I love being inspired to art by friends’ happy pics | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

I get inspiration for art every time I see something that expresses joy to me. This week, I was inspired by my friend Eileen A. Jacobs’ profile pic. In it, she radiates such joy that, even though I was in the midst of another painting project, I wanted to stop and create a happy muse of my own. Here it is in progress. I I edited out half her hair to show more ocean, and may edit out more to make room for a jumping dolphin and maybe a sea turtle in the water. (I did.) I’m not good with hands, so it takes me awhile to get them down to size and shape. They all start out as mitts, then get whittled down to man hands, then painted down to final fingers. On the left is the arm and hand as originally drawn, and on the right I’ve begun defining the finger joints and resizing the arm. I’ll go find a tutorial on painting the ocean since I’ve never done that. Right now, though, I’m going to thin her hair down a little more to make room for that dolphin and sea turtle. The final version is shown here on the right. I realize now why I had to stick the turtle in there. The series of paintings I am doing have to do with the moon’s energy, even though the sun appears in this one. Turtle as a totem has special medicine. They carry the Moon’s cycles on their back: 28 sections for the 28 days and 13 plates for the 13 moons.