Carissa Rose; Art with Attitude

The other day, I stumbled upon Carissa Rose’s work on Artfire and I’m enthralled!

She is a tattooist in training but also works with pencil and paintbrush. In her own words, her “art is inspired by tattoos and people”  and it isn’t hard to relate to her statement once you see her work.

The first thing that hits you (or me, as it were) is the contrast. “In your face” color cuts the deepest black into pieces. No shades of gray; no compromise!
Most of her subjects are young women but although femininity is dripping off of them like the colorful run-lines of paint that you can see in so many places, they are certainly not stereotypical beauty-queens without a mind of their own. They are characters, and as real, with all the facets of darkness, as the fields of perfect inky black.
Her work skillfully speaks to the observer. In many of her pieces you have strong eyes staring straight at you from the painting, involving you in the scene.

This is some serious art with attitude!

Thank you to Carissa Rose for the permission to display her work!
Artwork shown ©Carissa Rose Stevens. Do not use, edit or publish without authorized consent.

Handmade Jewelry Hub

NOTE (Nov 2010):
Unfortunately, the 1000 Markets venue has sold out and any of the related links in this post do not work any longer!

Twitter just introduced a new way of organizing the blizzard of tweets that you may get hit by on their site. You can now create lists of people that have one common denominator in some shape or form. It makes it a lot easier to filter what you may be interested in and avoid some of the stuff you are not.

So, since I am making handmade jewelry, it was merely a matter of time until I started a list about just that. I have accumulated more than 450 artisans that all make handmade jewelry of some kind. You will find glass, steam punk, wire wrapping, silversmithing, PMC and lots more. Come take a peek and get emerged in style, fashion, color, luxury and bling!

If you are creating handmade jewelry, have a twitter account and would like to be included in this list, please leave a comment or send me a direct message on Twitter.

Halloween Pet Costume Parade

Just in time for Halloween, here are some great handmade costumes for your best friend:

My New Artfire Store

For the past week or so I have been fine tuning and accessorizing my new online store at Artfire.com.
Artfire has come a long way since I looked at it for the first time in the beginning of the year. I don’t mean to insult anybody but back then it had a kind of second-hand look to it. It was visually not very pleasing in my opinion and it was hard to find anybody that wanted to buy rather than sell anything.
I probably should have stuck with Artfire and given it a chance to develop at that time because now, visually and feature wise, I think it might be the most promising out of the three venues (Etsy, 1000 Markets, Artfire) I am a part of.
Well, I will stay with all three, at least for a while. So I guess I will find out whether or not I’m correct.
So, here is a picture of the online store front, but if you have a little time, you should probably check it out in person because there is a whole lot more to see.