On trusting the universe & fart times.

It's 5am fart time. Elliot, without fail, has "gut issues" every morning from about 5 to 5:30am. He starts to grunt, kick his legs, shake his head for about 10-15 mins, cries a little and then usually that episode ends with either 2 or 3 big trumpet-like farts or a proper (noisy) poo. Before babies, I really didn't know that farting could be THIS big a deal!

It's not great timing for me as it wakes me up, but it also has the potential to wake Dylan up which is much worse! (The 3 of us co-sleep, Andy is in Dylan's double bed). An awoken Dylan at 5am unwilling to go back to sleep is every parent's version of a nightmare I tell you! ;) But this morning Dylan slept right through the farting cacophony and I decided to take this opportunity to blog about my youngest son's fart habits amongst other things. Aren't you a lucky and blessed reader right? ;)

So I sit here with my iPad in the pitch dark, snuggly under a warm duvet listening to the breathing of my two little boys. This is rather blissful I tell you. It feels safe, cosy, snug and full of love.

Now that Elliot no longer just sleeps during the day like he did in his first 3 months of life, I have much less time available to work so I'm having to find "sneaky" moments of getting some work done. Like 5am on the iPad. :)


This pic was taken moments after they woke up this morning:

I wanted to talk about a few things. One is the pinterest debate;

I'm not entirely fully informed about what it is that people are hung up/pissed off about but I see it all as follows; I have no issues with people pinning my work, using it on their blogs or websites as long as they're not using it to sell my work. Ie; blogging about me/ my work with images and credits is cool, selling prints of my work on T-shirts; not cool (this is apparently happening somewhere in Argentina!)

More specifically about pinterest; I like that place. I don't LOVE it obsessively, but it's a handy place to keep inspiring stuff neatly categorised. Instead of downloading images I like to my machine I can pin them there including my own work. The thing that does bug me is that people don't often credit to the original artist, not because I'm so hot on copyright, but because I often see pinned work, think WOW, want to find out more about the artist and see more work of theirs but can't find a thing about who created the work; that annoys me. Therefore I would love it if people not only link to other artists when they pin work, but also link to my website if they pin some of my work. This so that others can more easily find me should they want to look at more of my work. And if we all make sure we do this, we're nicely advertising for each other; win-win no? :)

Now I'm confused about this thing where they say that pinterest owns all the images posted there and also what that means? Does that mean they might take one of my images and start selling it to a licensing company? Why would a company like pinterest want to own the images and aren't there other sites that have this in their user agreement too but it doesn't actually mean anything? Thoughts on this welcomed! :) I am simply a bit ignorant in this arena.

When it comes to sharing my work, putting it out there, having other people blog it/ pin it and apparently big companies own it, I'm kinda just wanting to trust the universe and have an "open" energy about it all rather than a defensive/ closed energy about it. Sure, it may mean that someone in Argentina does a bit of T-shirt selling with my work on it, but I still think that there are more benefits to letting people share your work than not. There is a lot of free publicity and hey, it makes for a richer internet experience in my opinion! So I'm going to be OPEN (cool, this is my word for the year too!) about it and trust the universe! :)

So I am still on pinterest; willowing, but I'm not a big pinner! I often forget the site is there. Then I remember it, take a peek and repin a few things that inspire me. I'm on there maybe once a week. Feel free to follow me! :)

{edit} after reading a bit more about the pinterest debate, something I did not cover/ think about is the whole issue of if *I* should be pinning other people's work without permission. And if I don't have permission I can apparently, legally, be sued. Ok, look, I really do understand that some people don't want other people sharing their work on other sites (not the best marketing move in my humble opinion, but ok ...), but I am not going to be spending ages of my time contacting the respective owners of the work just so I can pin it. If someone wants me to take down a pin, I will and then no need for sue-ment right? It's not like I'm making money of off pinning other people's work, it's just for keeping it together in a neat place. If it really becomes such a big deal, I'll just download images back to my machine in my 'inspiration' folder. Tsk - I think it's taking copyright a bit too far. I say: take advantage of people wanting to show the world your art man - let them pin it!  (with a credit, of course).

Ok, enough on this one now.

In other news! I was published AGAIN! This time it was in Somerset Apprentice, and Somerset Digital Studio with some of my digital girlies! Look!

That last image is of all 3 magazines I've now been published in. :D Can you feel the stretch of my grin?! :) 

*Dances Happy*

I feel overthemooncrazyhappy to have been published in these great magazines with these other  established and amazing artists. Thank you to all over at stampington's. I'm so so grateful! :)

In more other news: I did this new painting and was initially so pissed off with it. People on FB asked me why and it's hard to put my finger on it, but it was something about her facial expression, a bit too gloomy for my likings. Also I was going for some deeper contrast shading and some Avril Lavigne type eye make up which came out alright but the whole thing was a struggle.

And sometimes when I start a new piece of art I have a bit of an "artist identity crisis". I don't know if I want to draw and shade more like an illustrator or like a painter. For me the 2 are a bit different. Illustrator shading is much more precise and neat while painting shading is much more free and "slap-dash-bang-messy" (that highly technical term I'm sure you're all familiar with ;)). But the thing gets very frustrating when I mix and match the two. The two styles don't really mix and sometimes I can't decide on which way to go so it's like someone with multiple personalities trying to paint something and it feels off and a bit fractured.

After all that though, I decided to like the painting in the end. I am now quite pleased with how the shading came out and her brooding/ mysterious intensity. :)


Oh I also took some proper pics of the other 2 that are now finished (though they came out a bit darker than they look in these images!)

And I started a new painting on wood which I hope to do some more work on next week if Elliot lets me! ;)

That's me for now.. It's slowly getting lighter and lighter, boys still asleep, better do a bit more work before they wake and chaos ensues again! :) Ta-ra faithful readers, I shall leave you with a few more pictures of the people that light my heart, soul, mind and life: