Do you ever have those days where you feel like a very small animal in a very big world? I think of them as my Piglet days, and when I drink tea out of my Piglet mug it fortifies me greatly, but those feelings still lurk under the caffeine bravado.

Sometimes they’re brought on by something specific — a comment someone makes, something I’ve read, something I’ve seen. Sometimes they just seem random, coming with the rain or just out of the blue. My Piglet moods never last for more than a few days, replaced by my more usual quiet, easy Pooh bear moods, taking one thing at a time and not worrying too much unless the cupboard’s low on honey.

This week’s a bit of a Piglet week for me — I’ve been reading a book with a lot of art processes alluded to in the fiction, things I’ve never had the chance to learn about. I feel a bit of a fraud when I read about people working and working on their art, day in and day out, learning new ways of seeing, new ways of using light and color, glazes and washes and underpaintings. I never learned any of those things, really, and I always just feel lucky to have remembered to use light at all, let alone tried to do so in a way that would make someone remark upon its uniqueness, for instance.

But I keep painting anyway, trying to hang on to the inspiration that also comes with the Piglet feelings, to give my inner Piglet lots of warm bear hugs and tea.

New web technology gives me this feeling sometimes, too. I was a coder, once, back in the mists of time, and let me tell you, I hated it even when I was good at it. So whenever web design starts to slide further and deeper into coding, I get the heebie jeebies and want to back away. But then someone wants something from me — or I want it from myself — and I fall right back into those Piglet feelings. Even though I know I made a conscious choice to move in this direction, it’s hard to remember why it matters when faced with all the things that I not only don’t know about web coding, but don’t particularly want to have to know.

The best solution I’ve found for code-related Piglet is to find him a nice Rabbit to work with, who knows just what to do and how to do it. Well, plus tea and bear hugs.

I’ve mostly soothed Piglet’s worries about Woozles, though sometimes it slides more into Eeyore for a day or two before Pooh takes back over. Today I raise my mug and set the Woozle worries aside to work on projects for happy clients, projects for myself, and just being me.

And that’s the very best thing for a bear to do, even one with a Piglet lurking inside.

My friend Nick asked me back in August, if I was going to do something for his 25th birthday party invitations, what would I do? And I immediately thought of this:

With this on the inside:

Nick tells me they were a great hit, and I have to say, I had a ton of fun doing them. He sent me dozens of photos from his childhood that I’d never seen before — I have to say, before I did these, I never realized how big Nick’s ears were! Poor kid.

They’re all done with pen & Copic marker, and then scanned and (after realizing how bad my scanner is with blond/brownish midtones) color corrected by hand. I delivered via emailed pdf, so he could print them onto his own cards at home, and then mailed the originals along in his birthday card as his gift.

Happy (now long past) Birthday, Nick!

I sometimes manage to paint even when it’s not for a commission, but I tend to be shyer about those pieces, more reluctant to post them. This piece has been done for months, hanging on my wall and becoming a part of my surroundings until I let myself forget that I hadn’t actually posted it. I actually did forget to take any “in progress” photos while I was working on it, though there weren’t too many stages this time around, either.

This painting was inspired by Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, in a roundabout way. In it he postulates a continuum of realities from the Pattern of Order at Amber to the Courts of Chaos at the other end, with the realities becoming stranger and more dangerous as they get closer to Chaos. I imagined a world where the sky had cracked open one night, its rough-velvet texture tearing down the middle and letting molten gold spill forth, sparking and changing and becoming like stars as it spread across the sky. I tried to capture that sense of motion, of chaos, with the three metallic colors of droplets (gold, bronze and a scarab red that shimmers and changes to old-bronze-green at certain angles).

Title: Molten Sky
Medium: Oil on canvas, 24″ x 24″
Price: $999 (free shipping in the US)