A New Year, New Outlook

As you may have noticed, I've been frequenting the blog less often lately. I've been struggling with balancing my computer life with my "real" life, as I think many of you can relate to! As the kids are getting older, my free time is dwindling, and many days I have none at all (depending on how they cooperate with their naptimes). When I am able to grab a few minutes, I try to answer emails, update the blog, etc., but even so, I'm often not able to keep up on it as I'd like to... And that's not even considering trying to find time to do artwork!

Anyway, all this to say that you may be seeing a little less of me, as I'm going to cut back on a lot of the computer work for a while, and try to concentrate a little more on spending time with the kids and doing artwork. I will still post photos of new work on my Flickr site for sure, and I'll try to squeeze in a blog entry every so often as well. So, please be patient with me! I promise I won't drop completely out of view, I just may be a little harder to see!

But before I go for now, I'll share a couple projects I've been working on. The first is pretty self-explanatory- a journal spread for Noah. The little guy is learning to walk! It's so fun to witness this process- we can literally see him improving every day. I can't say I'm 100% pleased with these pages, but they're good enough...

The other project is something that's been brewing in my head for a while, and yesterday I decided to go ahead with it. I've been wanting to take some nude self-portraits. I'm not sure how I'll use them, but it just felt like something that needed to be done. So, while Noah was taking a nap and Riley was playing in his room, I set up the camera and went for it! I'm really happy with the way they turned out. I didn't want to post them here, since this is too easy a place for just anyone to copy them, but if you'd like to see some of them, you can go to my Picturetrail site. At the bottom of the page is an album that is password-protected. The password is "blog".

One series is on our family room floor. I decided to leave everything as it was- kid's toys, etc., since that's what my life consists of these days! And the other series was taken in an arched niche in our dining room-turns out it's the perfect size for a human!

I used some of the neat editing tools in my camera to blur and darken areas, which I think creates a really nice effect. Plus it doesn't hurt to soften up those stretch marks either! The shots on my other site are larger than these. I cropped in on these so as not too show too much, but I rather like the cropped images, too! I'll have to play around with some cropping on the others.

Thank you, everyone, for bearing with me while I try and re-prioritize my life. I hope you all are having a wonderful new year!