Drawing and Inspiration (Part 5)

Hello Again, Dear Friends and Happy Halloween!

Well, I did it!  I was able to do a drawing for everyday this month for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club Drawing Challenge!

Here's still more of my inspiration of the season!

The Adorable Baby June and Mr. Peeps

For more fun, please check out this link to Making Fiends!

Be sure and click the link to the Web Series and watch as Vendetta makes Fiends

and Charlotte makes friends!

Here's a vintage Disney cartoon to have fun watching:

And now, my final drawings for Drawlloween!

(As always, click images to see them larger.)

As always, you can check out my Instagram feed for what I wrote about each drawing.

Thank you to everyone who liked and made comments on my drawings this month!!

It was most appreciated!

If you'd like to catch up on all the weeks,

Simply click here:

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Wishing all a Happy Halloween Night!

Drawing and Inspiration (Part 4)

Hello to you, Dear Friends of The Tearoom!

Thank you so much for following each week of the progress of my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club Challenge!  I can hardly believe that the month is very nearly done!  But as usual, I have lots of other projects to work on, so I'm ready to move on, but pretty proud of myself that I got through the whole month!!

I hope no one will be disappointed if I postpone my final wrap-up until tomorrow and then it will include all of last week as well as my final drawing for tomorrow.

As a bit of teaser, here is a detail from the prompt "Alien" that I did!

I hope to see you here tomorrow for my final post of drawings for The Month of Drawlloween!

Drawing and Inspiration (Part 3)

Hello and Happy Sunday Again to you, My Dear Friends!

Welcome to the third week of catching up with my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club.

It's week three of the Drawlloween Club Challenge and I'm still keeping up and still having fun!

Still on the topic of inspiration, I have a lot of songs I love to listen to to help me get in the spooky mood when decorating or creating art during this extra-fun and extra-inspiring time of the year!  Here are a few of my favorite tunes of madness and menace:

Albums:
Bat for Lashes - Fur and Gold and Two Suns
Cocteau Twins - The Pink Opaque and Treasure
The Cure - Bloodflowers
Depeche Mode - Black Celebration and Violator

Songs:
Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead
The Church - Violet Town
Cocteau Twins - Sugar Hiccup and From the Flagstones
The Cure - All Cats are Grey
Everything But the Girl - Tempermental (Pull Timewarp Remix)
Gene Loves Jezabel - Influenza (Relapse)
Joy Division - Candidate
Peter Murphy - All Night Long and Cuts You Up
Nouvelle Vague - Bela Lugosi's Dead (cover)
Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack - Science Fiction Double Feature
The Specials UK - Ghost Town
Tones on Tail - Twist
Tricky - Love Cats (cover)

(For my fans of the blog who are not fans of Halloween, if you have not heard The Cocteau Twins, I would encourage you to do so.  There are some songs which sound a bit dark, but many, such as Sugar Hiccup, are swirling confections of sound that are just lovely and fun.  Everyone I have ever played the music of this band for who has not heard them before has a different way of describing them!  Give them a listen if you have not!)

And here's something fun that Mr. V found that made me laugh!


Meanwhile, here are my drawings for this week:

(As always, click images to see them larger.)

To see what I have written about each piece, please check out my Instagram feed.

And please check back next week for the final pieces in the Drawlloween Club Challenge!

Drawing and Inspiration (Part 2)

Hello and Happy Sunday Again to you, My Dear Friends!

Welcome to the second week of catching up with my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club.

As I wrote in my last post her at The Tearoom Blog, I'm doing her challenge by making a drawing based on her prompt for each day of the month!  Whew!  I haven't drawn this much in a long, long time, but I'm still having fun!

When you are creating, do you like to watch something on TV or listen to music, perhaps?  This week, I'm including a list of the movies that I have been or plan to watch while working on my spooky drawings this month.  Of course, because this is the Spookliest Month of the Year, we have our stacks of Halloween-themed movies and TV shows all lined up.  Some of them are not strictly Halloween movies, but some just have a definite "creep factor".  Here are some of them (in alphabetical order):

- 9
- Addams Family (boxed set of original series)
- Addams Family and Addams Family movies
- Attack the Block (actually set on Guy Faukes Day, but lots of scariness anyway!)
- Beauty and the Beast (original Jean Cocteau film)
- Beetlejuice
- City of Lost Children
- Corpse Bride
- Crimson Peak
- Delicatessen
- Fantastic Fear of Everything
- Frankenweenie (both the original and the animated versions)
- Hotel Splendide
- Hotel Transylvania
- Lost City
- Munsters
- Nightmare Before Christmas
- Only Lovers Left Alive
- Paranorman
- Penny Dreadful (we're watching all 3 seasons again, but I love season 1 the best!)
- Phantom Museums - The Short Films of The Quay Brothers
- Revenge of the Were-Rabbit
- Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Shadow of the Vampire
- Shawn of the Dead
- Sleepy Hollow
- Super 8
- What We Do In the Shadows

And, here are my drawings for the week!

(As always, click images to see them larger.)

To see what I have written about each piece, please check out my Instagram feed.

And please check back next week when I post my favorite musical inspirations when I'm working and my Drawlloween creations for the week!!

Drawing and Inspiration (Part 1)...

Hello to you, Dear Friends and Welcome to The Spookliest Month of the Year!

Some of my blogging friends celebrate Halloween and some do not.  For those who do, I hope you will find yourself suitably spookily inspired!  And for those who don't I would still encourage you to at least read the interview I've linked below.  I just love a lot of what Mab Graves had to say there about inspiration and the origins of creativity!

This year is the first year I have decided to do something a bit different with my October, creatively. This month, I am participating in Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club!

Mab provides us with the prompt for each day's drawing!  So many fun Halloween topics to draw!  She's such an inspiration!  I've followed her on Etsy for a long time and now I follow her on Twitter and Instagram as well.  

Here's a link to a great interview with Mab in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine from May of this year (very inspirational)!

And in my on-going quest to actually use all of the beautiful things I have managed to accumulate in my world, I am using a very special notebook for my Drawlloween drawings!  This notebook is special to me for a few different reasons.  First of all, it was a gift to me from a shop owner where Mr. V and I had shopped a couple of times.  We had bought quite a few cards from him and other items and got to chat with him.  On one of our visits, he gave me this notebook!  So super sweet!  The other thing that makes it special is that this shop was located on the rue Dauphine in Paris, just up the street from our hotel when we visited there in 2008!  But the other thing that makes it special is that this is when I discovered the work of another great artist who continues to inspire me: Nicoletta Ceccoli!  It is her illustrations which decorate this wonderful notebook I was given:

This is the front cover of the notebook...

...and this is the back!

One of my favorite of her pieces.

This image is on one of the cards I bought

from the shop in Paris!

You can find more of Nicolletta's work here!

And so, I'll be doing a weekly blog post for the month of October, showing the drawings I have done for the Drawlloween Club challenge.  I really haven't drawn everyday since art class in high school, but on the whole, I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out and I'm having lots of fun.  Here's the first nine days of work:

(As always, click to see the images larger.)

Please check back again next week for what I've done for the week or keep up day by day by going to my Twitter or Instagram feeds!

More Tea Treats from The World of the Digital...

Dear Friends of The Tearoom,
I love tea and tea treats in every form!  So, I've been having fun making even more treats to go along with my digital tea sets!  Of course, my favorite kind of tea treats are from the beautiful patisseries of Paris, so my newest digital collage sheet for my Etsy shop Velvet Revived includes several flavors of macarons, a millefeuille with cream and strawberries, a religieuse, an éclair and fresh fruit tarts, all perfect to use with any of the tea set sheets I also sell there.

Parisian Patisserie Digital Collage Sheet

And is it any surprise that my Little Victorienne shares my love of patisserie?  Here she is trying to decide which treat to have with her tea,  in a beautiful tea salon in Paris!

(Keep checking back here, as the collage I've made above happens to be the starting point for the very next project I'm working on for Velvet Revived...!)

What's New (and New Again) in My Etsy Shops...

Hello Dear Friends!

I hope your summer was a good one!  As usual, it was way too short and soon, I will be hibernating back in my nest of an easy chair until springtime once again.  

We've spent as much time as possible here on our lovely front porch! I have so much fun every year taking care of the hummingbirds who come here to feed on the nectar I make for them and growing bright pansies, nasturtiums and morning glories, which make our days sitting here even happier!  This is a hard time of the year for me because I know we only have a few days or weeks left of them and I'm sad to see them go!

I love that I get to sit on my porch and work on my collage sheet shop Velvet Revived!  Isn't the Internet a wonderful thing?

I had been thinking for a long time that my digital tea sets here in my shop were missing something. And then it hit me! There needed to be tea treats!  So, I developed this collage sheet of Tea Cup Cakes!  

This sheet includes 4 festively decorated cakes, including one with a candle in case someone is having a birthday and a plate of beautiful fresh fruit as well!  My new Tea Cup Cakes are the perfect addition to any of my digital tea sets. Typical of my style, the Tea Cup Cakes do not match any of the tea sets, but instead they coordinate nicely, in my favorite lovely mismatched way!

Here are some examples of some of my tea set collage sheet images with the tea cup cakes:

Mad Tea Party with Tea Cup Cakes

French Tea Set with Tea Cup Cakes

Floral Tea Set with Tea Cup Cakes

Victorienne in Wonderland Tea Set with Tea Cup Cakes

Also new in my shop is the first of a planned-for line of mini printable coloring books!  I love coloring and it just seemed right that there should be coloring books in my shop for folk like me who love to color or to making into DIY party favors!

Here's Victorienne's Birthday Coloring Book!

Hoping to have a couple more done soon, probably a Tea in Paris design and an Alice in Wonderland one too.

Also, I recently had a customer ask if I was ever going to open my Gossamer Tearoom shop again on Etsy, so she could buy one of my Anatomical Heart Brooches.  So, for now, it is open once again, but only with the red and black anatomical heart brooches available at the current time.  I'm still deciding about the future of all of my shops on Etsy, but I have had enough interest on Pinterest to think I should offer at least these two items again.

Red Anatomical Heart Brooch

Black Anatomical Heart Brooch

(The last time I made one of the black hearts was to sew into the chest of this little creature, Mr. Mookie.  You can read about his re-birth here.  About two weeks later, I too had to have my own heart put back together by Dr. Robaczewski.  That was 13 months ago this week.  I'm grateful to be here and still chatting with all of my Dear Friends of The Tearoom!)

As always, thank you for your visit and please

keep watch for all of my newest projects!