& NOW FOR A SHORT DIGRETION INTO POLITICORELIGIOUS HISTORY

Greetings, weary traveler! Welcome to another edition of the exciting new blog everyone's talking about! Oh wait. No, welcome to Azule Blue Dragon instead. Well, I have been hard at work, making cards, friends on facebook, and trouble in general. My facebook fanpage; known as bluedragon connections, if you aren't near a link, has 85 fans so far, but I went from getting a four star rating to zero to one. People click "like" and then don't interact anymore than that. That doesn't bother me, but I still have made only two sales on cards and I have to figure out a way to market my cards to people who are looking for them.

Well, I just keep moving forward; or as fish savant Dory would say, "just keep swimming." I post at least once a day on all three facebook walls, make new cards, examine what I think makes other people's cards good or interesting, and researching new subjects and marketing strategies.
I'm exploring the various theories on "search engine optimization", which is why I've done all the things I've done so far, but clearly more needs to be done.

More interesting to me is the new cards I've made. A few utilize a new painting I created combining my favorite deep space object: the cone nebula, with pictures I found of witches celebrating Halloween, which they call "Samhain" pronounced "Sowen". When I was younger, I became interested in this phenomena and did some research. I had a real "through the looking glass moment" when I realized that real witches don't worship the devil. The religion, now known as "Wicca", predates Christianity. When Constantine; a Roman Emperor, converted to Christianity, Christianity took on many aspects of Roman Culture; centralized authority, and conquering the world. To this end, whenever opposition was found that couldn't be overcome with a sword, God was used as a weapon. In this way non Christians were made to convert to Christianity or be killed, usually after torture. To justify this, the deities of other religions were made to be the devil, and the followers of these other religions were said to be devil worshipers. That would be like making a Hindu or Buddhist out to be devil worshippers today (which some people do) The funny thing is witches don't even worship a male god; they worship a Mother Goddess. Her consort is the "Horned God", and the patriarchal early Christians mistook him as the main Deity of the wiccans. They said he was the devil. This is one of the primary sources for the modern view of the appearance of the devil.

Anyway, I try to have respect for all religions (including Christianity) but I feel the need to explain my affinity for the Wiccans.
In fact, I have also made cards utilizing prayers from the Catholic Rite of Mass. Specifically "Gloria" & "Sanctus".


Finally, I have crafted an ink and brush rendering in Sanskrit of the word "yoga". The word means "Union with God" and, being indo-european etymologically speaking shares the same root as the word "yoke" in English. I hope to create many more cards using Sanskrit calligraphy.

I Only Have to Change 1 Thing: Everything!

This is something I frequently heard when I first got sober. However, One of the things I have to be careful about is my desire to change everything all the time. (just look at how many irons I have in the fire on my links!) So, it should come as no surprise that no sooner had I decided to concentrate on recovery greeting cards, then I decided I also wanted to concentrate on Catholic Saints greeting cards.

It's simple: Every day is a feast day for some saint or another; why not do one for each? I can provide recovery greeting cards and Catholic ones, right? Right. except, now there's a new problem: I have a book of Saint's days and it doesn't correspond to the Saint's days online.

I'm excited about this project because it meets the suggestion that I find something that no one else is doing, and I haven't had the opportunity to do a lot of portraits in a while. Plus concentrating my efforts on promoting saints and creating replicas of their images has got to be good karma (or whatever the Catholic word for karma is.)

It seemed like a good idea to give myself a month's leeway to submit and post cards of the saints. Since it was May 1st, I was all set to do a portrait of St. Angela Merici whose feast day in the book is June 1st, when I decided to double check the online date; which turned out to be in January! At this point, I should try to clarify how I came to suspect the book of... well being suspect. To be honest, this is actually the second book of saints I purchased. The first one has St. Rose of Lima as having her feast day on August 30th. This offended my girlfriend, Rose; who is name for Ms. Of Lima because her birthday (my girlfriend's) is August 23rd; the day of the feast of St. Rose. Well, I got a different book of saint's days, but it turns out the problem is that these books (which I got used) are outdated. So, no portrait of St. Angela.

Now it's the 2nd of May, and one month from today will be St. Peter's feast. Of course, it will take more than a day to paint and I don't want to rush the paintings, so maybe I should plan on doing one a week instead of one a day. That's 365 weeks people! Plus, most days have more than one saint. This should keep me busy for a while.

Meanwhile, I posted a new illustration for approval. (I'm still waiting for the recovery cards to be approved too!) It's a sea serpent. I think it would be good for a little boy's birthday.