Return from the long slumber, new art and efforts

 I didn't think that Blogger/Blogspot was still a going concern with most people but I see that there's actually a ton of people (or bots—hello, bots) viewing this so I'm going to bring it back tentatively. For one thing, you don't know about me and BIRDWATCHING, which I've documented at length on Instagram and other sites. More on that in a bit though. I've only done one of these so far but I've taken enough pictures to keep me busy for a while working them into paintings. 

My goal right now is to get a good pair of binoculars, and to replace my wide-angle lens that seems to have stopped working. I mostly use the 300 mm though. Anyway, I'm not a photographer by any means but it's been a huge source of calm and comfort to find all of the amazing birds that live in my neighborhood in Texas.

Above is my greatest recent victory, grabbing a picture of a scissor-tailed flycatcher while I was on the phone with my mom for Mother's Day, and one appeared right in front of me. 

Since I stopped posting here, we moved, some things changed at work, Covid happened, I went to grad school and got a master's degree in English, and now I'm back pretty much back to my old routine and painting and wondering where all the time went.

For now here are some new paintings, and we'll figure everything else out later.

My first love is 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons-inspired art so that's been most of my time in recent years, going back to what I loved to do when I was 13-17.

And more recently, a love of vintage Halloween postcards is still a thing. 

Here are some new places where I have social media accounts:

Threads: ArtBySarada

Bluesky: Xelucha

Here are some old places that I've resurrected recently: 

Tumblr: ArtBySarada

Pinterest: ArtBySarada

Bird adventures, gothic exploration and classic D&D are all going concerns for the time being, more about those soon.

Psychedelic visions, imaginary album art, and dark memories of dungeons. Necklaces, too.

A big update is underway in my main Etsy shop this July, and one of the big things to know is that I've reduced the cost of prints, at least through the end of the summer, to $6 for 5 x 7 prints and $10 for 8 x 10 prints. I also tried to make sure that first class shipping is available for all prints. If you see it coming up as only priority mail shipping please let me know and I can adjust it down to first class. As always, international quotes are available on request, but require some extra time to pin down the exact cost.

I finally listed an oil painting that I completed late last year, with a gothic/alchemical theme. It's one of my favorites, and I'll be happy to offer prints on request but haven't made them just yet.

I also have a number of 8 x 10 and 11 x 15 paintings on stretched canvas that were done for art shows or just my own amusement...and pendants are now available! I have made 12 designs in total and have four more in my shop. Contact me if you're curious about the others and don't want to wait, but I will list the rest very soon.

Original oil painting

"Black Swan Ritual"

9 x 12 inches

Original acrylic painting

"The Golden Dragon and the Unicorn"

11 x 14 inches

This painting was inspired by a scene in a D&D module that I love, X2 Chateau D'Amberville. In the encounter, there is a woman with golden hair asleep in a grove with a unicorn, guarding a box. She is actually a gold dragon that has shapeshifted. You'd never know this is from a D&D module if you weren't looking for the reference, but just between you and me...that's where the idea came from!

Original acrylic painting

"Subterranean Summoning"

11 x 14 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Beyond the Sea of Cosmic Memory"

8 x 10 inches

These two psychedelic paintings (above and below) were in a recent psychedelic art show at Insomnia Gallery in Houston. They have an art show every month on a variety of themes: gothic, gaming, horror, and plenty of other pop culture and art themes. We've participated in at least a half dozen of them so far, including their annual monster art show, cartoons, video games and other topics. The gallery also houses an incredible record store!

Original acrylic painting

"The Source of the Mushroom Vision"

8 x 10 inches

One other thing about these psychedelic paintings: I did them to resemble album covers I'd love to see. The first one in particular is a bit of a nod to the kind of album art that The Fool did in the 1960s for projects like the Incredible String Band's 5000 Spirits of Layers of the Onion album. Just as colorful as possible, with vague overtures toward cosmic and spiritual themes.

Original acrylic painting

"Luna Crystals"

5 x 7 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Octo Crystals"

5 x 7 inches

Original acrylic painting

"Accidents in the Alchemist's Workshop"

5 x 7 inches

Now available as a photo print

"The Unicorn Constellation"

5 x 7 or 8 x 10 photographic print

"The Crone's Secret"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

I have wanted to make little glass tile necklaces for close to 20 years and finally broke down and did some. It is quite easy to do and they are very charming! Each pendant is made of a nice, sturdy, heavy metal and houses a teeny tiny 1-inch photo print sealed in place with a glass tile. I include a basic 24-inch gunmetal chain so you can wear it right away, but feel free to use your own instead.

"The Owl and the Pussycat Went to Tea"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

"Le Coeur et le Serpent"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

"Song of the Witch Girl"

Glass tile pendant

1-inch square print beneath glass on a chain

 In March, I participated in the Thorn and Moon Magickal Market at Avant Garden in Houston, an event that grows every month, and is held the first Friday of each month. I hope to attend again. Prints and pendants were extremely popular there, and I have all of them available in my shop all the time. If you ever see that I am out of stock of something you want let me know and I'll make sure to make a new one for you!

I have lots more art on the way, it's just a matter of sitting down at a laptop and listing it, but who actually sits down at a computer anymore, right?

The Halloween season

I have not posted anything in a long time because of a new day job, but it wouldn't be right if the Halloween season got past me without a few comments! I'm busy working on some special projects this year rather than general random oddments and there's not a lot to share publicly right now

But here's something cool. The UK magazine "She Who Knows" requested to use one of my paintings as a backdrop in their Autumn 2016 issue. Please visit them and consider subscribing to this excellent feminist magazine full of nurturing and spiritual articles, art, poetry and wisdom.

One other small note for fall is that I will open a second Etsy shop soon focused on gothic, folk horror, fantasy and Halloween-themed embroidery work. Here is a sneak preview of a couple of items. I will be starting with just a couple of items this fall and will slowly add to it. The name of the shop is "Crewel Sister" because crewel is the type of embroidery I am aiming at (I'm still learning...I haven't done this since I was a kid!) and it also refers to the excellent English folk song "Cruel Sister." See what I did there?

 I've gathered a few resources on the subject and will be working more on the themes and techniques in the upcoming months, as time allows. It's more of a project for my own amusement than a serious attempt to make a big pile of craft-related money, so I won't be doing commissions or anything right now. Time is too rare of a commodity at the moment, so I can only fit things in as it amuses me to do so.

Hoping to include more updates soon for the season...

A glimpse at what's new for Halloween -- cats, tentacles, ghosts and vampires

The skulls are on the shelves in the craft stores, so it must be time to get a few more Halloween-friendly items out there into the world. This post is just a chance for me to round up a few new items I have on Etsy this month!

I started a few little (3 x 5 inch) canvas panels with black cats on them a long time ago and only just now finished them up for the season. It might be a little bit obvious who my models are, at this point.

 

"The Door to Autumn"

 

This is Angelique, who turned 3 this year and is the most wide-eyed, excitable cat I've ever met. Her eyes are always ROUND and every object is a potential toy or prey. I'm not sure what she was looking at in this picture...oh no wait I do, she was listening to a Keiji Heino record, actually. So I guess she was trying to figure out what to do with those fascinating dissonant sounds...

  

"Playful Pair"

And here we see Shinobi -- age unknown but he's probably at least 8 by now. He's on a diet these days, since hitting about 24 pounds, so there's a lot of cat going on here...but stoic and bulky as he is, he's a real sweetheart. When we play with them with the laser pointer, Angelique (and the other cats...unpictured) zoom around the room, limbs scampering and paws flailing. Shinobi waits for it to come close and he just steps on it with his paw and sniffs it. He's a pretty cool customer.

I've also added one to my revolving collection of "ghosts in bottles" -- the first ones I've done in color, so that's fun, right? Yay!

"Ghost Gallery"

And I've added one to my "traumatized pumpkin" collection as well - this time it's blue tentacles making everything weird and alarming.

"Entangled"

Finally, for now, there is an 8 x 8 painting I did for some album art, but I am offering it up for sale on its own now. Inspired by images in films, along the lines of Hammer from the early 1970s, the long red cloak trails off in a surreal and symbolic gesture of a river of blood.

"Ascent to the Haunted Peak"

 Thanks for looking, if you are looking...more Halloween and haunted art coming soon!

Dragons again! Also, surreal and psychedelic prints newly available

I'd like to say that a childhood steeped in museum visits and gifts of lavish art books inspired me to start painting, informed by a classical education, but the truth is that old D&D modules and copies of Dragon magazine were probably what got me interested in art. That probably isn't too surprising though given that my favorite subject matter is fantasy-oriented, albeit on the whimsical side thereof. I'm not a student of the style of art that comes up when I google "fantasy" art images, obviously -- while all expertly done, it's a little glossy for my taste (and, er, my ability, which is nowhere near that of the professionals). I like to see the individual artist's touch and brush strokes. I especially like the look of the D&D art from around 1979-1981, where the figures are not always proportional and muscular, the colors are bright and garish, with oozy shades of green slime, crimson capes and glowing orange eyes. I like the drawings that look like elaborate notebook doodles and paintings with bold, clear strokes of color.

Behold, the formative influences. The colorful mushrooms, otherworldly lighting and details and stiff poses of the classic fantasy figures on "In Search of the Unknown" light up my brain in ways that cannot be articulated.

With that in mind, I'm applying myself to some more of the detailed dungeon work that I liked to do when I was in my teens. Here's my newest offering in that spirit, a 12 x 16 acrylic painting on flat canvas board. Any time I can put a small pile of jewels around a dragon's feet, I'm happy.

"Cave of the Stone Dragon"

I've posted a few examples in the past of my late 1980s paintings, but I don't think I posted this one below before. I'm terribly proud of that dragon; I think my dragon skills peaked around age 16.

Also newly available this week are some prints of paintings I did in the past. First here is a 5 x 7 print of a painting that I sold last month. I can make larger prints of this one on request, up to the original size (12 x 16). Oh yes, and clusters of crystals are even more satisfying than piles of jewels.

"Night of the Amethyst Dragon"

Also, a trio of psychedelic paintings I did in 2009. These first two have some kind of Tarot influence to them, but I can't say exactly what it is. The first was inspired by a dream; the second is just a collection of things that I like. The third piece is one of my lonely ice landscape paintings. Now that I am not living in a place where it gets quite as cold and lonely, I don't do a lot of those any more, but I DO spend a lot of time reading about early 20th century Arctic/Antarctic explorers.

"Vision of the Cosmic Rift"
Available as an 8 x 10 print

"Astral Peacock Empress"
Available as an 8 x 10 print

"The Secret"

Listing is for 5 x 7 print

also available as 8 x 10 on request

Thanks for looking! Coming soon are some perfume reviews and Halloween in June musings, if I get my act together.

Everything is A-OK

Just in case any friends are wondering if we're OK here in Houston after the flooding, I wanted to post something to let everyone know that everything is fine here on the north side of the city limits. It did rain pretty hard, but other than the power flickering, it didn't even mess up my plants. I can see from news footage that it looked pretty bad on the highways and heading downtown, earlier today, though. Any plans I had to head in that direction were immediately postponed, and it's business as usual here  -- for us, at least. Not everyone has been that fortunate, but there are some ways to help out in the communities that have been affected:

Red Cross - Gulf Coast Chapter (Houston)

Red Cross - Central Texas Chapter (Austin)

One of my favorite local charities is:
Houston Food Bank

And in Austin:
Hays Food Bank


While  we've been staying in to avoid the bad weather, I've been working on some medieval illumination-inspired art this week. This first piece already sold but a couple more have already come along in the meantime.

I can't promise I'll make it through the whole alphabet any time soon but I thought these little 3 x 3 inch canvases would be perfect for illuminated letters! The first is A is for armadillo, which I don't think any medieval monks would have seen, but if they did, they might draw them something like this:

And another colorful dragon, this time being battled by one of those rabbits with a sword you sometimes see in these drawings...

These are a lot of fun, so more are coming soon!

Sci fi surrealism, rust monsters, and a few more unicorns.

Aside from working on a lot of oil paintings recently, and waiting for them to dry, I have a sort of unthemed mixed bag of things to share for the moment.

 Earlier this month I contributed a piece, "The Sea Corridor," for a greyscale art contest at Jerry's Artarama in Houston. I got a nice set of oil paints for my efforts, and the painting (18 x 24 inch on a gallery wrapped canvas) is taking up a big chunk of art closet real estate here now, in case anyone within driving distance of Houston is interested in making an offer on it. :) Blurry photo with glare courtesy of my perpetually poor lighting conditions and lack of a professional grade photo studio.

The "fish-owl" was inspired by a couple of lines in the book "Babylon" by Rene Crevel, and there are tiny little fishes budding off of the branches that were inspired by lines in "The Goose of Hermogenes" by Ithell Colquhoun, unless I'm getting my surrealist novels confused. I tried to put some of my favorite elements in this -- woods, corridors full of billowing curtains, gliding down a passageway like the famous scene in Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast"...just some things that I like, blended into a sort of collage.

I also have prints available of a colorful, surrealist-inspired painting I did a few years ago and kept in my personal collection. This is a 5 x 7 print for sale but I can also make 8 x 10 (or 9 x 12, even) on request.

"Beneath the Green Sky"

"The Lair of the Rust Monster"

On a completely different note, I'm slipping an 8 x 10 print of another of my "personal stash" paintings into the mix this week -- I love D&D module covers from the early 80s, which was my formative era. I liked the art more than anything else really, since I rarely got to play with other people. In fact, check back for a post about those soon. 

"The Shadow and the Candle"

Back to surrealism, this oil painting is also in my personal stash, just a stream-of-consciousness piece I did, of whatever came to mind at the moment that I wanted to see. Subconsciously inspired by my love of Leonora Carrington, in ways I can't quite put my finger on. I'm keeping the original of this, but 5 x 7 prints are available at the link above, and 8 x 10 can also be made on request.

Finally, I have prints up now of a couple of the unicorn paintings that I did last week.

"Beneath the Purple Unicorn Tree" 5 x 7 print

"Groovy Unicorn Room" 5 x 7 print

And soomehow when Easter rolled around I think I neglected to post this picture, that I did for the season. But really, aren't moonlit bunnies suitable year-round?

Thanks for looking, and I hope that my next update will be a little more focused, but really, what's so great about focus?

A dream of lavender unicorns and lava lamps

Like many 13-year-olds in 1986, I'm sure I had my share of unicorns around the house. I know they were all over my school supplies. Glowing white unicorns on a purple background simply cannot be resisted, though I think I was mainly a dragon girl. Looking over the paintings I did in my teens, I only have a couple of unicorns represented, but I have many, many dragons. Here is the best example of a unicorn painting from that time period (1989) that I have on hand:

Edited to add: Another unicorn painting from that time period, which my mom just photographed for me since it is up at her house in NJ. ^_^

I was a huge fan of the movie "Legend" which came out when I was in 7th grade, and had some of the glitteriest unicorns ever filmed, even though their horns bounced a bit. But they were pretty, especially filmed among pink flower petals and dandelion fluff. It remains one of my favorite movies from that era (and I don't like much of anything made after 1975 to begin with!...)

One thing you will never see from me are any of the tongue in cheek "unicorn poo," "unicorn fart" or "barfing unicorn" images that I know are incredible popular these days. Look, I take my unicorns seriously. I like them pretty, pastel and magical. I like them pink and purple and covered in glitter.

With that in mind, I've started a mini campaign of doing some unicorn paintings with simple, colorful images that appeal to that part of my brain. This first one below is already spoken for, but will be available as a print soon. 

"Beneath the Purple Unicorn Tree"

And here we find one in its natural setting, among butterflies and a fairytale tower (the kind from which I can imagine a long golden braid spiraling downward):

"Unicorn Tower"

Now that we're on the subject of unicorns, let's talk about lava lamps. While unicorns might call to mind an 80s girl's room or notebooks, surely lava lamps were a staple of the 70s....and also the 80s for people like me who lived (and continue to live) in a psychedelic past. I was fairly well obsessed with getting a lava lamp, but they were prohibitively expensive when I was in high school, at over $40 if you could find one. One of the first things I bought when I finally had some spending money, was a lava lamp, because I wanted to make sure to have one in my dorm room. 

One of my most-viewed items on Etsy is my lava lamp ghost painting/print, so I know that other people share this interest. In later years one of my moments of glory was managing to have something like four or five lava lamps going in my office at work. I think when I reached that pinnacle, it set the clock ticking on my workplace folding, because once your environment gets that groovy, it can't last for long...

"Spectrum of Psychedelic Spectres"

At any rate, here are six miniature paintings I've prepared on 2 x 3 inch canvas, each with its own personality and name:

"Blue Goo"

"Emerald Ooze"

"Purple Pixie"

"Flame Phantom"

"Sunset Daydream"

"Ghost Globules"

And here is the moment where it all comes together -- the culmination of everything I could have wished for, and still do -- the moment when a unicorn and a pink lava lamp collide beneath a bead curtain. I'm so thrilled by this idea that I couldn't even come up with a good title for the painting! It's dubbed "Groovy Unicorn Room" until I can come up with something better.

I hope that someone's Google search for "unicorns" and "lava lamp" brought them here, because if it has, we are obviously meant to be friends.