First, thank you for the support below. I should've told you not to gush over me, but I have to say, what helps more than anything is to know I am not alone in my moments of doubt, that you all feel that way from time to time. I know that deep down, even told other people that when they were doubting themselves, but sometimes I lose perspective and just need to be reassured that everyone feels that way sometimes. Like I said, I don't think my "art world" friends ever make me doubt things, it's the others in my life that make me look at things from a broader perspective and then I question everything.
On another note . . .Lately, I've been getting some flickr and blog comments that lead me to believe people think I am a digital artist, and even a couple of blogs have linked me as a digital artist and I'm not. I mostly work the old-fashioned way - scissors and glue.
I WISH I knew how to do more digitally but about all I have figured out is layering textures for backgrounds, then I just print them out and glue everything to them anyway. So, I thought I'd show you the backs of a couple of my older figures so you can see that they are constructed from cut pieces and glued together.

I Just Wanna Fly, below, has 6 pieces glued here but by the time she was finished with hat and cuffs and trims there were 11 pieces in just the main figure. All cut and glued and hand colored.

Hope, below, has 9 pieces glued together not counting the 3 on her hat.

And, lastly, one of my newest characters without wings. This crazy person (for Nancy's Collage Dreams on Paper class) has 13 pieces glued together with the wings. (This one is harder to see the cut edges because I should've scanned on another color to avoid the bright contrast but you get the idea)


Hey, but I did learn a little trick by accident this morning that might be fun to play with. If you scan the back of a figure into your computer so that it is white on a black background, take it into Gimp (gimp is a photo editing program that is much like photoshop but free and not as sophisticated - good for easy edits), "color to alpha" which means it takes everything white and makes it transparent, save it as a png image, you can put the shape over another picture and make an interesting silhouette. Hmmmm, may have to play with that a bit more. Would be a great do-it-yourself template for wings or crowns or all sorts of new things to play with.
