I wish I had...

That's the Roc prompt for Feb.

I wish I had...

Wow. Where to start?

Grace Kelly's looks, Warren Buffett's money, Steven Spielberg's creativity?  Yeah, that'd work.

However, I hadn't thought of those things when I did my spread, so there are different wishes on the page - some real, some silly.

Used my cost-a-lot-of-money-had-to-have-them-don't-use-them-nearly-enough Copic markers and had fun blending the various color families. It's not a sun or a flower. It's just a many-armed design element. Black marker, pencil for shading, gel pens. 

It was fun and I like how light it feels with so much of the background showing. Also like the black/white dashes around the center. 

Practiced my lettering by trying to make each one different, a la Joanne Sharpe's Letter Love 201 class I'm taking. 

Added little drawings or words to some wishes. (the 'more time to art' comment is 'picasso... monet... leslie...' hahaha) 

Just for the heck of it I added a little spider and web like I used to do on all my crazy quilts. 

Another case of it didn't quite fit on the scanner, so I pasted the 2 halves together in PSE 11 for the top pic.

Sunday studio shots

Hi. Today I'm all about markers.

I can't imagine a life without Sharpies, hi-liters, etc. Given half a chance, I mark up documents with hi-liters, write labels with Sharpies, color in the centers of Os, Ds, Ps, Bs, Rs, and Qs, and just generally make things more fun to look at. My desk at work has a beautiful made-to-my-specs organizer, made by my woodworking husband from cherry wood. It's full of hi-liters, a rainbow of gel pens cause who wants to write all day long in just blue or black, some Sharpies for marking boxes and making file labels, roller ball pens for document filling out and a straw from somewhere.

Here at home I keep my markers laying down flat because a few artists said to on their blogs. Right now they're in nesting cardboard boxes but I'd like to find a pretty wooden box or a cool organizer of some sort so that I can haul them out and about without dumping them all over the place.

Here they all are, loosely sorted by color family. There are 3 or 4 different sets of Sharpies - different color assortments, different thicknesses such as very fine, fine and the plain old original. Also in there is a set of 24 Prismacolor double-ended markers and a set of (I think) 48 Super Tips water based markers from Crayola.

They're all quite nice, but there was still a hole in my marker collection, still something missing, still something I had a yen for since I bought 3 of them in January at Road to California while visiting Julie. They have a tip like a paint brush and you can do things with them that you simply can not with other markers. I am so far from being an expert in their use that it isn't even funny, but still... I wanted them.

Copics

Very pricey, but oh so cool. They come in a wide variety of color assortments and I waffled around for a while but eventually settled on set A, 36 sort of basic colors to get you going as a Copic owning artist. It had only one duplicate of the three I bought earlier, and it had lots of greens and pinks. Perfect.

I scoured the net for months, bidding on a few sets on eBay but never getting serious enough to win. Then I sold a bunch of stuff on eBay and found myself with enough money to buy a set of 36. Thought about it another few weeks but finally went to the website, stuck one in my shopping cart and headed for check out. My finger hovered over the FINALIZE key for many seconds as I reviewed my decision, but eventually I dropped the hammer. 

$112 and 5 days later, my Copics showed up. I've been using them sparingly but am getting more likely to reach for one now that I'm journaling quite a bit. The color lays down differently than other markers and the brush tip is just neat. Everything from tiny dots to sweeping swathes of color, Copics are markers worth having. Amen.