Cupcake Watercolor Card

Cupcake Watercolor Card
Originally uploaded by bburbank

This cupcake card might be my favorite card to date! I definitely want to do more of these! I think I learned from this that I really do like to work from photographs and I can alter and make a photo my own. I used one of Martha Stewart's cupcakes as inspiration, but it really took on its own look and that's cool!

I have so so much to write about to catch up, but for now I'll just say that I have moved to a new house and, after about a month of furniture moving, laminate floor destruction, decorating, and (yay!) picture hanging, I am back to being able to work on hobbies, especially painting and reading, again. I am reading a book called Seven Days in the Art World and it has really reenergized me and made me start thinking again about what the heck I'm going to do with myself. I enjoyed having my own business and think about doing something like that again. The book also made me seriously consider going back to school, but my indecisiveness hurts me again. What school? What program? MFA? What in? Creative Writing? Fine Art? PhD track in Literature or Humanities? Should I go back to museum work? Should I really make myself focus in on art and try to be an artist? Should I really make myself focus on writing and try to be a writer? Would I rather just have writing and art be more of hobbies and have more kids? Sigh.

In any case, my brain is back in overdrive and I am busy thinking up projects and, again, hoping I come across a project that sticks...something that works...like Julius's 365 Bears project. He just focused in on something that he really likes and that he's good at and that represents him and people are responding to it. My goal is to come up with my own project like that. Reading to Jhonen takes up about a quarter of each day as he continuously pulls book after book off the shelf for me to read to him and I've realized that, despite my desire to come up with a brilliant, innovative children's book idea/gimmick, I probably don't need to to get published because, geesh, there are some terrible children's books out there. However, there are some awesome ones and I would love to have created one of them. While putting him to sleep just now I thought of an idea that I'll write down here to remember it and ruminate on it a bit. I thought it would be fun to have a metafictional kids book (because I LOVE metafiction) talking about a character loving books. Something like this: Janie loves books. She loves to pull books off the shelf. She loves to flip their pages. She loves books about dinosaurs and books about dogs. She loves books about trains and planes and cars. She loves books with numbers. She loves books that rhyme. She loves her Mommy and Daddy to read her books before bed. She loves books with bright colors with pretty pictures. She loves books that are big and books that are small. Books that are long and books that are short. She loves all books, but this one is her favorite of all.

I also had an idea of a raccoon character who is walking on a nature hike in the woods and about all the things that he sees, hears, touches, tastes, smells like pinecones, flowers, birds, the food in his picnic basket, the crunchy leaves under his feet, etc.