A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Go Fish


Just continuing painting portraits of children, though I think I might try doing a landscape painting soon in gouache. I have joined Zazzle and, so far, have a card and a T-Shirt for sale with an image of the Smile girl on them. Of course, if it sells, I will only earn a small amount, but I figure it's a step in the right direction. It's kind of fun turning the artwork into a useful product, but it is time consuming, so I will only make up a couple of products a day and post them on the Zazzle site. I will also make a link somehow from the blog to the store, so you can check out my gallery if you want to. It's just bare bones right now. I'm trying to decide which images I want to use as product designs. I'm also tempted to make cards, posters and T-Shirts with some kind of message like religious (Buddhism) or political (mental health advocacy?) on them. This could potentially be quite challenging, you know, not just painting portraits but getting into the design and marketing end of things. It's new to me, but I'm willing to give it a try.

I have been going in and out of moods lately. I have taken a few more steps back from singing, not just because I've been painting, but because my confidence level has dropped quite a bit and when that happens I sing poorly and have little enthusiasm. I hope this is temporary. I also spend too much time indoors. I have it in my head that I'm becoming agoraphobic because I don't even want to go outside to get my mail. I'm going to have to push myself to go out several times a week. I would like to paint out of doors and there is a public park with a reservoir about 20 minutes from here. If I could do that I would feel quite brave.

2 comments:

tooearly said...

your pictures are amazing! Thank you for sharing them.

Wanderer said...

Thanks David, your comment means a lot to me.

Kate