Tranquil_mood
This is the work of Evgeny Sturchak from Belgium. He doesn't speak English so his daughter does his US eBay sales for him. ALL of his work is wonderful!
This piece is an original watercolor ACEO (miniature painting). It was one of the very first ACEOs that I purchased on eBay last year. It took me a bit of research to track Evgeny down, but now I am proud to display his work in my blog along with the other talented artists that I have thus far collected. His work obviously sells quite well and it remains one of my favorites in my collection.
Tinacampbell56
I just tracked down Tina Campbell and got her okay to publish this ACEO here. There are a whole raft of Tina Campbells on eBay, but she is a very prolific and talented artist whose style is unmistakable.
Believe it or not, this is a watercolor. The flames look so real!!! I was completely thrilled to have won this auction and will buy more of her works in the future because everything that she does is fantastic. I love all of her art.
Cicelycombs
You guessed it...her name is Cicely Combs and she was smart enough to also use it as her eBay user ID. All of her artwork, that I have seen, has wonderful designs in a Decoish style.
This particular piece caught my attention last fall and I was very impressed and even more so when I saw it in person. It's so wonderfully exotic and Egyptian looking. I'm hoping to obtain more of Cicely's work in the future. It's surprising to me that she hasn't yet become one of the eBay favorites.
Rignard
Bwahahahaha! Check out this ACEO! L. Sim is her name and I don't know a whole lot about her except her artwork is beyond bizarre.
I completely related to this little piglet for some reason. Many years ago I got a pair of red long johns for a Christmas present, and Rig's artwork made me laugh. I actually didn't win this auction, but the person that won it ended up renigging on the deal, so Rig contacted me and I got it!!!
She really has an interesting imagination and I love to check on her listings from time to time...there are never enough of them going to suit me, but she definately has a following of fans. I've lost about half a dozen auctions for her work...so this is a prized possession.
New Florida painting
This is mine. No other artists here in the blog tonite. Still having problems locating various peeps.
Goooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!
Self-tautartist
And now for your viewing pleasure, I would like to introduce you to the art of Karen Hickerson. I bought this ACEO from her on eBay, as I have all of the others listed in here in the past couple weeks.
This piece is a collage done with acrylic paints. Is this a wonderful design!!! She has so many beautiful ACEOs to choose from that it's difficult to know which one to buy. I felt myself fortunate to have won this one last fall. I love the colors and the various design elements that she incorporates. It is called Spirit Birds and is card #216.
The photo at the top is actually the BACK of her card! Compare her attention to detail with what the back of my ACEOs usually look like...splashes of paints dribbled over the back....hahaha. At least I put my name on them and the date. :)
Joandoug
Will you look at this one??? OMG!!!
This ACEO is done by Joan Sturtevant and I stumbled upon this ACEO last fall while perusing eBay. It immediately transports you into a fairyland, does it not? I expect to see a hobbit or an elf appear any day in this card.
Her choice of colors and the detailing shown here is a bit daunting when taken from an artist's perspective. Some of those eensy weensy little brush strokes there on the flowers....good grief...there must be 2-3 hairs in that brush that she used. I just love this little painting.
Sketchdude
How many eensy weensie little lines can you draw before you go mad? Sketchdude (aka John Moore) created this card late last year as part of his Textures series. I find this ACEO to be utterly charming and entertaining. The whole series was interesting.
I haven't seen much of Sketchdude around the eBay ACEO groups recently. I know that he was involved with another website, art-cards.org, that was specifically started for ACEO artists. He did a lot of the website design on that project, I believe.
His mother is also an artist of wonderful talent, but I don't own any of her works to show here.
Doodles 81
This is one of my very own ACEOs today. It is acrylic and India Ink...an original painting.
I want to continue posting artwork from other artists in here, but I have so many cards presently that I can't find the owners to!!!! Some of the cards came with nothing on the back, some are signed and I can't read the signature, and others have a name but no eBay user ID and I haven't tried to track them down as yet.
Many artists are notoriously BAD at marketing! During this process I, myself, realized that since I'm not putting my user ID on the backs of my cards...how are people going to find me again? Slight oversight there. Unless you get yourself placed on someone's favorite sellers list in eBay...what are the chances of them finding you again when there are anywhere from 3,000-40,000 painting listings at any given moment? Duh.
Fortunately, I have been saving everyone's email addresses and sending out newsletters to them twice a month. But even then, less than half the people even open and read these newsletters, so you easily lose touch with your buying public. This is a must-do point....keep attention on marketing at all times!
Ale3164
This was one of the very first ACEOs that I purchased on eBay last year. The artist's name is Ale Ljubuncic and he is from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Is his work exquisite or what?
This is a watercolor painting which he did in September of 2005...right around the time that I first became interested in ACEOs. I thought that my timing was excellent, since I got the opportunity to purchase his original painting. It is titled 'Fuchsia'.
I hope to own another original Ale painting in the future!
Whatyes
KC Pollack is her name in real life and she has been an artist for many years. I fell so in love with this ACEO when I first saw it, that I was nearly obessesed.
Normally, I go for the whimsical, fun, odd, brightly colored and unusual type artwork...rather than the more realistic. But this painting stopped me dead in my tracks...I was mesmerized with it.
She named it "Girl in Doorway". I fought a good and valiant fight to win this one at auction! You can see why, just by looking at it...it was a coup for me to add this to my collection.
Sunshinesketches
Bwahahahahahahahaha!!! That was my initial reaction when I saw this ACEO by Karen. I don't actually know Karen's last name as it isn't in her ME pages on eBay. EBay was where I was first introduced to her work.
Crow-Sephine Baker is the name of this card. Sunny has done one fantastic crow after another and amazes us all with her creativity and imagination. The crow series is my absolute favorite of her works because her humor and wit shine through so wonderfully.
At present she is doing some cats that I adore, too. And here again, it's the same old story with Sunny's work...I get sniped over and over again because of her popularity. That is why I only have this ONE measly little ACEO to show here. I will get more, trust me on this! I still laugh every single time that I look at this card here, so why wouldn't I want to add more to my collection?
Daliadorer
I find Cyndi Deery's artwork to be fascinating. If I remember correctly, she is a self-taught artist. You would never know it to look at this drawing, would you? What an imagination!
This ACEO is named Sole Observatory and I love it! It's the usual story with Cyndi, though, as I have lost many of her auctions, too, and only have this one piece in my collection so far. She had one particular image a couple months back that I wanted in the worst way, and I fought valiantly but someone out-sniped me at the very last second.
I check her auctions regularly as I always look forward to seeing what she has created. What will her mind come up with next?
Jmkosm
Jeem. You may remember me talking about this guy back in December when we had the whole 'Where's Jim?' thing going on eBay. Jim Kosmala is our favorite curmudgeon. Can he wield a Uniball or what? Look at those intricate lines on his artwork!
He is also known as Crow Man, and by looking at his artwork, you can see why. The bottom piece "After The Tidal Wave" is a full-color piece for Jeem. This guy has built up a huge following on eBay and when he posts his new artwork, there is a stampede to get in there and read his description on the listing. He does like to torture us, though, and take his old sweet time about posting a new auction!
Jeem tells the coolest stories of anyone on eBay. Yet, he's still the King of the One-Liners and on dozens of occasions I have burst out laughing at something that he posted. Life on eBay would be utterly boring without him there...
Bone Diva
I only have one of Bone's ACEOs in my current collection, and not because I haven't tried to win others at auction. I simply got sniped over and over as she is another very popular artist on eBay. I actually won this card on a fluke...it was a late night auction and I happened to be in the right place at the right time for once and snagged it. Lisa Luree is her real life name, and Bone Diva is her stage name...no, really it's her eBay user ID...
One look at her artwork and you can tell that she knows her stuff. This particular piece is done in oils. It even has her fingerprint on the back of the card, which I don't think was intentional, but could make it even more valuable one day.
Bone began this whole split from the ATC (Artist Trading Cards) crowd about 1 1/2 years back when she decided that she wanted to sell her art cards and not just trade them on eBay. Apparently a few other artists thought this was a good idea, so Bone started a group on eBay and they had to differentiate themselves from the ATC crowd because the ATC people didn't like the idea of selling their art to make money. Don't ask me why, I have never understood that concept.
So Bone starts this little group and I think there were maybe 10 artists in the group and they had to come up with another name. Many names were tossed out there and voted upon for a few weeks and finally an agreement was reached to call it ACEO (Art Cards Editions and Originals). I forget the name of the person who submitted this particular name, but it's all in the groups' records for anyone to see.
They voted and ACEO became the official handle, and by this time several more artists had joined the group and it kept growing and growing. People were posting their ACEO auctions on eBay right along with the other artworks in the larger formats and there was some scoffing about it, but the whole movement took hold and the membership roster is now over 2,700 ACEO artists. There is now more than one group on eBay dealing with the ACEOs.
Bone did not invent this concept or the name or anything like that and she will be the first to tell you this. As I have posted in earlier blog posts, the art trading card phenomena has been in existence since the 1600's. Long before baseball was even thought of. The ACEOs are indeed the same size as baseball cards.
Some fellow from Europe came along in 1999 and began the art trading card phenomena online and from what I can gather he tries to convince people that he was the creator of the movement, but that's horse pucky.
Today the ACEO movement is alive and well online on more than one website, and it's really most active on eBay currently. However, it continues to grow in numbers all the time and is one of the most searched keywords on all of eBay. I think that I have now repeated this whole story here in my blog at least 3 different times, but who wants to go back and read the old archived files? Not me! I feel very lucky to have hooked up with this newest history-in-the-making movement...
123bananas
By now you may have figured out that the titles of these blog postings contain the eBay user ID names of some of the artists that I have in my ACEO collection. The name of this artist is Sandra Martin.
She has created some of the funniest black cat paintings of anyone that I have seen in a long while. I managed to snag these two, but only after using all the bargaining and sniping abilities that I could muster.
Sandra created a couple of Star Trek ACEOs that made me laugh out loud. The other people that I showed them to also laughed out loud. I should never have shown them to anyone, though, because in spite of bidding as strategically as possible...I lost on both of them.
I have had to adopt a temporary policy at this point in my life: only 2 ACEOs per artist. I have seen SO many of these miniature paintings that I wanted to buy that I would end up in the poor house. So it worked out for my pocketbook that I was unable to win the extra paintings from Sandra. I keep an eye on her works, however, because of the humor and skill that she imbues in her watercolors.
Shadowtreekids
This artist's name is Ellen Morrow and she goes by Shadowtreekids on eBay. These ACEOs which I purchased from her are done in watercolor. She has created so much gorgeous work, that I have been hard-pressed to refrain from buying everything that she lists on eBay.
The Flamingo is obvious, but the other piece I found to be very intriguing. Only by looking closely can you see the person standing behind the goldfish bowl peering in at the fish. It's an interesting viewpoint to say the least.
Poxodd
This eBay artist, that I only know by her user ID 'Poxodd' is so talented it's incredible! Each of her pieces has a very similar style which you can spot a mile away, but they all have a different surrealistic theme.
Here you can see Big Meal and Cat House. Big Meal is a frog eating a human, and it caught my attention because I paint frogs and trees...so it seemed appropriate for me. Not that my little froggies eat humans! Cat House...well what can you say about that one except hahahaha!
Everytime I see Poxodd's work, I visualize a book about her artwork, calendars, etc etc. I am truly amazed that some publisher hasn't come along and snagged her already. She not only does the ACEO format, seen here, but larger pieces as well. Each new release makes me ooh and aahhh...
Utopianvisionary
Here are Percy the Fairy Snail and Jacques the Cat, both created by another marvelous eBay artist. They are ACEOs, of course, done with pen, ink and watercolors, I believe.
Percy caused me to laff out loud when I first spotted him a few months back on eBay, and I HAD to add him to my collection. Soon after, Jacques came along and also became part of my life. Just look at the detailing! Enjoy the art....
Dasha Smasha
Look at the exquisitness of this artwork! I bought this on eBay from another artist last week. To die for! I realized today that I have an unbelievable art collection and I want to share it with my blog readers. I have bid on this artist's work about a dozen times before I finally won an auction. It's just the coolest!!!
This one is an ACEO/art card on 140# watercolor paper. It's a watercolor and it looks as if she may have used a sepia ink pen for the brown lines. Doesn't it just make your mouth water???
Taxes done!!!
Hooray!!! I've been up since 5:00 a.m. today organizing my paperwork to take to my tax people. So technically speaking, the taxes aren't DONE...but my end of it is. Fortunately for me, I have been doing bookkeeping type work for 30+ years and I know what they need from me in order to complete the tax returns.
I feel much more comfortable having someone else do it, especially if they are accredited with the IRS themselves. I could fumble around and figure them out, but I think it helps to have another eyeball on your returns. Not only does it keep you honest, but it prevents mistakes from happening (in most cases).
About 13 years ago, unfortunately, I had someone else do my taxes and they screwed me over royally for several years and it created such a mess for me with the IRS that I still haven't completely recovered from it. I did finally learn about taking deductions legitimately when you are self-employed...something that I had never learned about in all my years as a bookeeper simply because I never filed those kinds of taxes. It's amazingly simple once you know how to do it.
Most artistic type people can never get over the hump on this one because they have no interest or desire to learn about it. It took my disaster in the 90's with the IRS to get me to confront what I needed to provide. So here is a very basic format for you in case you are interested:
1) Save ALL your receipts...cash and credit cards.
2) Bunch them all into months so that you have 12 piles of them (unless you do this monthly and already have them separated).
3) Tape the receipts onto plain white papers with the name of the month on the front and staple them all together by month.
4) Take a hi-lighter and mark each CASH receipt for January.
5) Go back thru your January pages and write what expense those cash payments covered onto each receipt. If you are familiar with a Chart of Accounts, that is very helpful. If not...title them with things like supplies, travel and entertainment, medical, utilities, books and mags, postage and shipping, etc etc.
6) Run a tape from a calculator for each of the categories that you just set up. Just do the one month first, get a total, mark what it is, and move on.
7) Once you do these simple actions with all 12 months for the year, then you can total them all up and get your yearly amount for supplies, postage, etc etc.
8) Take your pages of receipts, your tapes of totals for your expenses, and your income to your tax person and they will love you! All they will have to do then is figure out where to place your expenses on your tax returns. It's quite worth it to pay someone else $100 or so to fill out your return, particularly if they offer any sort of guarantees and will help you with any IRS problems that you might have.
Jumpback Mountain is on the Pulse page!!!
eBay has these pages sprinkled throughout their auction site that are known as Pulse pages. Each category has its own. I was on the Pulse page last week for one of my ACEOs that I had listed in the Contemporary Paintings category. Just today I hit the Pulse page of Self-Representing Artists, since that's the category that I listed Jumpback in when I started the auction.
Many artists will end up on these Pulse pages with regularity since they have so many followers and people 'watching' their auctions. You can actually click on a listing and add it to your very own Watch List.
So we have started our own little Pulse group of artists on eBay and we all list one art piece per week that we all agree we will watch. That is how I have ended up on the Pulse page 2 weeks in a row. We have about 120 members right now, and the most number of watchers that I have had so far on anything is 42...so obviously not everyone is watching. But I think this is also due to the fact that they are confused and only click onto the auction (which counts as a hit), but they don't click onto 'watch this auction'...so that's most likely why we have such a discrepancy.
Plus, as is the norm for any group, we have the non-believers that think the whole idea is a waste of time and isn't going to benefit anyone anyhow. So why they even join, I don't know, but I do know they are there. From time to time one of them will come in and squawk and yap and complain...
The way that I see it, our tribe of artists is helping each other gain a tad more attention. Who is it hurting? We have banded together because of a common goal...we want to make livings doing our artwork. How can that be a bad thing?
Thursday
My guest blogger idea hasn't been the hit of the week...so far I only have 2 artists that even answered my questions! :( Gees, I was hoping people would come up with some really funny responses to my questions and we could all giggle for a few minutes. I'll keep trying to get some people interested...maybe my questions were the wrong ones.
At any rate, this is a 9 x 12" oil painting on canvas board that I haven't yet finished. I'm trying to get some feedback from other artists on how to correctly paint water so that it's realistic, even though this is an impressionist piece. I really do enjoy painting in the impressionist style!
Painting Florida all weekend...
April Fool's!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I posted my Jumpback Mountain ACEO tonite on eBay and had a bid within 3 minutes! hahahahaha
This one is probably going to hit the Pulse page, too. I wouldn't be at all surprised.
I decided today that I am going to enlist some fellow artists to do some Guest Blogging in here since my 3 fans must be getting bored by my constant blatherings. I think I'll try to find someone with a sensahuma and give them a list of questions to answer and see if they can come up with some funny stuff. I'll keep you posted!
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Doodles 124
6:30 am on a Sunday??
Black & White image
Florida 59
Viacom vs Google
Tour de Chaos
Pet Video Contest #10
Klimt revisited
A lot to be grateful for....
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