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There is a very real struggle that goes on in the life of a visual artist. That struggle is between creating and promoting. For instance, I know that if I want to sell my art I need a promoter and since I can’t pay someone to do it for me then I must be my own promoter. And in the world of online art sales one of the most touted ways to do that is to blog about your art and life as an artist.

Here is where the struggle comes in. Many visual artists are introverts who have a hard time writing about anything and especially their own art and life.

We generally don’t want to draw attention to ourselves and will avoid having the spotlight. However if we ever intend to sell any art we must get it out there in front of potential buyers and collectors.

Ah, the struggle is real, especially for me personally. So with this post I just wanted to put that out there for the reader in the hopes that you will have patience with artists like me who go long periods of time without a new blog or social media post.

I am a lover of history and nostalgia and much of my work reflects that love. This is a piece I created of a village that has a definite historic flavor and I tried to make it feel like an impressionist style even though my tools are entirely digital. I am always striving to make digital art that doesn’t look digital.

I’ve included the description I wrote to go with this image on the day I posted it to my website because I was feeling the role of a storyteller that day and I hope you enjoy reading it.

It goes like this…

“An impressionist style view of a medieval village as seen from a hill overlooking the town center. There is a tall spire on the cathedral dominating the other smaller houses and buildings with their charming red rooftops. The community sprawls out over the rolling green fields and hills to a range of mountains in the distance.

In your imagination zoom into the center of the bustling main street and hear the sounds of hawkers trying to lure you to buy their goods and carriage wheels clattering on the cobblestone pavement. Smell the aromas of flowers and street vendors cooking meat on spits and bread baking and fresh horse manure from the horse drawn buggies and coaches.

Feel the excitement of a day at the town market in the late afternoon as things wind up for the last of daylight, everyone preparing to close up shop and go home. A quick look at the cloudy sky seems to warn of coming showers. Time to find a bed for the night…”

You can find and purchase prints of this image in my Landscapes collection on the home page.

Autumn is a Lady is a modern contemporary abstract piece I recently created and when I was finished the title jumped out at me. I remember thinking what a great book cover it would make and how if I were a writer, I would write a novel of the same name just so I could put this art on the cover.

This is an example of one of my favorite techniques for making abstract art I call stacking effects. I started with a base image that was a vintage magazine ad from the public domain and I took it into my go to software, Gimp 2.10 where I started transforming it into an abstract with various effects and then tweaked the colors and the final result is what you see above. This piece has become a personal favorite of mine already.

It is available for purchase in many print formats and on cool products here at my website.

#modernart #contemporaryartist #abstractart #bookcover #interiordecorating #BuyIntoArt #FindArtThisSummer

Her name is Rudbeckia but you can call her black eyed susan. She is wild and free and loves to snuggle up with an Indian blanket on the side of a hill or in a meadow. She has long golden petals and beautiful brown lashes and though she resembles her cousin the sunflower, she likes to think she is more fun. You can become quite attached to her and love her all summer long but don't cry when she goes away for the winter. She promises to return next spring.

She allowed me to capture her in this pretty abstract artwork so that you could have something to remember her by.

What exactly is art and what does it mean to us? Well it turns out there isn’t one definitive answer to this question. You can ask a hundred people and get a hundred different answers.

I thought it would be fun to see how some famous artists answered this question. Here’s what I found.

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” -Pablo Picasso

“All art is but imitation of nature.”
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
-Edgar Degas

“Art is the signature of civilizations”
-Jean Sibelius

“Art is a line around your thoughts.”
– Gustav Klimt

“To be an artist is to believe in life.”
– Henry Moore

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” – René Magritte

“Art should be something that liberates your soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further.”
– Keith Haring

“The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.”
– Claude Monet

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”
– Edward Hopper

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”
– Michelangelo

“My opinion is that the best thing would be to work on till art lovers feel drawn toward it of their own accord, instead of having to praise or to explain it. “
-Vincent Van Gogh

“The only time I feel alive is when I’m painting. “
-Vincent Van Gogh

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”
– Georgia O’Keeffe

“I paint flowers so they will not die.”
– Frida Kahlo

“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.”
– Dorothea Lange

So with that, I will end this post with my own quote about art.

“Art is not what I do, it’s who I am. If you cut me, I bleed art. “
-Shelli Fitzpatrick

What is your definition of art?

Are you down in the dumps and feeling blue? You need art.
Did you know that art can relieve anxiety and improve your mood?

Studies have shown that viewing beautiful artwork can mimic the feelings you get when you are falling in love by releasing dopamine in your brain.

There are also reports that art can improve your critical thinking skills. These benefits are reported to come not only from creating art but also from looking at art.

When you are choosing a piece of art to display in your own home, be sure to consider how that art makes you feel, because this will be a lasting effect for you and can even have positive health benefits, both mentally and physically.

I am happy to invite you to browse my artist website and let it give you a lift. You might just fall in love with something and want to take it home with you where you can reap the happy benefits everyday!

Obsessed with Abstracts

A quick browse thru my artist website will reveal to you that I have an obsession with digital abstract art. I love to look at it and especially to create it.

There is such a freedom in just letting the work lead you. When you start out just playing around with color, shapes, brushes and effects. Then you reach that moment when an artwork starts to gel and you suddenly know what it is supposed to look like so now you can take the lead and add the finishing touches.

Each piece turns into an adventure and the creation of each piece is exciting and fresh. It may sound vain for me to say this but when I look back again at certain artworks I have made I get that same excitment all over again.

One thing I really love about abstract work is that each piece is truly unique and while the style can be copied, they cannot be exactly duplicated. How do I know? Because I have tried to make the same thing twice and even I can't do it with my own art. That is why I don't mind posting my abstract art for sale online and letting it inspire others.

View more of my work at my artist website

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Fractal Watercolor Fusion Art

What is it?

It’s a new style of art I am exploring by fusing my fractals with silhouette shapes and watercolor backgrounds to form unique artwork that is colorful decorative and exciting. A new kind of abstract realism and a way to take fractals to the next level in artistry. I invite you to come browse my growing collection of modern fractal watercolor fusion art and see what is new.

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"Fractals for kids?" you say and I say, "Why not?"

As it turns out I have a perfect fractal for little girls who love pink unicorns. This cool artwork is as close to catching a unicorn as you can get in the fractal universe. See the pink pearly horns?

When I created this piece the first thing I saw was the unicorn horns and the candy stripes and I immediately thought, "Wow! this is a perfect whimsical design for a child!" So while we don't normally think of fractals and kids going together, I want to challenge that way of thinking with some of my own designs like this one!

You can get this design on a fleece blanket for your little unicorn lover to keep them warm this winter!

Well on the last day of 2017 I reached a small milestone in that I uploaded my 100th artwork to this site. It sounds like such a small thing but when I started I really had no idea how long it could take to build up a body of work. So I am taking it in baby steps, trying to only add my very best work and keep the mindset of quality over quantity. I think if I could reach a daily goal of two uploads or at least five per week that by the last day of 2018 my goal of 500 nice artworks will be met. Then I can set a new goal, maybe something like selling a print of all 500. Now that would be a milestone indeed! Follow me on this journey and see how well I am able to reach my goals one baby step at a time.

Update: On Oct 9 2021 I realized this post needed a photo. I went back and counted my posts in the order I made them and this was the 100th piece of artwork that I uploaded that day. I thought to myself, "how perfect that it is a piece featuring babies for a post named "Baby Steps"

So you fill in the blank of the title and you will still have the truth. For the purpose of this blog post though I will fill in the blank for you. Dammit Jim, I'm an artist not a writer. I just realized that I haven't written a blog for this site in over 2 years. Shame on me, ha ha.

Honestly I have about 6 blogs besides this one floating around out there and only one of them do I post to with any regularity. I have no idea if anyone even reads my blogs and I am always tempted to start each new post with the words "Dear Diary" because I think I am my only reader.

So what should I write about? hmmm, I don't know. Dear diary, today I made some art. yesterday I sold some art but not here. Does blogging here help sell art? Well anyway I am back to where I started.

If my blog posts are few and far between and seem to have no purpose my excuse is I'm an artist not a blogger. :)

On Becoming a Digital Artist
by Shelli Fitzpatrick


I’ve always been an artist, but I have only recently realized that I’ve become a digital artist and how that happened is really quite incidental.

I never thought of myself as a starving artist, even though I was close to being starved for creative outlets due to my financial estate of barely above the poverty line while I struggled as a waitress to raise two children on my tips.

We didn’t go hungry but I also didn’t have money to spare for art supplies so I became very resourceful and used whatever medium was available at the moment.

I drew on napkins and school notebook paper with ink pens and pencils, until once, when I found some left over model paints at a yard sale and some clay pots, I used toothpicks for brushes and painted the pots with those enamel model paints.

Then I bought cheap acrylic paints and miniature wooden boxes and painted them. I planted cactus in the pots and glued felt in the boxes and these became Christmas gifts for family and friends.

I would also hodge-podge my drawings onto wooden plaques and give them away not realizing that I had no record of any of this art for the future or that I might need one someday, so nearly all of my early work is undocumented.

Once my kids were on their own, I acquired a laptop and began dabbling in digital art with simple paint programs which produced very primitive and naive art and saving it all to my hard drives.

Then my daughter gave me a digital camera and I discovered a love for snapping photos and especially macro photography.

I started thinking of ways to make my average but decent photos into one of a kind unique works of art and that is when I got my first iPhone.

Things started getting serious from there when I signed up for Instagram and learned about all the amazing art apps for iPhone and started participating in Instagram challenges and groups.

From there I started to develop my own digital techniques of photo manipulation, glitch art and app stacking trying to create my own personal style.
I discovered I have a passion for creating abstract art and digital impressionist paintings from my photographs.

Over the past five years I have been mastering the use of Gimp software which is an alternative to Photoshop, and now days digital is about the only medium I ever use to make art.

My latest adventure has taken me into the world of fractal art with an amazing app that allows me not only to discover beautiful fractal landscapes but to tweak and manipulate them into truly unique art that I hope will become recognized as my fractal style.

And so that is how I came to realize that I am not just an artist but I am a digital artist for better or worse... and I love this digital medium because it is so versatile and elastic and seems to have endless possibilities for creating art!

As I was working on this piece, it was stirring up memories of my childhood. I like to call myself an artist from the womb because there has always been this gift God gave me bubbling under the surface struggling to burst out and He gave me eyes that look at things and see the art in them. I remember growing up in as a child, being about 10 or 11 years old and my favorite outing was not the skating rink or swimming pool like all the "normal" kids. No, I wanted to go hang out at the Denver art museum all day and enter into the imaginary worlds of the paintings that I loved there. I remember a day at the museum sitting on a bench staring at a Van Gogh of wheat fields and some other artist's rendition of a homey looking house and thinking to myself, "if I could, I would just live here in the museum and never leave." That is why it is such a thrill for me to now be able to display and offer for sale some of my art, finally in my latter years I am living the dream in a way and being able to share the gift God gave me with others to hopefully spread some smiles and happiness.