Weeklyish thingy and more angry fat women.

Two more! The model for this first one is someone who very graciously offered me a photo because they wanted to help widen my pool of body types.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m all confident and shit. I have a lifetime of cultural conditioning (including all the time I spent hoping to be a ballerina) and body dysmorphia and disordered eating to overcome. It’s a process learning to embrace all of my body, and this project is really helping – I see beauty in all of these bodies, and really leaning in to that is helping my relationship with my own. This next painting is a big step for me, though.

I avoid seeing myself naked. I’ve NEVER taken a nude photo, and after a peeping tom incident in my late 20s I lost the freedom I had felt to wander around my apartment nude. So it was a big damn deal for me to take off my clothes, set up my phone on the selfie stand, and take a few photos to work from. It’s a big deal for me to include the identifying beauty mark on my neck in this one, and the paintbrush in the hand making it clear which of these is a self-portrait. It’s a very big deal to then put it on the internet and enter it in a juried art show (as I just did, we’ll see what happens). So anyhow, this is me, as realistically and with as much love as I am capable of.

Places to buy stuff!

• The Gamecrafter: your home for the new and slightly improved Neurotic Owl Tarot. AND Neurotic Owl’s Faerytale Tarot! https://tgc.link/Faerytaletarot
• TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products.  Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
• REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff.  T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
• AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book!  Daydreams and Whimsies!  AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
• ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection

Did I miss something?  I think that’s everything.

What’s making me happy this week:

I’m entering three pieces in another art show! We’ll see if any get juried in but it is exciting and it pushed me to pick up a few frames on sale so I have options (working in the same size 90% of the time means I can pretty much swap frames and mats between pieces as needed so even if nothing gets in I can use them).