Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Mud Pie Maker

Okay, I'm letting you in on another part of me! I love to make things out of clay! It started with mud pies when I was about five or six ...
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not only had I already started to write my own fairy tales but I felt the need to try to illustrated them as well, and ... Miscellaneous 035 mud was my medium of choice! I say it started with mud pies because when school was out in the summer one of my favorite past times was making mud pies, and my father made me believe that I was the most creative mud pie maker who ever existed, because he'd stop and examine the ones I had lined up on the sidewalk, and those that he liked he'd pay me a nickle for!
Miscellaneous 046 That was all the incentive I needed! I went from mud pies to eggs by the bushel, thinking he might purchase them individually (tee hee hee)
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but he was too smart to fall for that! He kept it to a nickle for mud pies, but I was already fascinated with what you could do with dirt and water and words and imagination and making my characters three-dimensional became a way of my little creative life!
Miscellaneous 031 I forgot about that part of my creative spirit for a long, long while, but a few years ago while rushing through a craft store my eyes fell on a row of clays and those hot summer Kansas days flashed across my heart and mind and I stopped.
Miscellaneous 038 I bet I can still do that, I thought, and half an hour and a sizable number of nickles later I left the craft store with a bag full of multi-colored clays!
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So, here's the results! There's "The Napper" and
Miscellaneous 030 and "The Crown of Thorns",
Miscellaneous 033 "The Egg Bearers",
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"The Making of a Prince",
Miscellaneous 045 "The Champ and His Contender", and,
Miscellaneous 047 being the eternal optimist that I am, "The Bushel of Eggs!"

Thanks for indulging me!

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Cooperating Muses

A lot of my time in recent months has been spent leaning on my creative muses who, surprisingly, have not been as temperamental as they have a tendency to be under more normal circumstance. They have bonded with the logical and technical me to figure out things I had absolutely no clue about, but were necessary to move to new creative levels.

One of those things was deciding to become more serious about my own visual art, which I've always just more or less toyed with, and seeing if it could reach a level of critical acceptance in the larger art world. I thought I'd see if anyone would be interested in licensing any of my art for prints, and, sure enough, the first one I submitted was approved.

So, I've got my online gallery in motion now. It's the Peggy Allen Love Gallery, and it has only one print today, but I have dozens I'll be adding to it in the near future. Learning the requirements of preparing artwork for presentation is interesting, but I recently inherited a MAC that's loaded for bear with everything I need to get it right, and it seems to be teaching me itself what I need to do next!

Getting that approved was great, but then I also saw my name on Palibra.com's Top 10 Best Seller list for my excerpt from TELL IT LIKE IT IS, and that really was an emotional bonus!

I'm really grateful for these small blessings.