Now as you may remember, my prior career was as a decorative painter.  I swoon over colors!  I adore textures!  These web sites gave me a good fix of both.  Once you start looking through colors and patterns, you can get lost for hours.  I’ve given you fair warning, so don’t blame me if you do!

COLOURlovers – Browse the colors, color palettes and patterns.  Register and start making up your own.  A really friendly crowd if you want to get involved with the community.  Here is a color palette I came up with – feel free to vote for it, if you register with COLOURlovers 

The next web site that will keep you mesmerized is iStockPhoto.  This is the place to purchase royalty-free photos, illustrations, video and audio.  Or conversely, if you are an artist, you may want to sell some of your work here.  There are thousands of files to look through – if you have a specific application, you will find one that fits what you need exactly.  If you are just looking for ideas, you’ll find that too.

The third site, CG Textures is one I made good use of when I was a decorative painter.  If I needed a model to complete a faux surface, CG Textures was the “go to” site.  There are photos of every texture imaginable, all available as a free download, with certain restrictions.  Landscapes, sky, fruit, animals, metal, nature, fabric, brick, marble, water are just a few of the 36 main categories of textures on this site – of course each main category has a myriad of sub-categories.  This is one very useful site for an artist to have in their hip pocket.

How’s this for ornamentation.  Not only is the arch and and brickwork lovely, but so are the varied panes within the arch.

Enjoy browsing these sites and of course if you have any favorite graphic sites of your own, please share in the comments!

Ring in 22K gold with granulation and pink tourmaline.

Welcome to my blog!  I am a jewelry designer.  Ultimately, this blog will be attached to a beautiful web site, showcasing my finely crafted jewelry. However, there is a lot of “behind the scenes” work that needs to take place prior to that.  I thought it might be interesting and useful to others to learn about the steps involved in launching a new business.   As I quickly found out, you can’t just wake up one morning and decide you want to start a business.  Well, you can’t if you want your business to be a success!  So follow along with my trials and tribulations.  If you are an artist and/or woman business owner, several future topics will be very helpful and tailored to your particular needs.

My web designer, Julie Krefta,  was gracious enough to set this blog up in advance of the web site so that I could chronicle the trials of a business launch.  The blog is rather plain jane now – but it will all coordinate with my elegant site by the time the business is officially launched.

Journey with me as we learn how to turn a dream into a viable business, step-by-step.  I hope it inspires you to do something with your dream!

Next:  Know Your Passion

Thank you for visiting,

Maria