OSWOA® Squirrel took quite a bit longer than five minutes, but I am very happy with it and love the way the reflection turned out. It was a bit of an experiment using Paynes Grey monochrome for the water reflections, but it might be an overcast day. I like the contrast with the warm colors of the squirrel.

All of my little eBay artworks mailed this morning, though I found out by way of kkitten42 that it takes $1.13 in postage to use those CD mailers I like on the ACEOs. I'm going to have to either throw in the thirteen cents as lagniappe or raise USA shipping to $1.50 to cover the mailer and added postage -- still, the mailers are pretty cool and I have lots of them now, so I should decide one way or the other on that.

The sad thing was that the post office wanted to charge $150 to send lilcrabbygal's art in the big flat Blick box, because I didn't have a smaller flat box. They suggested that she ought to take the art out of the mats and put it in a mailer tube. Well, this would be great except that Portrait with Lorikeet and Frangipani is on museum board itself, and so instead we're going out to UPS on Monday, where they do have packing materials, get a smaller flat mailing box -- the one they're all in is huge, it's about 26" x 34" or something like that, one of their big "mail half size mat boards" boxes, and send it UPS.

On the up side, UPS is fast, so sending it Monday by UPS may get it to Australia faster than if I'd sent it USPS on Saturday morning. And they do have packing materials at their store. Hopefully I will have a day good enough that I can actually go with kkitten42 on Monday and do the repacking myself, but if not it'll still go out.

I got a look at my eBay fees overall and a lot of what I've earned has gone to pay for eBay fees. It's the large number of unsold works that are pushing that bit of overhead sky high, anything that sells covers its fees easily. Plus the cost of the mailers and top loaders and things. It's startup. But it's not like working in New Orleans was, where I'd have probably gotten a lot more by this time. What I need to do is start doing more cats, because there is a big cat fandom among buyers.

And that old style from fandom... whatever it is, put some knotwork on it or a border. The knotwork scratchboard piece got two watchers and a lot of attention, so today I am working on a larger OSWOA® scratchboard piece with knotwork. I'm not sure if I'm going to scratch out a texture between the lines to make the lines pop out more, that may make it look cool. I'm almost at halfway around it now and it is looking pretty cool, the space inside the border is probably going to get another landscape but I might put in a deer this time.

I need to sketch it before going in with the scratcher though, if I'm going to get that detailed -- at least loosely work out what goes where. Also I'm thinking of leaving the edges of the landscape black and fading into it, not bringing the lines of the landscape right out to where the knotwork is. I want the knotwork to pop. Heck, the way the border looks, I could go horizontal or vertical on this and haven't decided yet -- but whatever it is, doing a fade to black before reaching the border would probably look cool.

So today I am actually working on art and have already spent two hours on an OSWOA®, first time in days that I picked up that challenge. No other posts on the thread for the challenge either though, so maybe I should relax about that one.

I signed up five times on the Frost swap thread in the ACEO group, so I will be seriously beefing up my collection this month too. A happy thought. I got all the art that I bought from other sellers yesterday and so had a few happy minutes sorting my album. Including "Snowball Man" by Amber, one of the Art-Hedz kids whose art is being sold on eBay by their teacher kellyscolorstudio. They range between five and twelve years old, and they are stunningly talented, getting an early start that may keep that group from ever having to say "Do you want fries with that?" (Unless they want to -- there is something to be said for physically vigorous low-stress jobs for physically active teens.) They're very cool, so I thought I'd plug them -- search on Art-Hedz at eBay to find their works when Kelly posts them.

And to see my auctions, search on Robs Art on eBay -- I just did the search and nothing comes up in it other than my art. It's a neat trick, makes it a lot easier to steer people to the bargains on my large pastel works and smaller pieces than listing all 22 links separately. I have some good ones up, and the only thing that starts over $9.95 is the complete Raptors Series, all three of my raptors start at $15.95. They will not appear at that price again, that's my holiday bargain since they should be going for $20 apiece, it's $60 worth of original art at $15.95.

Forest River is posted for auction on eBay. I took a challenge from the OSWOA® group to do an OSWOA® every day through December 20th -- 4" x 6" or 6" x 4" Original Small Work Of Art is what the acronym means, and it has now been trademarked.

I haven't kept up with the challenge too well. It started on November 20th but eventually I had to choose whether to try to keep up with daily art or get my novel done. I got my novel done, I'm a writer first. But there's no reason not to go on with daily art in December. Yesterday was just a sick day. I was too exhausted from the novel finish and the insanely intense art day I did on December 1 to do any new art.

I've been socializing a lot at eBay too, hanging out there as well as DeviantART and LJ and SFFmuse. It's fun, and it's energizing in a different way. I also wind up shopping there and picked up some art supplies hideously cheap, as well as mailers and top loaders and sleeves for ACEO (Art Cards Originals and Editions) artworks. Out of the eight Frost pieces I did for the Dec. 1 ACEO Theme Week "Frost" event, I've sold four already! Bids on the first day of the auction, it was very cool.

Here's one of the Frost pieces, it came out neat...


-- it's one that already got a bid, but I like how it came out and you can see it and the others at eBay. ACEO TW Frost Peacock is one of my favorites of that batch.

So I'm having fun with the art even though I am thoroughly in the red as my art and writing career goes currently. Nothing resembling profit so far, but I'm starting to cut into my expenses on it.