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 Well, I got a different book of saint's days, but it turns out the problem is that these books (which I got used) are outdated.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.

Another Blue Blog?

This then is the premier posting of my newest blog. Unlike my blue heaven ,which is a mix of art, and fiction writing or my blue heaven at open salon, which is primarily political cartoons; this one will be dedicated to the creation of greeting cards at blue dragon. Since the focus on these greeting cards is turning toward recovery (12 step programs) I will also be talking about that. The purpose is to appeal to people interested in recovery as well as the thought that goes into making my greeting cards. I'm going to be honest; it is recommended that to be successful in online businesses, blogging about your business and things related to it can boost your business. So that's what I'm after. I will try to make sure that there are easy links to my other blogs here and elsewhere so that everything is connected. I'm trying for connectivity plus segregation. I don't want to insult people interested in recovery with my political cartoons, and I want people who want to read my writing to be able to do so without wading through a lot of others stuff. (By the way, I'm also posting my writing at: WEbook, where I hope to submit it for publication.
The above picture was painted a few years back, before I got sober actually. It was created on the balcony of the apartment where I was living with my girlfriend. We moved the TV out there so we could smoke cigarettes and whatever else while watching movies we rented. We basically lived on the balcony rain or shine; warm weather or cold. It was actually pretty cool, because she had a lot of plants out there and it was beautiful most of the time. Now that image is available as a mother's day card as well as in my general collection. It will also be available as a recovery card. At first, I wanted to have each card have a unique image and greeting, but they actually recommend using the same image multiple times... again; more exposure.
I'm nervous about talking about recovery in an open forum, and I realize that I haven't really talked about it yet. There is the added possibility that something I say might help someone else who is struggling. That would make it worth it to me. It's funny, I wasn't embarrassed when I was "out there" using, why am I wary of talking about being sober? I've been sober for 5 years now and it's possible that I have something useful to share. I hope you get something out of it.