Art brings me joy. I wouldn't be an artist if it didn't. But like everybody else in the world, I have a life outside of my art. I won't bore anybody with many of the details here, but sometimes life gets busy, and it becomes difficult to juggle life and art. 

I think the hardest part about being an artist isn't the skill required to draw. That's sometime that comes with time, patience, and practice. The hardest part for me is finding a way to push past the things life throws at me and continue drawing, even when the drawings stubbornly refuse to let me finish them.

When I looked out my window last fall and saw the giant sunflower my family and I had planted wilted over and covered in fresh frost, I knew I wanted to draw it. It was so warm and so cold, the details so fresh. 

I'm always looking for ways to challenge myself as an artist, and I've known for years that my greatest weakness is my attention span. I struggle to take the time to really nail the picture. I find myself rushing at the end of a piece because I'm so excited and anxious to finish it. When I took this reference I knew I found one to teach me that lesson in patience. 

This has been a big year for me. Currently, all of my completed artwork this year has been accepted into exhibits. For a mother-of-three who only just seriously got back into her art after a couple of years off for the kids, this is a big deal. A very big deal. Hopefully this is the start of incredible things. I wasn't entirely ready to leap into an art career, but words cannot express how excited I am to finally have found the path I want to be on with my career. 

Horses. Yes. I'll admit it. I was that cliché horse-crazy girl who sketched horses in all of her notebooks, carried around horse binders, wore horse shirts, etc.

When I was a kid, I lived and breathed horses. I grew up on a small fifteen acre farm that had horses, I rode my first horse when I was two, and I got my first horse when I was seven. When I wasn't riding and competing in 4-H in the summer, I was drawing horses, reading about horses, and watching horses on TV. There has never been a time in my life where I wasn't around horses,, so it's no small wonder that horses would end up integrated so deeply into my artwork. 

First off, I want to start by saying that I hate drawing from my own references, or at least I did. I have them, thousands of them. In fact, my last photo transfer from my old computer to my new computer involved moving 25,000 photos (No. I'm not kidding. It was upward of that number). Incidentally, that was before I got a smart phone with the in-your-pocket-everywhere-you-go camera built into it. Now, I look for references everywhere I go, but I still didn't use them, until now. 

It is easy to be inspired by the photography of others. Too easy, I think. I can look and instantly see the end result of a photo: the composition, the light, the feel. It all speaks to me in an simple-to-grasp moment of clarity. Training my eye to see the possibilities in the world around me, using my own creativity to find the piece that will speak to others, is much more difficult and requires active searching.

Many artists, myself included, enjoy the challenge of trying new things. 2015 seems to be my year of that. I knew going into the year thanks to my brief jump into pen and ink that I wanted to stay with colored pencil art. What I didn't know, however, was whether or not I wanted to stick with the paper I had been using (Arches Hot Press Watercolor) or even the pencils (Prismacolor). 

I decided to start with Art Spectrum Colourfix Paper. I had heard it reviewed before and actually had a nice stockpile of it from a few years ago, though I never tried it before this project. Colourfix is a basic watercolor paper with an acrylic primer (the bonus being that it's lightfast). Most importantly, the paper is durable, which is vital for me and my heavy hand. While browsing references for my previous piece, I found one that would translate wonderfully onto the Colourfix.