Hello my lovelies! I'm trying something different. This blog has been my baby off and on for the last 9 years. With that said, I'm trying my best to be consistent and active here for you guys, my readers and newcomers. I know a few of my returnees as they message or stop me in the streets from time to time inquiring about a post or when's the next update. As a reward for dutifully returning time after time to see whether I've updated or not, as well as those who have just arrived and decided to stay, myself and a team of bloggers from a blog community have come together to chump up and co-host an $800 USD back to school giveaway on our blogs. It's open to anyone, anywhere with a few conditions later on in this post. The giveaway raffle officially opens for entry on Tuesday, September 1st, 2015... You have a month to deliberate and secure as many entries as possible!
How to enter:
**The Rafflecopter link will provide directions for your tickets. You have the option to log in with Facebook or with your email. Different requests would allow you to earn more ticket entries to increase your chances of winning. Aside from those I won't mind if you do these as well, if they're not listed in the Rafflecopter (I'm a newbie at these blog giveaways). If you've already done the following already... then great!
1. Like my art Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ShellonArt
2. Follow me on Instagram: bluemoon_daisy
3. Follow me on Blog Luvin' (Hit the
+ Blogluvin' button on my side bar)
4.
Post a comment saying hello, which part of the world you're from and what you plan to do with the money if you win it! Click here!
5. Tell a friend!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
Terms & conditions: The giveaway starts on September 1st @ 12:00am EST and ends on October 1st @ 11:59 PM EST. There will be two winners ($400 each). Winners must be 18 years or older to win. Giveaway is open world wide, void where prohibited, Full Lives Reviews will choose the winner no later than October 6th 2015 and the winner will be notified no later than October 7th 2015. The winner has 48 hours to respond by email before forfeiting the prize. The co-hosts (like myself) will be notified no later than October 10th 2015 with the winning names.
Good luck!!
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In keeping with my recent theme, I decided to do another environmental piece. This one too will soon be up on my
Society6 store ready for purchase. With that said, it's of fish dying in a dried up river valley. Initially, I was going to put up a sign similar to the one with the bears saying "Climate change remains yet to be proven" but seeing the dying fish is already such a dire scene, I decided to use floating balloons carrying the message instead to add a little colour and life to the piece. Hope you like it.
The piece is mixed media. It was sketched lightly in pencil. I used markers to superimpose the lines. I used pencil crayons to do the shading.
Cheers!
Shelli
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Dear All,
The following is a guest post by
Lizelle from
Sandals & Sunnies. (I have often referred to her as Sher here on mine) Also, after you're finished reading this, there will be a link at the bottom of the post for her super awesome free End of Summer Giveaway. Read, enjoy, and then hightail it over there...! You can win one of my art prints...!
***
Life Lesson #18 : On sharing your fireflies with your creative friends to keep the drive alive.
When I was younger I used to chase fireflies in the field beside my house. We had just moved here and there were no signs of development for a constructive purpose yet. It was just a wide open field with tall grass full of butterflies for chasing and catching (alive and well) in masses during the golden hour while you watched daylight turn the rich green colour of healthy wild grass into a colour tinted with the shade of amber. Releasing them then, back into their home ecosystem as soon as the sun had disappeared and watching them spiral into the air happily and relieved into a dusk veiled sky.
At night, it was for watching fireflies (where I am from on the island we call them lightening bugs) pop slowly and with little purpose over the then black grassy plain.
Watching them was and is still amazing; so majestic, it seemed to me. So much so that when I heard those lyrics 'Would you believe your eyes...when ten thousand fire flies...light up the world....' it made me vividly nostalgic.
When I saw them at first they would always be alone; just one bobbing, as if the weight of their light and their beauty was too heavy to keep them steady. Yet, purposeful and driven they flew on, sharing their light with me, with every on looker. Lighting up the world like no human could imagine or conjure....
Much like the creative. Much like the artisan. Much like the ascetic.
Funny story: lightening bugs always seem to move faster to me when in pairs. Every time I sat in silence marvelling at a lightening bug, whether in that field or in the verandah of my own home, I would almost hold my breath as a voice in the back of my consciousness whispered '
Wait for it...'
Sure enough a while later as the first lightening bug was well on it's way, whether from underneath the leaf of a fig tree our from the grassy dark plain or just somewhere out of my peripheral vision, would come a next lightening bug. Soon they would catch up, if not then
almost but they would both suddenly seem to be moving so much faster into the distance....birthing a different kind of beauty for my eyes to feast upon.
I feel like the weight of an artists' creativity is like the lone lightening bug.
I recently saw an image, surfing around. It said something along the lines of surround yourself with people who light your path. I have found that good friends and or supporters don't just light your path. Hey lets face it, scarcely is that what we need. We don't need someone to provide the light for us, we have our own light, this is the age of the independent remember? More often what we need is someone to hold their light up as they walk beside us so that we can see further than beyond our footsteps, farther than the top of our toes that we thought would have been further along the track by now. Someone to improve upon our vision when our hands grow heavy with doubt so that we end up lowering our lanterns.
It is then that a good friend raises their own light, in that moment when the darkness of self doubt, obstacles or just plain tiredness seems thickest, when our own light feels too heavy for our hands.
Motivation is a powerful thing, a good friend is there to remind you not so much of the things you have not yet done but of how far you come and how capable you are of going so much farther.
Preferably over wine.
Peace. Love. Lightening bugs
***
As promised, click anywhere here on the text to get a direct link to the giveaway post. Go take part!
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I finally got around to doing environmental themes as intended since I started learning about wildlife and its conservation issues. It's what I completed my degree in (specialization under biology) and something that I found to be very relevant. There are many realities we're faced with on a daily basis. However, to me, the starkest is the lack of regard to the fragile ecosystems that surround us and ignorance of the repercussions for humans should it crumble. Earth will survive, we won't. Of course there are lots of cognizant folks out there like me, raising awareness and doing their part to leave the world better than they found it... but there's so much more work to be done.
This was made increasingly evident after reading all those comments under news articles about the murder of Cecil, the lion. I saw
an article about how lions kill people and essentially, the lion deserved to be killed. That is the usual mentality folks have towards top predators. You know what kills humans the most out of all different specials on Earth? Other humans. Here's the real situation, animals don't have boundary lines and fences the way humans do. Yes, they have territories but how the animal kingdom works, without human interference, everything balances itself. They claimed those lands before us. They aren't encroaching on our space, we encroached on theirs. They don't always catch up to speed to acknowledge this and be aware like "Oops... the savannah is now a city."
Also, since we humans are committed to expansion with little thought towards practical coexistence, the animals can't survive and exist as before; they end up getting lazy and linger around human settlements to get easy food like domestic livestock and such. Hell, even cute monkeys are commonly considered pests too. Locally, there are hunters for monkeys. More so today as after Hurricane Ivan there is little to no food in the forest. Thus, the monkeys have relocated to live along or close to agricultural farm belts and raid the farms. Is this the animal's fault? They too have that instinctual need to do what's necessary to survive.
With all this in mind, aside from all the other things annoying me in the world today like the
resurface of open dislike of brown people in America... I've decided to explore these issues through art. Here's my first one, "Sad bear and friend." It's of two plush toys sitting in a deforested area holding a sign. Plush toys aren't alive, even though we saw Ted come to life recently... But there are real animals facing this real issue of no longer having a home due to deforestation. This reality extends beyond the bears and the birds to cures undiscovered in plants, insects and other bugs that keep the soil fertile, other mammals, etc. At this rate, we should probably go take pictures of everything for generations to come because who knows what will still exist?
Here is how it looks on my Society6 store.
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It has been that time of changing seasons where I was ready to give my blog a face lift. You may have noticed my blog looking unrecognizable from time to time over the last couple weeks.
The reality is that since last year I've been trying to decide what direction to take my blog in and what template can I live with for an extended period. I discovered a website called www.fiverr.com where you can enlist almost any service starting at $5. I decided to take a chance. Initially, it truly felt like a nightmare come to reality. I found myself rereading my correspondence thus far with the guy I hired for the job to ensure I did not misrepresent what I wanted but constantly found the blog looking worse than the day prior.
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| Here was a screen I did trying to explain to no avail what needed to be adjusted on the blog after he applied this weird Wordpress looking template. |
Things escalated until I finally gave up and told him just leave it alone, that I'll do it myself. Truth is, I could do it myself. I had always done it myself. I just didn't have the time and felt rather lazy about it. I attempted to cancel the $30 US custom blog order out of frustration too. I know, it's only $30 US but I felt like in this dry dry guava season $30 US is a lot to give away for free and be unhappy. It was at this point he decided to re-build our correspondence and I realized that maybe there could've been a language barrier situation. Long after the payment was issued, he continued to work to adjust to my needs and suit my fancy. I started using simpler, shorter phrases as you do with folks who are learning English and I found to be getting better results than when I used more descriptive words.
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| Here was when we started to make some progress. |
He sent me links to pick a template I liked and wanted. In the end, I'm content with the results of how it looks and I feel satisfied to send anyone to him. What I've come to learn is that while he may not get it right the first time, he's surely dedicated to getting it right eventually... and sometimes KISS (keep it simple stupid) is way more effective than what I perceived to be a long list of clear instructions.
I'm not sure how long I'll keep this template for though. Now I'm feeling for a little bit of colour added in. However, I'm so in love with my new drop down menu that I think I'll stay with it for a while.
Like the new look?
Oh! And if you'd like to give him a try, here's the profile.
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There is one truth that most should know about me and that is... I love fruits. The older I get, the less I discriminate among fruits as well. Recently, five finger (carambola) got added to my list of favourites. However, one of my absolute tried and true favourites are mangoes. I love the fruit, I love the fruit juice, I love the fruit candy, I love mango upside down cake, etc. It's safe to say that this is one fruit I love in all shapes and forms. I remember even going to my favourite gourmet supermarket Garden of Eden in Manhattan when I was studying overseas just to get the bottled mango puree juice from India. It's just so yum!
Suffice to say, when I visited a friend's house last week and discovered he had many mango trees in different varieties behind his house, we ended up trekking in the backyard. Ironically, he hates mango. I've come to the conclusion that that's the number 1 reason why I never noticed that he had mango trees. He felt inclined to make this revelation about the trees after I ranted all upset about my mum claiming a celon mango that I had been patiently waiting to ripe. In fact, I think everyone that crossed my path heard the injustice of the boldface claim of my mango. Of course, no one understood... but that's ok! His backyard is like endless mango ville.
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| My unprepared self going to trek through the mud to get mangoes. |
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| We have to cross those two planks/makeshift bridge to get across. |
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| Guess who was a happy camper with a huge bag of mangoes? |
No, there are no pictures of my bag as I'm not trying to motivate anyone to claim my mangoes again. Easy lesson good for dunce.
What fruit or food do you love this much?
Love & light,
Shelli
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