All You Need is Love

Hi guys! I've decided to take my blog in a new direction. Although I'm sure you are all fascinated by my meanderings about my blind stumbling through the oddities of the print business, it occurs to me that we all might be better served if I write about: 1. something I have experience in, 2. something that’s interesting, and possibly 3. something that might benefit us by talking about.
My life and my art have centered on spiritual matters for years, so even if I’m not an enlightened master, I may be able to pass on some bits of information that could be passably entertaining to some. My other areas of interest in art like dinosaurs and myriad other subjects usually get enough research by me when I’m working on the piece to at least make a blog post about.
The first post on these lines will of course be something I’ve already talked about (repetitive and contradictory!) My spiritual outlook can be summed up thusly:


“I am the Blue Dragon. I serve the Blue Light; whose physical manifestation is the Universe: the One Voice, the Eternal Word, the Infinite Sound. All things are revealed by the Light. All shadows are created by the Light. Love is the Way of the Light. Either one serves Love or one opposes Love. One cannot claim to serve Love through hate. Anger and fear are the absence of Love. Love is omnipresent. There is nowhere it is not. It does not shirk; it does not hide. To be unable to feel its presence is delusion. It is we who turn away from the Light. It is constant and never abandons us. It is The Energy; The Force; The Power. The Source of all. Love is indiscriminate. Love is not concerned with what name it is called, or what rituals it is worshiped by. Love does not favor one over another. Love does not punish. Love wants you to be happy and healthy. For this to happen you must conform to Love. Love cannot be ruled by you. You are a manifestation of Love. There is no intermediary.”

This is not to say that I believe that I am literally a dragon or even believe in the existence of dragons. I was born on the year of the dragon, and in Eastern philosophy the dragon is a symbol of enlightenment. The dragon is just a metaphor. Try not to get caught up in particulars. Find the general theme. The theme here is Love.
What I mean is that God is not angry or hateful or punishing. You can’t worship God by being that way. If you can accept this principle, everything else will fall into place. Many religions have been corrupted by men to say that God hates, but this is simply not true. This belief is brought about by our own short sightedness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m human and I become angry and declare that I hate things, but I know this does not bring me closer to God. It separates me from god via my clouded perception.

Try to connect to Love in everyway you can. Listen to music that has a healthy view of Love. (Jealousy and other negative emotions connected by our culture to love are natural to have but they are not Love.) Know that we are all struggling through our daily lives and when we wrong each other it is usually out of the pain of our struggles than any vindictiveness on our part. In this way we can forgive each other as we need to be forgiven for out missteps (sound familiar?)
Finally a word about various faiths. The word Allah means “God of Abraham” which is a Judeo/Christian epithet for God. Krishna is known as the “Lord of Love” as is Jesus. Just as many cultures have different words for “hat”, and different ways to have weddings, so there are many ways to worship God. Religions that say otherwise were designed to say that by their leaders because these leaders want to be the leaders of everyone. It doesn’t nullify the whole religion, just the part that says they are the only way.
Remember, when Jesus says, “I am the way and the Light and the Truth” he is speaking as God. He is not saying Kali is not the way, he is saying that heaven can only be found through God. Whether you worship God as Kali or Jesus or something else is up to you.

Ok, now time for my shameless plug: I am so enamored of the Blue Dragon that I have painted many of them. (What the dragon says is absolutely true, even if he is fiction.) You can get any print of my blue dragons and you can have the blue dragon quote included with them if you want.

JUST MY TYPE!

I'm thinking of changing the name of this blog to "Bad Blogger" because of how remiss my posting is. Anyway; here with another installation of the latest news from bluedragon greeting cards is your intrepid reporter. When last we saw our hero, he was pining for an application to put on his netbook that would allow him to add type to his greeting cards. The website that publishes the cards provides a format for an inner message; but the image on the front of the card must be uploaded as it will appear on the card. Every computer has a word processor of some kind, but the website requires that images be uploaded as jpegs.
Well, "Mission accomplished" as one of our former presidents was wont to say. I purchased PRINT ARTIST SILVER. It is perfect for my purposes. My netbook doesn't have a CD ROM drive however, and as you may be aware, most programs come on CDs to be loaded onto computers. So, I put it on my PC, and split it into two "thumb drives" leaving off a ton of clip art that I don't need and don't have room for.
I immediately set to putting type on lots of images. It takes longer than I thought, and I had to overcome a couple of hurdles along the way, but the end result is exactly what I needed.
NEW: FAN PAGE ON FACEBOOK!
I also started a fan page on face book. Become a fan today! Actually, first I started a whole new account just to promote my greeting cards! I went to the greeting card universe page on facebook and friended about 200 people on the fan list. this is a slow process as it takes me back to the first person on the list after each request which of course has two windows to approve before proceeding.

I've been spending a lot of time working on these two pages, so I haven't done much else. My next move is to start those Halloween cards and more fairy cards. I'm gathering images and ideas to work from right now!

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.