Sunsets and Dreams

I love sunsets. I will whip out my camera at any slight blush of bright color in the sky and take way too many pictures. It's an addiction, but for an addiction, I'll say it isn't that bad :). Here is the last sunset that melted my heart.

Better

I wish I was deeper. I wish I was cooler, smarter, prettier, savvier, and had perfect skin. I've wished for blue eyes and blond hair, for green eyes and black hair... but my eyes are still brown and so is my hair. I'm still not as tall as I'd like to be and my feet are still big. I still get zits and bad breath and forget important things. I argue too much and I'm stubborner than a mule. But you know... I forgot that in this world of plastic people and airbrushed perfection, somewhere deep down we all want to be ourselves. We ask "Am I not good enough? Is this person I turned out to be different than what is supposed to be?" I've realized that I have to accept myself for who I am before anyone else can. Stupid right? Duh. But sometimes we realize things a long time after we wish we did. So now I can look in the mirror and actually recognize myself. Hey, that's my face looking back at me, hey you smexy looking beast- perhaps not that last part. But you get what I mean. Now that I know who I am, I can work on improving myself, INTERNALLY. Work to make myself a better person and the world a better place with God's help, even just by a little bit. Although I'm sure a tic-tac wouldn't hurt.

Life is a fairytale..

Fairy tales are full of adventure, romance, beauty, and magic; why can't our lives be full of that as well?
Here are some pictures I took and edited to show that perhaps fairytale endings don't always have to be in a book.

The Big Bang

So last week late at night, I took a pair of scissors off my sister's dresser, went into the bathroom and chopped off my hair! Not all of it, just the front. So now I have patchy bangs that I am actually LOVING. It seems to change my face (and hides a lot of unsightly pores on my forehead ;) AND it keeps my forehead warm. What more could you ask for? Here some pictures my younger sister took of me.

I love this one :)

If you don't know me well, I love hats. And jewelry. Like a lot :)

I bought the necklace from a thrift store for about $4. A tad expensive for a thrift-store, but it was Goodwill (which is an expensive thrift-store), and I loved it.

I love California weather. We live in the valley and it feels like a windy but warm spring day!

Cheers!

What Is It About Those British Boy Bands?

British bands have been popular ever since the Beetles took the world by storm. Maybe it's something about their quirky characteristics or their cute accents that sets girls hearts a flutter. Not that I would know...I'm a bit heartless in the fan-crush department. No celebrity crushes for me haha. Although I'm not a huge fan of this genre, I do enjoy it now and then. Here are some of my favorite British-folk style songs.

Butterfly Girl

I haven't posted any pics for a while so here's one that I took of me and edited. I really like how it came out.

Although slightly grainy...sorry :)
I'm still learning!

Four Wheels and Hot Pink Gloves

So two days ago (I'm a bit behind on blogging, sorry!) my friend Emily texted me asking if I would like to go quading. Would I like to go quading!!!??? Yes, I would!!! I've never gone before and I've wanted to for a while. I've gone dirt-bike riding and I loved it, so I figured I would love quading as well. There is something about speed and immense power you control as you roar over the ground that just appeals to every bit of my senses...maybe I'm just adrenaline junkie, who knows ;).
   
My friend lives out on a farm with llamas and donkeys in the front pastures and vineyards in the back with plenty of room to zoom around on the quads. She had cautioned me to dress warmly and to expect to get dirty as the quads kick up quite a lot of mud!  At first I was a pretty cautious; after all, I've never gone before and I did NOT want my first time to end as a disaster, but as I got used to it, I started speeding up and really getting into it.
   
Imagine: a roaring machine underneath you, kicking up globs of mud as you speed down a dirt track! Emily taught me to do donuts (!!!) and soon I felt like I could go quading forever! Of course we didn't, we eventually went inside and played Wii Fit for the rest of the afternoon (which is amazing, I might add) but the feeling remained. The best part of quading? The hot pink John Deere gloves she gave me to use. I'm usually not a big fan of pink, but it somehow seemed fitting. It was a touch of femininity in the adrenaline-filled, speed-demon and mud-track world of quads that assured me that girls have a place in that world too.

Have a lovely day,
Cheers!

P.S. Sorry for no pictures, it's just sort of hard to take a camera out there.

One To Win

My fellow blogger The Flower Girl is hosting a giveaway and as I am in love with the dress she is giving away, I thought I'd go for an extra entry by posting about it here. Check out her lovely blog!
Cheers!

P.S. Did anybody catch my pun? I'm a sucker for puns :)



*hint* it's in the title

Caged

A sad song drifts from the golden cage,
Of beauty and sweetness, terror and rage.
Uncontrolled long for distant sky,
The scent of roses way up high.


Freedom so close, but yet so far,
Never to go farther than iron bar.
Wings are trapped, short life is drawn,
Only release is the haunting song.

~2/28/08~

Haven't we all felt this way?

Tis Not Fit-ting...

So after a week of recovering from a cold and a lingering cough, I think I am finally ready to go work out!! Yay :). I'm not the most athletic girl in the world, but I do like staying active and I have been really bummed about being sick and being too tired (and lazy :P) to go for a quick jog. I had been working out before and I felt pretty good, but since that's all sort of slipped down the drain I'm happy I can start again. I'm not a huge fan of New Years resolutions, but I did make one of working out at least 30 minutes day, which is actually the recommended amount to staying healthy and in shape. I like being healthy. So here's to working out!
Cheers!

More Art Journal!

Here are my promised photos of pages 3 and 4. Hope you enjoy!

This is the third page of my art book. I copied a page from a flower coloring book and painted over it with blue acrylic. After it dried, I used a razor (it looks like a pencil with a razor blade at the end) to cut out different parts of the flowers. I then ripped off the sides of the coloring page and glued it to the third page of the journal. I had previously used a paintbrush with ink to darken the background. Once I had glued the flower paper paper and its description on, I colored some line inside the cutouts with a blue-ink pen.

Up close.

This is the fourth page. I wanted to draw something pretty simplistic and I had an idea of a robot-type thing, and this is what it ended up as. I really like how it came out!

I glued a square of foil in the middle of the page and just used a pen to draw around it.

Don't you just love his face? He looks like he isn't sure what to do, now that there are little birds nesting on his head! I also love how the mama bird has her eye shut in perfect contentedness.

Robot legs :)

The flower one was interesting to do, and I really love my robot! Think I should name him?
Cheers!

My Art Journal

I was inspired to make an art journal from some beautiful art books my mom got from the library that were brimming with creativity and inspirational ideas. So when I got a moleskin journal for Christmas (from my lovely mother who had overheard me talking about creating an art journal), I started experimenting with ideas and mediums to create different pieces. So here they are :).

I wrote random words and the first verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic with a calligraphy pen and glopped on pieces of of colored tissue paper. I also brushed water color over it, then drew with fine-tip pens on top of that. I tried putting gold metallic ink on it, but that just ended up looking like water color. Ah, well.

Vintage key

I am a Christian :)

Doesn't the bird and the tree fit perfectly? I didn't even mean for that to happen!

Journal page # 2. I layered pieces of newspaper I ripped from the obituary (haha I'm so morbid) section of the newspaper and layered them down with this artist gel medium. Wow, I sound so technical! Ahaha. Anyways, then I just painted the face and the words on with black acrylic paint. It was fun :)

I just wrote whatever words came to mind when I looked at the girl's face.

Both Pages.

I have finished pages 3 and 4, I just need to take good pictures of them and get them up here, so stay tuned!

Getting to Know Me

I figured I would put some pictures up of me, not because I'm drop-dead gorgeous and beautiful (that goes without saying), but to give you a better idea of who I am, my artistic style (lots of practice editing my face haha), and just what I look like. I think it's always nice to know what a blogger looks like, it makes you feel more connected to them somehow. So here I am :).

My adorable sister Ashley <3<3

I love wind-blowing-through-your-hair car pictures. Like a lot.

Told you.

All of these have been my profile picture on my Facebook sometime or another, so you might of seen them there.

A Crazed Girl

I have a fetish for morbid, haunting poetry and this poem fit those categories perfectly as well as appealing to my wanderlust. It evokes lonely seascapes and waifish girls in billowy white dresses and made me long for the ocean (more than usual).

A Crazed Girl

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

By William Butler Yeats