I am sick of the dungeon!!! I am not a delinquent. I have over 40 DSRs now, and they are all good! I have 82 unique feedback and 117 total feedback now.

I need 18 more unique feedbacks!

Okay, I will get some more when the latest thing I bought arrives, probably. But right now I am doing something about my seller feedback situation. I got fed up with it. Two days ago I began creating Five Minute Art -- ACEOs created within five minutes, start to finish. They're fast and powerful in strong sketch mediums, my first two are in Conte Sketch Pencils on nature subjects.

I was happily surprised when they started coming out so good! They amazed me. I didn't realize that using a timer would force me to simplify and economize, or that I'd draw with the same focus that I do Asian technique painting. I'm sure I'll do some Asian technique paintings in this sale too. Each day I'll do a new one with whatever medium is fast enough to finish it within five minutes. Could be pastel pencils. Could be sketch pencils as I've been doing. Could be opaque watercolor or transparent watercolor or even acrylics -- though getting out the acrylics and setting up to do them would take more time than the art with how they're packed up!

On a good day, I might even post more than one, just however many I do. This special super-sale will continue with 99 cent minimum bids and no reserve until I've gained 18 more Unique Feedbacks and crawled out of the dungeon for listings visibility.

I was getting more sales before the new policies went into effect with decreased visibility for new members, and now I'm determined to do something about it. I doubt I'll become a Power Seller. I am not sure how that gets awarded anyway, and what I'm selling is original miniature artworks, ACEOs. It's not manufactured goods sold and shipped in bulk, it's much more unique, specific and personal than that. I've become a serious collector too as I go on, and do occasionally buy them.

But there's another reason for me to do lots of ACEOs this month, and that is that I need a new full range set of Prismacolors. I've been doing some wild things with them lately after reading Masterful Color by Arlene Steinberg, and every ACEO that I've posted using her techniques has sold on its first listing. But, those take a lot of time and go through the pencils like I'm eating Pringles or something. Also, I keep running into colors my vintage set doesn't have, because they got introduced during the years I was broke and couldn't replace worn out Prismacolors or shop for new colors. I have the 24 latest New Colors from buying those sets, but not colors like Raspberry yet that came in after I first bought my first 120 color set -- it's been maintained by replacement pencils since 1990! About time I got a new one.

Check out all my listings by searching on Robs Art -- and for low price without reserve, look for the ones that have 5 Minute Art in the title. All other pieces will have my usual $9.95 minimum bid or contest-specific minimum bids like my Theme Week entries at $4.99 or my monthly NibbleFest Art Contest entry that starts at 99 cents. I doubt it'll take all month to reach my feedback goal. So far both of the cool nature sketches I listed have bids from new buyers! This is working!

Enjoy -- you won't see these prices very long, but the art I'm doing for it is coming out better than I could have dreamed. Simple, powerful and evocative, they still count as Realism! Take a look!

I've got 51 feedback now and a blue-green star -- neat color that. I was wondering when I'd get a new color change. The stars are pretty cool, it's great to tell at a glance that I'm getting somewhere and how long others have been on eBay.

I'm not the newest newbie any more by a long shot. I still have a ways to go, some things don't kick in until I get past 100 feedbacks. But I'm more than half there.

I've been having success with my art and also with selling ACEO blanks cut from scratchboard and Stonehenge art paper. So now I'm thinking of expanding that and getting all 60 colors of Canson mi-Tientes, to offer Canson ACEO blanks in assortments that let the buyer choose what color goes in the assortment. I can restock when I start running low on popular colors, but having all of them would rock for being able to use them for my own art too. Nice to have the full range of colors available!

Not sure when I'll get this, whether I'll do it this month or next month, but I've been planning and working out several cool things I want to do. One thing I need is to pick up a better webcam, one that has an inbuilt microphone, so that I can do some art instruction videos as well as written articles. I haven't seen anyone do a Bob Ross type of video for doing little ACEOs or any other kind of miniature art, but I do so many types of miniatures that it wouldn't be hard to set up for that. Get a backdrop set up around my table, then set the strong lights to focus on the art and work while the camera is set up pointing at my work area, then keep the preview screen going on my laptop just out of view so that I can see that I'm doing things in a way the camera can see it.

I have short squat short-fingered hands but I don't think this is about what I look like so much as how to do the art. I'll clip my stupid looking fingernails before doing it but other than that not worry about that. It's about doing something real.

I've also got some good art commissions in progress, have been getting ACEO commissions as well as the two large pastel pieces I am doing. One is a portrait I have to be mysterious about as it's a gift for the person in it, who gets to be the one who sees it first. The other a mystical painting of two cheetahs circling a fire in a spirit dream. I see the cheetahs moving when I think about it. I see the painting coming in closer and closer focus, and I know I can get good detail in it with using Colourfix paper.

I've sold the one ACEO that I did using Colourfix sanded pastel paper and may put some Colourfix ACEO blank lots out too. I'd need to cut more of the stuff and have six cards in a lot the way I do with other fancy papers. It's good with pastel pencils especially, but I think it'll work well with colored Conte crayons too for mini-pastels.

Maybe I can do another one with my pastel pencils sometime soon.

Tip of the Entry: When using colored pencils on a new surface, pay attention to how it handles and how fast the pencils wear down. Does it blend easily or does the texture break up your strokes? Colourfix sanded paper takes many layers and much burnishing to get color way down into the valleys but it will stand up well to underpainting because the sandy gesso is painted onto heavy watercolor paper. It will also sand down the pencils fast and shape the points as you work, because it is literally sandpaper.

Canson Mi-Tientes has a smooth side and a textured side with a basketweave look. That basketweave look can be very good for loose drawings, breaking up strokes and letting the color of the paper shine through between the marks. If you want fine detail, use the smooth side.

Record your impressions of each new paper or board you try in a notebook, so that if you go back to it after some time you'll know what to expect.

So far I've had some pretty stunning sales. One of my OSWOA scratchboard artworks went for $61 and yesterday, a scratchboard ACEO went for $50.99 -- I'm starting to see eBay turn into a venue that has all the best aspects of the SF conventions I used to go to (auctions are fun!), and the street market in New Orleans.

Much to my pleasant surprise, I found out selling supplies is also lucrative. I posted one lot of precut ACEO blanks in specialty Stonehenge paper, a sampler with one each of seven different colors, and another lot with six precut scratchboard ACEO blanks. They took off. I sold most of the scratchboard I had on hand, and started running low on baseball card sleeves. I needed to reorder those! So I put in a Blick order and got some more scratchboard coming in, ordered some more baseball card sleeves and will post lots again.

One of two things will happen. Either it'll eventually saturate the market and most of the artists who want to try scratchboard and don't want to invest in a giant sheet to do so will get what they wanted and be done with it, or it'll become a staple and I'll wind up opening an eBay store with various cool papers and specialty papers cut into ACEO blanks. I could cut some from watercolor paper too, in two different grades.

I've got lots of good watercolor paper, having picked up a super bargain Arches Block and Brush set from Blick before that ran out. 12" x 16" block with a size 6 Arches Kolinsky brush. These brushes are neat, not only are they incredibly high quality but the brush comes with a little snap-on protective cap that has breathing holes so it can dry out -- but keeps cats, toddlers, random dust and so on from getting into the nicely shaped point.

I don't think it'll turn into a full scale art supply shop, but who knows? Maybe if I can get good prices from manufacturers I could carry a few small supplies eventually. I'm holding off on starting a store until I see how it goes. While I made enough on those lots that I could cover a monthly fee if I started it this month, I'd have to know I could turn over that much volume every month.

But then, I go to other sellers' stores like that all the time, and if I specialize in ACEO blanks in papers that don't specifically compete with saigonron2000 and the other big sellers, then maybe I will have made myself a niche.

I have a Blick order online waiting for supplies too, something I wanted for years but never actually got, that I see a reason now to get it. I love working on colored Canson Mi-Tientes art paper. It's very high quality, heavy paper, good for ACEOs because it's stiff and thick paper, and it comes in 60 different colors. For a decade I've been going to art stores and drooling at the display, then making hard choices and getting maybe a dozen sheets at a time in different colors. I bought some pads, so I've now got 20 different colors in it.

But I have a cart where I added one sheet each of all 60 colors, which would do for a start if I can sell ACEO blanks, precut to size and packaged in a baseball card sleeve so the artist can do an ATC or ACEO without worrying about running out of sleeves or finding the box with the sleeves. In every lot, I put in one card of the other paper for the artist to try, a random Stonehenge color with the scratchboard, a scratchboard card with the Stonehenge lot. If I do this with Canson Mi-Tientes, I could cut a lot of cards at once and offer either a big sixty-card "All Colors" pack or assortments that let the buyer choose what colors they want in the lot. Pretty much like the stores sell the big sheets, but in little ACEO sizes with sleeves.

Then restock when any given color starts running low and keep it going indefinitely, maybe get extra sheets of popular colors if certain colors like black or a beige or gray start selling a lot. This is a fairly large capital outlay to set up the store and get that stock.

On the other hand, I live on Social Security and they'll take any income I earn out of my check. Which, as long as I sink everything back into my business, is not actual income. Buying stock to sell, paying eBay fees, packaging expenses are all legitimate business overhead, so the trick here is for me to build the business very solid and wait till I have real profit over the overhead to go forward with it and become independent. I browsed printers today, just pricing, and passed up a good deal on an Epson printer because I don't have the funds yet to do that without having more in hand.

Yet that is on my agenda. There were so many printer listings that I'm pretty sure I'll find a good deal when I'm ready to get it. Right now if I want something printed, I need to email it to my daughter in the other room. Her printer's hooked to her computer but we're not networked due to the physical layout of the house. I would be on a wireless network able to just print from my keyboard, but I think it's the heater that's in the way blocking the signal.

I also need to get printer package labels once I get the printer, so that I can use PayPal's neat little software trick of click and print the package label from the email that tells me the buyer made a payment. That'd be handy. We're also looking into a couple of rubber stamps. One permanent one for return address, another to do the backs of ACEOs with a line for title, line for signature, line for medium, and the rest of my contact information all printed out on the stamp instead of my hand lettering each and every card with a lot of information on the back. That may make my earlier cards with hand lettered COA information on the back a bit more valuable.

I've got a logistic problem with doing them on black paper. I did several on black colored paper, and that means the back information needs to go on with the white colored pencil! Harder to write that small with a white colored pencil, but I managed it on the one I just sent out.

This is so exciting. I was a self employed artist for years in the 1990s, when I lived in New Orleans. When I look back on all the day jobs I've held, those years were the best. That life was the best -- until now, when I have a happy household to live in, loving grandkids and critters and family, and an art venue that doesn't involve pushing a 50lb cart several blocks to wreck my back hanging it on the fence. If I'd been undisabled, I would still be down there in the Big Easy doing the street art, probably have an A license and be on Jackson Square by now. But I might still be looking at eBay and doing ACEOs because these little collectible works are so much fun to do. I can go all out for detail on them or just come up with a good composition, vary my medium, establish various specialties, pretty much do whatever I want.

That's a lot of what keeps me happy selling art. Being able to do something different every time, not just repeat the same drawing over and over. New mediums, new papers, new paints and pencils, it's exciting to pick up a theme or a contest and do something I've never done. I'm working on a collage for the ACEO Art Cards Editions & Originals group's "New Years Resolution Contest" which takes doing a medium I have never done.

It would've taken some searching to find one, but the post specifically mentioned "If Robert did a collage..." as an example of going out of one's comfort zone!

So naturally, I had to do a collage. I've tried that in the past and always gotten bogged down by taking too long choosing and cutting out the images I'd include. It was always at some workshop or art jam or get together, so the supplies would be brought by whoever led or suggested the activity and when my collage wasn't done, it'd go down in the bottom of my portfolio and get forgotten.

Of course those collages were usually large, half the time on full sheets of poster paper or something! No wonder I didn't finish.

I have a good concept for it. My cat is my muse, he sheds Cat Hairs of Inspiration on everyone in chat and on the message boards I participate in, so some lucky collector will get the genuine Cat Hairs of Inspiration neatly packaged in a corner of a penny sleeve, with a picture of the furry muse and a caption all within a pretty, trifold, gold and silver fancy cuts little shrine of inspiration. Open it and see the cat and the relic, like a little reliquary.

But I also get inspired by new art supplies. And I was thinking about Inspiration and about why I didn't continue those old collages and got another idea! Cut up old Blick catalogs that I throw away anyway, and use the images of various art supplies in a collage. Eh, those are usually a bit large to put enough of them into an ACEO piece, so I may do the "Inspiration" collage larger, OSWOA or bigger, after slaughtering catalogs for it. Could be fun, certainly would be colorful and cheery!

eBay groups always give me lots of good ideas!

Tip of the Entry: When doing scratchboard, consider using a magnifier for small areas and test the particular scratchboard you're using before coloring. Claybord Inks will dry completely transparent on the black, inked areas of any scratchboard, so you may want to use those to color your art rather than other types of colorants. For tools, you don't need the fancy Claybord Tools set, a sharp Exacto blade point is good enough to get a fine line and the curved Exacto knife blade will give a nice broad but shading stroke. Improvised tools also work, like an unbent paper clip or a needle mounted in a cork, or even an awl. Anything pointed that can scratch through ink will work on scratchboard. Steel wool can be used for texturing, and an old toothbrush can be used to brush aside ink and clean spaces entirely back to white for pen and ink detail.

Today was wild. I've been watching Theme Week come up since I missed last month's Theme Week on one of my Groups -- ACEO Art Cards Editions & Originals is a big group with over 4,000 members. November's theme was Leaves, and I joined too late to participate either in Theme Week or the mid-month Swap thread. I was looking forward to the new theme, because Frost looked like something I could do something cool with on an ACEO. I had the idea of doing either a watercolor or acrylic ACEO and using Iridescent White acrylic or Winsor & Newton Iridescent Medium on the watercolor to paint frost patterns around the edges of a scene through a window, either looking in or out at a holiday scene.

Well, I did that one and it turned out to be looking in at a Christmas tree very close to the window, lot of detail in acrylics. But I really spent most of the day doing scratchboard.

I spent most of November writing a novel for NaNoWriMo, an annual writing event online that this year got 100,000 novelists jumping in to try to write 50,000 words in 30 days. You can google it if you're interested in trying to write a novel next year, they'll open up to new members again next October and it's a great site. Some Wrimo authors have gone on to sell their novels to publishers, others self publish through print on demand sites. I have been participating every year since 2000 because I'm a serious science fiction and fantasy writer, and writing is a lonely business. Once a year it's not, because you find thousands of other writers going through the same ups and downs and fits and starts, and it's fun.

So I got my book done -- Snowflake Obsidian is 80,983 words of pure fantasy with magic, action, travel, and an equine wizard. He's a horse enchanted to human sentience who learned to be a wizard in his own right and so saved the Quest and the world, being the only wizard on the spot with the Questers. Lot of fun writing it. But working on a novel did not give me much time for new art, so I eventually slacked off on doing a drawing a day, something I've been keeping up since October.

I wound up with 24 hours to have a piece ready for the ACEO TW Frost contest, and I've now posted eight entries -- all of them created on December 1st itself. All but one is in scratchboard.

I bought the tools and materials months ago, and have been experimenting on scrap pieces to try to get the tools to work. I was getting increasingly frustrated because I was holding the tool wrong and could not get a clean steady line with them... until last night, right before Dec. 1, when the novel was done and I had my frost ACEO idea and thought I could try it in scratchboard. Little short lines worked easily, and later on as I got used to the tool I was getting clean strong long lines too. I have to laugh. The tool is a little curved like a hook at one end -- and in all my experiments I was holding the dang thing backwards! Looking at it under my magnifier confirmed what the problem was, and now I've got no more trouble controlling the tool for a white line on black as I would doing a black line on white with a pen.

Four out of eight of my Theme Week ACEOs got bids on the first day, practically as fast as I posted them. It was great. I loved the way it was happening. I barely noticed I was selling, because I was reading threads in the Groups and working on my next Frost piece, posting, making sure to post into threads in all my Groups after each one was posted, starting the next.

In addition to Theme Week itself, eBay had its Holiday Bazaar, and our ACEO group got a thread, which is full of ACEO TW Frost pieces. They are gorgeous. Part of what happened today was a glorious creative synergy. Artists getting ideas and bouncing off each other's ideas, doing theme stuff and non-theme stuff, posting all sorts of mediums and ideas. I think the most original Frost ACEO that I saw was a gorgeous watercolor painting of Robert Frost -- beautifully done, while I love watercolor I haven't quite mastered the skill of charging other colors into washes that defined for shape, it's incredible.

So today was a day immersed in new art, and I wound up getting a handle on my new medium. I may do some more detailed scratchboard pieces in future. I used up all but two of the precut ACEO blanks I made, so I'll have to cut some more, but now I'm thinking of going to doing wildlife in detail and other subjects like winter night landscapes.

While someone suggested my Tip of the Entry feature ought to be turned into a Guide, I'll mention here that I am also doing full length Guides on art mediums and techniques. Think of them as free samples for my art books, since I will be pitching Street Sketching I: Portraits and a yet untitled colored pencils how to draw book during 2008. My first two are:

Robs Art Guide to Colored Pencils -- a survey of numerous brands and some tips on discovering which brand suits you best. All artist grade brands blend with each other and all of them have high quality, but the one that works best for you will be a combination of your style and how soft or hard you like your pencils.

Robs Art Guide to Colored Pencil Techniques -- demonstrates some basic techniques for burnishing, shading, creating smooth tonal layers and mixing colors to get the most out of your set. It includes a step by step demonstration that will help you create an original artwork of your own -- you don't even need to copy mine to do it, just get an outline of something you find meaningful, two pencils in the same or related colors (light and dark) and a white or colorless blender pencil for the lightest tones. I'm very interested in seeing art done by people who use this guide, so please send me a message with a link if you've tried the project!

I'll still go on doing a "Tip of the Entry" because that's the payoff for putting up with my random natter about my life on eBay. Enjoy!

Tip of the Entry: Tortillons and Stumps are the little cheap cardboard blenders you sometimes see in art stores near the cash register, they're easy to find online too and I'd lay odds someone's selling a huge batch of them on eBay. Tortillons are the cheaper one-ended ones, rolled heavy gray paper with a point. Stumps are double-ended and more solid, sharp on both ends. Stumps can be sharpened with a pencil sharpener, tortillons can't. Stock up on them. They're useful for colored pencils, graphite pencil art, charcoal art, pastels, sketch pencils and any dry mediums. To get light smooth shades in any kind of pencil (including colored and pastel pencils), scribble a patch of your dark color on a piece of scratch paper, or rub the tip of your tortillon or stump in it. Then draw with the dirtied end of the cardboard blender. If you're using colors, keep a different one for each color group so the colors don't mix.

Tortillons sometimes get the point pushed down into the middle, blunting it. If this happens, it's not dead. Push a cotton swab in through the back to push the point out, then follow it with a toothpick or stylus to get the tip of the point popping out. When the point wears down on a stump, just use a normal pencil sharpener to sharpen it again.

I got some great advice from elizas_art on how to organize the information in my listings and how to title my artworks. So I've relisted OSWOA Pansies, and then posted today's OSWOA Lighthouse for the OSWOA group's challenge to draw or paint one hour every day on an OSWOA. Then tonight I posted Moorish Idols.

Keeping something going by adding a new one daily means it'll catch up to itself and I'll always have something ending and something starting. That should be very cool.

I also spent some of my proceeds immediately back into this by getting ACEO supplies from saigonron2000 -- a pack of baseball card sleeves, some CD mailers to send them and some rigid top loaders. A friend told me the baseball card collectors use both the sleeves and the top loaders, putting the card into the sleeve and that into the top loader. Considering baseball cards survive from the 1930s, this sounds great for art preservation to me.

I also found some great bargains on colored pencils -- a fun 12 color Prismacolor Portfolio set with pad and sturdy portfolio, sort of thing to take outdoors for sketching. I'm a sucker for small sets suitable to take outdoors for sketching, and wind up going outside with the new toys into the yard or just rambling in the house away from my corner with my easel and giant sets. I know I'll use up the Prismacolors like they were red licorice whips, because I've been doing that since I was a kid, but the portfolio set may get its colors shuffled depending on where I'm going and what I'm drawing. I use different limited palettes all the time depending on subject, weather, mood... and so the thought of using a 12 color set but constantly changing what the exact colors are sounded like a lot of fun. I got that from seller streetfair, who has more of them available.

A lot of friends have been recommending the horribly expensive Caran d'Ache Pablo colored pencils. I'm collecting Master Sets of all the major artist brands available, with three to go right now (counting Derwent Studio as the same as Derwent Artist because the cores are the same, only Studio cores are thinner and the pencils are cheaper). I need the big set of Derwent Coloursoft, the big set of Design Bruynzeel and the big set of Caran d'Ache Pablo... which runs $195 even discounted at Dick Blick. I figure I will probably get that one last. But I found a discount set on eBay from happyshop4u, got it at the Buy It Now price of $4.99 with $9 shipping and $2 insurance -- had some confusion about whether shipping was $9 or $11 but it made sense once I saw what it was for. I've heard these are great pencils, so I'm going to find out for myself soon... and surely, like all art supplies I've ever bought, they will eventually pay for themselves unless I really hate how they handle.

So this is fun, and within days I'll start having new supplies coming in the mail.

Tip of the Entry: When getting a new set of colored pencils, watercolors, any art medium, make a color chart on the support you most often use with that medium. Shade it out between full strength and the lightest tint you can get too, to see its full range. Then scan the color chart to find out what your own scanner or camera does to the colors. Each scanner is different and quirky, mine lightens everything by one value step but grays whites and mutes colors if I darken it a stage, it also drops about half the lemon yellow hues to white and cools greens toward blue. A friend's scanner turns all orange hues into red-orange but reproduces yellows and light yellow-orange fine. That way you know and can compensate for your scanner's distortions on posting your art online, and you know what each color does in reality in your hands. Mixing charts are also useful, though with watercolors or colored pencil I often create those on the spot for the particular artwork in its wide borders that go under the mat.