Hi guys.

Today's update is a little bit different. Instead of doing a specific art update, or an update on, you know, sewing or something like that, I'm actually going to do a little bit of a reintroduction post and some chats about all the different aspects of my life and what I like to blog about here over on Hive.

So I'll do a basic little bit about me, an update on where I am in my painting journey, an update on where I am in my sewing journey, costume creation, dance life, dance mum life, my health journey, because there's some pretty big updates there, and a few other little areas in my life. Just as a little bit of background, a little bit of a chatty Sunday post. It's Sunday here in Australia.

So let's get started.

Super Quick Intro About Me

I am an Australian dance mum. Dance runs a lot of my life, dance, art and creating. Anything that is sparkly and pretty and artistic is generally something that I have in my life. So most of my interests and things revolve around that. And that is mostly what I blog about and post about over here on Hive.

I got into Hive through Splinterlands and then branched out into the blogging aspect of it, which I mostly blog about art and creative sides of things rather than crypto and Splinterlands sides of things, although I have done posts about that in the past.

Art Update

Any of you guys that have followed my blog in the past know that I do a lot of posts about creating artwork, and in this case, normally acrylic painting, normally on canvas panel, is probably my most preferred medium.

However, as I'm sure most of you also know, I hurt my hand about two or three years ago, my dominant hand too. So I have some nerve damage running through three of the fingers and my thumb on my hand, meaning that I find large scale artwork and anything that's too fiddly quite difficult.

Painting is actually a lot easier randomly than drawing with pen and paper, because it's that pencil grip that holds a pencil and requiring movement from fingers and wrists that I find hard, as opposed to when painting, quite often you use your elbow a little bit more. So I find the actual painting a little bit easier.

You'll see at the bottom of this post I will have included a whole heap of my little daily artworks and things that I do. I like to do shorter projects and things just so I don't lose that good old ADHD, you know, drive to get something completed. I find if it's going to take me too long to do that I stop work on it, and I have some paintings that I have not finished, and they are like two years old, three years old, five years old, those sorts of things.

So I like to paint these little wee daily paintings that are here. As a rule, as I said, I use acrylic paint and canvas panels, and I love colors and just experimenting with those.

This is the one that is currently sitting on my easel, and yes, it is a one-hour painting, and yes, it has been sitting on said easel for about two months. So what can I say? That's pretty clear.

like this will take 10 mins to finish, but its been sat there weeks lol

I go through phases where I paint, like, literally every single day, and then times like this when I've been a little bit more focused on the dance mom stuff.

So I guess we should move along to that.

The Dance Mum Life

So both my girls go to a large dance school here in Brisbane, Australia. We live at the dance studio, basically. The only day we are not there is Tuesdays this year. So every other day my kids are there, normally for about four hours each day, and Saturday they're each there for about four hours each. So there's about eight hours of dancing in total.

We even go on Wednesday mornings before school, but they love it. They're part of a big performance team, and we do a lot of eisteddfods.

So most of our house is covered in costumes and glitter and rhinestones, because I do a lot of costume creation for the girls as well, where possible with my hand though. So I do find anything with cutting and things like that is actually really quite challenging. But I'm quite a creative person, and I can often find ways around things that I can't do with my hand, which is really awesome.

I think at the moment this year we're running at about close to 40 dances that my girls are in at the moment, with eisteddfod performance team, solos and things like that. We do exams, and we're getting close to starting the prep work for the end-of-year Christmas concert as well, which is going to be what I'm going to term a bit of a shit show this year.

So that's that.

Costume Creation

So costumes, as I said, I like to do a lot of rhinestoning and blinging, as you can see in some of the photos below that I'll post up. I have a fairly big collection, and I like to create things with that.

This week i have not created anything new however.

Art, Hobbies and Things Like That

So again, most of my hobbies relate around art stuff and the dance world, and my main little side hustle at the moment that I am trying to get up and running is creating some dance theme coloring books and pintables and things like that for Etsy and KDP

I'm not sure if I'm a little bit too late for this market or if there is still a few, you know, aspects in there to explore. I guess we'll see how we go, and I want to create these books anyway because my kids like them, and the kids at the studio like the things that I create and just hand out for funsies, sharesies at competitions and things like that.

So they enjoy them, so I'm sure someone will eventually enjoy them if I can get the marketing and things right for those. And I have some benefits here in the sense that I am a dance mum creating things for dance kids rather than some random person that says to GPT, "Hey GPT, create me a coloring book on dance," and then the pictures all come out really crappy and they're not, you know, poses that are particularly, you know, dance-related or the costumes aren't right or there's just stuff that's not right in those. I mean unhappily and happily AI IS getting better but still. you need to be able to edit with quality right??

So I'm hoping that maybe I can do a better job with those.

My last post that I have put up was on my coloring book and where I am with those. So I use AI to generate some ideas sometimes. However, I actually do the drawing myself. And then I think I explained in the last post as well that I run my final images through a vectorizer just to crisp up the lines.

However, I know that's not an accurate vector because the mathematics behind it comes out quite different if you run it through a vectorizing program. So we'll see how that comes out. However, it looks much better in print to have it done that way. So we'll see.

I'm hoping that I will be able to get at least one of these books finished in the next month or so. Although of course my ADHD brain tells me I can have it finished by next week, which is obviously not going to happen. So we'll see how we go with that. And it would be nice to get one done for Christmas and things as well.

So I kind of need to just to get on and do a few things. It's a bit like the little daily painting. Sometimes it's best to get them done and move on to the next one, and you can use what knowledge you've gained from that one little artwork in the next one as you learn a whole heap of skills along the way.

And I'm quite certain that my first colouring book I produce isn't going to be the best one, so I might as well get it over with and hopefully I can build on my knowledge from those and keep moving forward with that.

Now the Health Update

Okay, so I think about four months ago, five months ago or so, I posted that I was doing this really big health kick. And boy, have I ever done a little bit of a health kick.

So having reached that time in life when body starts to decide that it doesn't want to work as well as it did when I was younger, decided that needed to take control of a few things like that.

And I have managed to lose 21 kilos since January. So pretty happy, pretty happy with that.

Now that is a lot of hard work at the gym. I go to the gym about three or four days a week, mostly doing weight training and also doing some walking as well.

And then near the end, I think I said that there was a small dose of the GLP-1, so Monjaro. So I'm still on a really, really tiny dose of that, and it has been amazing, absolute life-changing medication. Say what you like, ive done the hard yards, they gym work, the diet, and this has been such an awesome addition.

Also fixed up some perhaps slightly dodgy sugars that I had as well. So probably due to still carrying a little bit too much weight, I think is why that's worked so well.

Now, even i think this post is getting too long... so i might actually stop it here. and get on with finding some images to go in this mega post. Let me know if ANYONE gets to the end of it!

Chat later

BLINGIT

HERE ARE SOME OF MY RECENT DAILY PAINTINGS

LOVE AND LIGHT

HAPPY PAINTING