After looking in boxes, on shelves, behind curtains, and other out of the way places I finally found my pendant making kit! This batch all are available on Etsy and I'm out of pendant supplies, so this might be the only batch for a while. I love making jewelry and I used to make a lot more. I used to make jewelry pieces from paintings that I would cut up and collage together with photos and text. I stopped because I don't have that much studio time and I decided to prioritiz

I just added a listing for Gift Certificates to my Etsy shop. I think I broke the rules doing this - so I am hoping that they don't take it down. It seems like a great idea! It works like this- someone pays for the gift certificate using Etsy They immediately have a digital image of a generic Gift Certificate I create a coupon code just for them in the amount that they request. I customize a printable Gift Certificate with the amount, the recipient's name, and their own coup

I am part of the Thanksgiving sales splurge temptation now! Everything in my Etsy shop is 20% off until December 1. I have never done this before, but Etsy requested it and here we are. In the shop I offer gift wrapping on smaller items and free shipping. I'm organizing myself to send out a gift ideas newsletter - I think I'm going to create a discount that will be just for newsletter subscribers for the whole month of December. So, if you haven't yet, please sign up (link he

I had these cradle boards around the studio for about a year without being interested in doing anything with them. Suddenly they caught my eye and I am going to make a little series with these 6" x 6" paintings. I'll post them for sale on my Etsy Shop as I finish them - which should work well for holiday shoppers! This one is called Earnest Flying Colours and is oil and collage - ready to hang on a cradled wooden panel. If you look closely at the moon you'll see a figure of a

My studio time today was adding more layers of green to this painting of the sun rising through the trees in my parents' back yard in Pennsylvania. It looks so wild! It is more like a jungle than the swampy woods that I know it to be. #margaretshipmanart #vermontartist #sunrise #workinprogress #woods

When I first painted my mandala series I had the goal of making a painting for each festival on the Celtic Wheel of the year and, if there was a month that wasn't lucky enough to have a holiday in it, then to paint a mandala to represent that month. Somehow I missed November. I have finally corrected that mistake and here is my November painting. (Yay!) November is beautiful and its beauty seems to be mostly overlooked. From my house I see blue hills in the distance, closer a

Well, it's not that much of a mystery if you know me at all. Stacy Salpietro-Babb and I are working on a new Tarot deck. I just nested myself into a corner of the studio to get to image-making. Follow this link to see the Wayfarer Tarot- the first deck we made. #wayfarertarot #studioday #margaretshipmanart

Sometimes being a little bit of a "hoarder" is a good thing. I have a roll of beautiful paper in my studio - where it came from is a mystery to me. It is thick and has a faint purple to it. It wraps up my small paintings beautifully when I add some twine and a business card. So, I'm adding gift wrapping as an option to my Etsy shop. #margaretshipmanart #giftideas #buyfromartists

I got to be in the same room as Henri Rousseau paintings this past summer when I visited MoMA. This is a picture of that happening. The thing that surprised me when I looked closely his paintings was that although the lines and shapes look perfect when you see them in a textbook or reproduced in a magazine, there are brush strokes and imperfections in the lines and the shading and highlights. It was liberating to see that! It means that I don't have to be perfect either. This

I am taking a mental health break from social media.The anxiety of worrying about missing something that I felt throughout the day has passed. The worrying that I am not doing enough to promote my artwork, or that everyone else has better ideas and marketing skills is not at the front of my mind anymore. I'm realizing that the world of Facebook can go on without me and it doesn't matter. I still hear about important news and I'm realizing that a lot of the other stuff was men