AmyBrand

Hello "Fall Back" day. I love having an extra hour in my day. Today I used that extra hour to teach a private art student, complete a very nice graphite drawing of an "underwater jellyfish lady" (I'll post her once she's scanned), to post a new watercolor onto www.BrandNewCanvas.etsy.com, walk the dogs twice, twitter 3 times (I'm BrandNewCanvas there too), make some ceramic Christmas ornaments, take a nap, and watch the world series with friends. Whew! What an hour can do!

For a limited time I'm offering commissioned pencil portraits for $20 plus shipping. I'd like to begin seriously soliciting commissioned portraits, but I feel like I need some practice to really feel confident in this endeavor. I'm especially looking for models who are young children, babies, or older folks, and of different races (i.e. not just white people, though white people are not excluded from this offer). You just need to send me a photo of decent quality. Let me know if you're interested.

For awhile now I've been working from collages. I create the collage first from found images and then draw or paint using the collage as the reference, often making changes as I go. For a complex composition it helps me organzie my ideas visually. It also tends to take me in surprising directions. Having the limitations of working with found images - what can I find? how does it actually fit together? - spurs unique solutions I wouldn't think of otherwise. The two works I posted most recently, the collage "sketch" and the pencil illustration final, are based on the Grimms Brothers original Cinderella. In this version of the story Cinderella