books in mind. So much to do

New Start

Things are GOOD. On black Friday I quite my job and decided to paint and work on paper mache' full time. I have been able to dedicate at least two days for now on just art.

It has been a new experience and a challenge to manage my free time. I took the month of Dec to get organized and get in the grove of being home all the time.

My listings on Ebay are up to 42 and that is mostly small paintings and prints I had laying around. My first plan is to get a website up and running and start working with twitter.

There is a dachshund show in a few months we need to get ready for and I plan to work on my Celebration on Dance

What does it Take to make it

Things started to come together but art was still only a hobby. I still did not have the artist mind set and was worried more about what would sell then what I wanted to create. I started with watercolor dog sketches and was thinking about doing some Abstracts. I purchased paint and canvas along with some brushes but it took me awhile to get started.

To me Abstract art was just paint splattered all over the place with no meaning or reason. It made me wonder how could it sell for so much but it was the way I thought a painting should be. I guess art to me was a painting that was to as close to a photograph a painting could be or something that depicted real life.

It wasn't until I took a step back and starting painting Abstract did I realize how it was just like real life. It opened my eyes of how Abstract is so part of everyday life and how one picture can create so many feelings and different impressions for one person.

When I was in the corporate world thinking about sales and numbers I couldn't open my mind to art.
Now seeing the world with artist eyes Abstract pops out at me everywhere, I was sitting in traffic
and as I looked at the road I could see a painting with the tar and asphalt I framed it out with my eyes.
If you take a brick and zoom in as close as you can what do you see. Even if you focus on trees you can see the Abstract in every part.

Now my paintings are part of me and I love to hear what people see and how they feel.

Open My Eyes

The first time I realized I could sell my art, was when I came home for a holiday and was talking to my sister. She told me about Outsider Artist on Ebay. It first made me laugh, looking at some of the pictures it reminded me of the things I would draw in high school on my note books. My sister who went to Rutgers and took art classes started selling watercolor sketches and mini teddy bears.The ABC's of Making Teddy Bears

She was making small 4x7 pictures of blue poodles and selling them  for about 10 to 20 dollars. So as a joke I did a picture of a cat and she listed it for me. It sold to my surprise. It wasn't until years later when my job transferred me to California did I really start thinking about art as a business or a way to make a living.

When I was in Ca my girlfriend who is now my wife lived in Pennsylvania. So to pass the time I started working with paper mache Papier-Mache Monsters: Turn Trinkets and Trash into Magnificent Monstrosities
and I have always loved Halloween. Searching on the Internet I found a whole new world. There was a number of pages of how to build anything you could imagine. www.monsterpage.com  There were kids along with people selling Halloween props and posting pictures and directions on how to build everything related to Halloween haunts.

At this same time I started a T-shirt business with my sisters artwork www.chicarttees.com we put her dog pictures on T-shirts and mugs and took an ad out in US Weekly.

Finding my way

Day One

Today I start my Blog. This is my chance to mark my thoughts in time forever. I have always been creative and loved art but have never taken the chance to do it full time as a career. With this blog I plan to track my steps from the transition from the mind set of going to a job everyday grind and plunge into free spirit of an artist who looks at the world with new eyes.



I have always enjoyed paper mache. Even as a kid I would always wanted to know more about the paper mache sculpting. For years it was always thought of as a grade school project. It was something that little kids would work with that would come out all bumpy. It brings to mind flour and water with strips of newspaper over a balloon. So it was something I kept it in the back of my mind as a hobby.



With the explosion of the Internet and the instant access of information in an instance, I found that people could make a living working with paper mache. I found other artist using paper clay
that looked fantastic and opened my eyes to what I could do.



With Halloween being my passion I found an overload of information and ideas that got me started