january.

just thought I'd share this song before january was officially over. I love "sleeping at last," and I love this song and the way it approaches the beginning of the year. give it a listen.
and since we've had such nice weather and such a lack of snow, I offer this picture instead of something more "january white" looking. it's from a recent shoot for class, and it's one of my favorite parts of the place I volunteer.

creative endeavors &/or weekend adventures.

every once in a while shutterfly offers me free prints, and that's just an offer I don't like to ignore. this time I decided to just go through and pick some of my favorites, regardless of time and theme (mainly bright, colorful photos,) and this is the group I came up with. after seeing something similar on one of my favorite blogs, I knew this was what I wanted to do with the photos. pretty fun.

also, exciting thing to note: the new piece of artwork by Jeromy Morris right under it! how neat is it? way neat. (and the picture doesn't even do it justice)

p.s. my soon to be brother-in-law is pretty cool.

things that make my day.

delicious hot cocoa and a new mystery. (it snowed that night, and that just added to the perfection)




the cutest and sweetest munchkins there ever were. baking no less.




lots of wedding projects. (sometimes this makes my day, and sometimes not haha)


in other news, I started school today and didn't hate that fact - weird. and on top of that, I'm kinda actually excited to get back to studio classes. forced creativity, I've missed you.

creative endeavors.

adventures with india ink and magazine scraps before christmas. I'm a fan.

things that made my day.

here are some photos of a few fun things that have happened in the last week.

1.




2.




3.


1. a 24hr trip to omaha!
wheatfield's wedding cake
gilmore girls

2. fireplace goodness.

3. experimenting with white ink. (turns out there was a reason it was super cheap/on clearance)still fun.

4. unphotographed, eating killer puppy chow while watching a documentary about art and WWII.

2011 highlights.

inspired by some year in review/highlights posts I've seen going around, I decided to go through my photos from 2011 and put together one of my own. I've got to be honest, I came up with a lot, and I didn't even include half of it, and I didn't even have photos of half of the great memories. I'm just always so amazed looking back on my year because I have it so good, guys. it's unreal how lucky I am.
I have no idea what the future holds, and I know it may not last, (and honestly it isn't all sunshine and rainbows) but when it really, really comes down to it, I've got it good.
so instead of going into details more in words, here is a slide show of just a few of my 2011 photographed highlights.



happy new years, friends!

christmas time was here. raincheck on snowflakes in the air.

this christmas was really terrific. I don't know what next christmas will look like, but I have a feeling it will be a little different so I'm pretty thankful for all this one was. I've been living in the moment a little too much and haven't been taking as many pictures of what we're doing, but I think that may be perfectly fine, and here are a few of the photos we did get of the highlights.

skating at crown center


andre's goodies!


christmas trees


and hot cocoa while we watch christmas movies


packaging things pretty


christmas eve at grandma and grandpa's house


adorable puppies and our christmas tree on christmas eve


having chloe around for a couple days


everybody unwrapping on christmas day


beautiful christmas loot


and with that I'll leave you with two of my favorite sleeping at last christmas-y songs.


I hope you all had a very merry christmas!

creative endeavors: skyscrapers/cityscapes edition.

for the past couple weeks skyscrapers and cityscapes pretty much took hold of my studies, my artwork, everything, so I thought it would be fun to put some of it together and show you what I've been up to. (admittedly a bit after the fact. recent stuff is soon to come.)

first up I'll show you my transparency design color project. it was pretty time consuming and frustrating and I think it's fair to say that everyone involved had hesitations as to whether it would come out. however, I think it did and it went over very well so I'm okay with all the work that went into it.


next is my wood drawing. this one I was equal parts excited and frustrated with. it went through many stages, with the initial study, the first stopping point, and then this, the final product. I'm pretty attached to it now though.



in the midst of all of this I came across this on little things, and it just made me smile.


AND if all that wasn't enough, I was also writing about this work Apartment Hill by Wayne Theibaud. it's really a pretty terrific piece, and fit in nicely with all my studies of skyscrapers in art history. bam.


and that's all folks.