Elizabeth’s Paintings

It’s been sooo long since I updated this blog. It’s not entirely my fault. I’m currently typing away on a brand spanking new keyboard with the biggest, chunkiest, smoothest keys you could imagine. Somebody…probably somebody small and noisy…spilt their juice on my previous keyboard and I couldn’t login due to sticky keys.

Anyways..

I’ve been painting. Surprise!

I can’t actually remember where this one came from. Oh yes I do! I was going to tell you that it was somewhere in Europe but it isn’t, it’s in America of all places! Somewhere in Beacon Hill.

 

The White Swan painting was the first one I did after my marriage fell apart. I’m not entirely happy with, I think the leaves are too sparse and looking at it now, I didn’t get around to finishing the beak in the reflection.

Fuchsias

The Fuchsia’s painting caused me so much grief! Seriously, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Such a simple painting too. I painted, and repainted, and repainted again every single aspect of this painting. I spilt my drink over it not once but twice! Then I smudged dark green paint over the blue/purple background (just beneath the flowers) and then, when I was cleaning my paint brushes nearby, I splattered very watery paint over the top right corner.

It was one thing after another. I changed the colour of the green buds at least three times, and the original petals were a slightly different shade too. The paint is zoo thick in places! LOL  It turned out okay in the end, I guess. It looks very graceful, my Mum says they remind her of ballerinas.

Rockingham Beach

This stormy painting…this one blew me away! I learnt some very valuable lessons about painting water and wet sand from this painting. I have found that most of my monochrome paintings come out looking has beautiful as this one, it’s when I add lots of colour that I lose track. I struggle with contrast in my paintings…I end up using a deeper, muddier hue instead of charging to a darker tone, so this painting forced me to focus on making my brightest high lists and my darkest lowlights without fussing over the colour.

The scene is also special to me. It’s a bit of an annual event here in Rockingham…each winter we have a couple of particularly violent storms in which a couple of boats break their moorings and find their way to the beach. So I went down their with my camera  after the last storm and snapped a few pics, this is just a couple of km’s around the corner from home.

 

Rainbow Lorikeet

This one BLEW MY MIND!!! At the end of it, I kinda stood there feeling a little bit stunned and looking at my hands thinking “was that me? Did I really do that?!”

I’m seriously hard on myself. I hold myself to impossibly high expectations. This one blew my expectations out of the water. I reckon it was a fluke! It’s the current crown jewel in my collection. It’s definitely my best work yet, the best quality…but funnily enough, it isn’t my favourite.

I actually started this painting sitting down Rockingham foreshore while the kids played on the swings. I spent about a week working on it, mostly at home, before  heading back down to the beach where I finished it, you can see my picnic blankie & drink in the background. It was really nice. I have appalling social skills and I had so many people come over to see what I was painting and stop for a chat. It did me good. I met some lovely people, including other artists who whipped out their phones or iPads to show me their own work and talk about the craft.

 

Click the photo to visit Moto GP Paintings

And lastly, exciting news! At the start of the 2013 Moto GP season I created a Facebook page named Moto Gp Paintings – Elizabeth Nesbitt

I say exciting but it’s an incredibly frustrating story really…

The thing is…selling paintings online is incredibly difficult. A bit like local bands or photographers…everyone admires their work, everyone can recognise something special when they see it…but who can afford to part with the extra money it will cost to invest in them? People see my paintings and praise my work but they also know that they can go down to the local Red Dot or Cost Plus store and buy a cheap print for $20 to decorate their walls with.

And so it is with Moto GP Paintings. I set this page up, I offered to paint fans on their own bikes, paint their favourite rider opt team, their dream bike, their favourite Moto GP moment. In a few weeks I collected 1000s of Facebook fans, I handed out dozens of quotes, I had so much interest….and nothing. Nobody wanted to part with their hard earned money.

So yeah, it’s frustrating.

Patience, I tell myself. When the time is right, I’ll get my opportunity to squeeze my foot in the door.

Until next time! xxx

My Homemade Laundry Liquid

For the past few years now, my Mumsy has been an Admin over at the Down To Earth Forum, working alongside some very lovely ladies including Rhonda Hetzel. And for years now, my Mumsy has been subtly hinting that there are some easy, cost effective changes I could be making around my home.

Three years later, I finally get the hint and made my own batch of laundry detergent. Very, very simple, took me less than half an hour to wash bottles and my bucket, heat some ingredients and five litres of homemade laundry liquid  into some bottles.

I only used about $1 worth of those ingredients (my shopping list cost about $12 so there’s plenty left for future batches). And if I was going to buy 5Ltr of Dynamo, I would pay $9 per litre. I just saved $44. Too lovely!

I halved the recipe to make 5 litres instead of 10 because let’s be honest, I was skeptical.

Funny story, as I began boiling some water for this recipe…I BURNED it. That’s right, the water in my pot was actually smoking not steaming. (Must have had some traces of bicarb in the pot left over from washing up!)

Ingredients

2 cup Lux Flakes
½ cup washing soda
½ cup bicarb (some recipe’s call for Borax…bicarb works and there’s some serious nasties in Borax)

This recipe will make TEN litres.

Just add the soap (flakes or grated), the bicarb, and washing soda to 1½ Litres of water and pop it on to boil. Gentle boil, lots of stirring.

Once everything had thoroughly and definitely dissolved, I moved from the kitchen into the laundry.

I had the kids fill up a bucket with water for me (about 9½ litres) and tipped my soapy mix in, gave it a big stir and…

Started pouring the laundry liquid into my pre-washed bottles.

For the record…. I do not drink Coke. Eugh! The Coke bottles belong to The Hubby who bravely palates the taste of Coke by mixing it with his scotch. However, I’ve recently discovered that Coke is one of those super cleaners – I’ve been using it to wash the toilet, the bath, it gets dried makeup off the bathroom basin…who knew!?

Bottles are labeled (including the ingredients in case a furry baby or one of the kids ingests it, I’ll have the ingredients on hand for when the Poisons InfoLine or Emergency Room triage nurse asks for them)

Shake well before use – the mixture will separate over time. For me…I’m quite happy to spend a few moments shaking my laundry liquid if it means saving $8 a bottle.

So there you have it. My clots are coming out clean for a fraction of the cost and I’ve just reduced the number of chemicals I’m bringing into my home.

Marketing A Band

TungXsten's Lead Guitarist Vance Vlahov is wowing the crowds at Battle of the Bands.

Last year, the major search engines had over 20 trillion web pages in their indexes. Over 1 trillion websites. We are running out of IP addresses. I think that’s one of the reasons why I enjoy Internet Marketing. The challenge, all those different marketing tools & resources, meeting different people, making video’s and in general, problem solving. It’s not just getting a web page to look pretty… it’s all the sly little tactics to get that web page out to people, to get those people on mailing lists, to burn your brand into somebody else’s memories for future sales/consults.

Here’s the thing. I’m like that friend with the ute who always gets roped into helping friends move house…. except I actually enjoy helping my friends & family find their feet online – whether its creating a Facebook profile, or a Memorial blog, or promoting a band.

One friend – Vance – goes back a few years now. He’s an honorary uncle to our kids, we think a lot of him. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve had regular contact but we’ve recenly been watching his band – TungXsten – come up through the ranks of Battle of the Bands. Eventually, the judges chose another band (a chick band, la-de-daa music, piano meets guitar, Missy Higgens feel to it) as winners and TungXsten walked away as crowd favourites.

I’ll tell you something for nothing, it’s been an honour & a privellgdge to help these guys out, I’ve had some trouble restraining myself from barging in & steamrolling over their efforts this far – which are awesome I might add. They have video’s at YouTube, Facebook Fan Pages, Reverbnation Profiles, they’ve got stickers & t-shirts. But to quote the lead singer, “We just play music.”

These guys are not marketers. So I’ve been able to get in there and help these guys fine tune the promotional side of things – more tags at YouTube, better descriptions, making new music video’s, leaving backlinks where they count, promoting their name in online voting contests. There is never nothing to do. TungXsten has always got another proverbial rabbit in the hat.

I’ve gone into some detail about how to promote a band over at Mwah ha ha Money – the short answer is… when these guys put together a band, they also created a brand. Promotion revolves around giving them a strong online presence & making sure that people can find them. Lots of backlinks, lots of messages, comments, responses, cool video’s, backlinks, regular updates, strong call to action, more backlinks and all the usual.

It’s about finding the people who like their style of music and then putting the TungXsten brand in front of them.

These guys were robbed at Battle of the Bands, they were clearly crowd favourites. They went in knowing that some of the choices that past Judges had made were somewhat biased & unpopular. They entered the comp with the goal of getting their name out there, and they certainly have done that.

But there’s a little piece of me who would love to know just how far they could make it, if they really pushed their luck….

You can find them at

TungXsten at Facebook

TunXsten at Reverbnation

Training Video’s For Interent Marketers

Better late than never! I have recently been working behind the scenes to begin my first series of Internet Marketing tutorial video’s. Man I kicked some butt! Or not…lol. Okay, I’m an Affiliate and Internet Marketer – I ain’t no Steven Spielberg but the very essence of the video’s are highly important and totally essential pieces in the whole “make money online” puzzle.

If you can get past the fact that my film making skills are so advanced that they appear to obsolete then you’re onto a winner. Only the purest nuggets make it onto the video’s.

In all seriousness, I’m no genius with the camera..but would you want me to be? Could you really trust someone who was a master of all trades? Or would you be content with a half baked, dodgy video that housed some golden tips to your success?

Which is why I have proceeded with this plan, despite the fact that I am not the worlds greatest public speaker. I mumbled. I ummm and I er…but I do know teaching.

It’s also an interesting point of learning for me. Before I began my make money online journey, I was technologically challenged. Challenged is an understatement – it had been at least 14 years between when I last had regular access to the Internet and when I began building my first website.

An awful lot has changed in 14 years. Hell, an awful lot has changed in 14 months. There has been a huge, mammoth, gargantuan learning process and I hope there will continue to be one.

I have learned a whole new world, a whole new language of HTML & tech talk, a whole new set of marketing skills and I am damned proud of myself. The creation of these video’s is simply the next phase of my master plan – World Wide (Web) Domination.

[Insert evil laughter]

I am mastering YouTube and utilizing something I don’t really get to do very often – my voice. Sure, I’m always yelling at the kids to pick up their towels or pack up their toys but I rarely get an opportunity to talk to a real life adult. Needless to say I am thoroughly excited to introduce this new series of Internet Marketing Training video’s and the moment I remember which file on my hard drive I stored them in…you’ll be able to watch them right here in addition to at http://mwah-ha-ha-money.blogspot.com

I did mention I ain’t no genius, didn’t I?