Welcome to Scribbleflowers: If we love doing art, let's just do it!

Hello and thank you for visiting Scribbleflowers, a blog to talk about art and share my illustrations, and hopefully the work of other artists. I've been drawing pictures–doodling actually–for as long as I can remember. I took some art classes in college many years ago but ended up getting my degree in English. But the art did not go away. My career has alternated between technical writing and technical illustration because those are the things that paid the bills.

But my real love is the kind of art that tells stories or decorates pages or communicates concepts, the kind of art we just feel like doing. I like working with bright or deep color combinations, skin tones, eyes, hair, and facial expressions. This blog is not about cutting edge concepts or pretensions of any kind. This blog is about loving pictures, color, and art supplies and expressing ourselves as we wish. Also, to me, art more fun when you can share it. Over the years, too many of my pictures simply ended up in the trash can. True, many of them were on Post-it, doodled while talking on the phone or thinking, and many of them deserved their fate, but some of them were pretty good.

"Lady with Apple"
Prismacolor markers
on Bristol board

After a while I began working with color and found that artist quality colored pencils, markers, and water colors made my doodles look really good. Then I tried doodling on good quality art paper and they looked even better! Then I started posting some of them on my Facebook page and found that people enjoyed them. I considered that I love drawing pictures, love art supplies, and love sharing and talking about art. Further, I began to think how much fun it would be to do illustrations for people as a job some day and design things like cards, website logos, and book illustrations.

Then I thought, but to be professional illustrator I'd have to go to art school and with one son is starting college and the other a smart ambitious  high school sophomore, art school is not a finanancially an option for Mom right now. But that is no reason to stop doing art. Art school and college are wonderful things, but the lack of funds for expensive tuition should not to be an obstacle to pursuing what we love. Of course, if what you love is brain surgery, then the lack of funds for medical school would in fact be an obstacle, hopefully one you could overcome by finding a way to pay for it.

But if you really want to be an artist or a writer or even other things – say a Russian translator – you can learn the skills through other means, such as books, videos, and practice. I hope to review and explore some of these educational and training materials on this blog. I am a strong proponent of self education and learning things because you value them, whether these things are learning skills or acquiring knowledge such as a deeper understanding of literature, history, philosophy, or science. Before science became a big important business requiring advanced degrees, it was pursued by many regular people who simply loved experimenting with and observing the materials of the world. That was back in the 18th century when they used to call it "natural philosophy."

So to start, I will share at least one picture per post, and share thoughts about art and creativity, and in the near future will share some techniques and tools and some delicious art books and some artist websites I like. Eventually I'd like to introduce other illustrators here and show their work. My older son will be majoring in graphic arts, so I'll probably show some of his funky art if he'll let me.