It’s been what feels like a really awful week…just one week ago was one mass shooting in El Paso, followed by another in Dayton. Heartbreaking.

The rest of my week has been crazy-busy getting ready for VBS, and working on a project for my Mom, and yeesh. All that in the midst of a heat wave that had the studio cookin’ – and not with just creativity! lol.

However – I decided to jump in and finish up a new class I’ve been working on for a few weeks, and maybe that’ll give us all something creative and meditative to work on in hard times – a way to zone out, pray, and create, all at once!

Whimsical Patterns Class

I’ve been asked to do more classes for the Whimsical Sketchers – and I thought doing patterns on black would be tremendous fun! I picked up a pad of Fabriano Black Black that totally inspired me. 🙂 It’s a class perfectly appropriate for beginners – and if you have black cardstock and a white pen you like, you have all you need to get started. PLUS – it’s on sale for a week! Here’s a quick video preview (watch on YT here.)

Mom’s Project!

My Mom asked me recently for some help – she ended up teaching cards to a few ladies in her art group where she lives. The facility loved them so much they asked if the group would make a bunch of Christmas cards for a fundraiser! Since Mom got rid of most of her stamping stuff when moving over the last few years, she asked for a little help – a “few images” that she could use with the ladies to create some cards.

And uh….yeah. This happened. Hahahaha! (Yes, click. Go see my craziness.)

IGTV vs YT plans

The linked video above is “IGTV” – instagram’s effort at fighting off YouTube, I think? It’s been available for a while, but I heard from Aaron over at Arkon that IG is promoting video more than stills, and IGTV even more than video posted on a profile. I wasn’t sure of that until I posted two IGTV videos in the last week and watched views blow up. Frankly, more people are watching those than my YT videos! Egads. (I don’t know, does that mean people want more short speed videos instead of full tutorials, LOL)

That does NOT mean I’m going to abandon YT for IGTV. Yes, IGTV can be 10 minutes so I guess I could fit a regular tutorial there – but honestly I don’t like the vertical format for anything other than a quickie. To make art I like having the full screen to make things nice and big.

However, since IGTV has more people actually watching what I create, I’ll be doing some experiments with it. I hope that on days when I create a fine art video inspired by a stamp set, that I can try to do a speed video with the stamp set on IGTV – I don’t plan to do voiceovers for those, but at least show more coloring over there.

It’ll take a little while to implement all this, as I still have things in the queue that weren’t shot to accomodate a vertical format. (I have to do special things to make that work.) But you’ll start to see it more.

Not on Instagram?

I’m not trying to get folks to go sign up for IG. I totall get not wanting to have yet another social media to keep up with! But the thing I like is that I can post my IGTV videos there and non-instagrammers can still view them. I can’t embed them here, but will link to them when I have one. You can always go to the IGTV channel tab on my profile anytime to watch them – without being logged in you can’t comment, but you can still see!