First Night Design | Snuggling Yellow Roses #Photography

Snuggling Yellow Roses © Sarah Vernon at Crated

The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions. Chanakya

“Daffodowndilly
She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
“Winter is dead.”
― A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

“Yellow is a very favorable vibration for mental or intellectual activity, as it promotes a clear state of mind. Yellow heightens your awareness and alleviates depression, sadness, or any kind of despondency. Yellow vibration foods are: pineapples, bananas, grapefruit, lemons and corn.”
― Tae Yun Kim, The First Element: Secrets to Maximizing Your Energy

Available at the following galleries:
Redbubble
Crated
Zazzle US
Zazzle UK
Fine Art America [14 fulfillment centers in 5 countries]
Saatchi Art

Take care and keep laughing!

Christina Georgina Rossetti says: | The Müscleheaded Blog

“Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.”

Source: Christina Georgina Rossetti says: | The Müscleheaded Blog

First Night Design | Oh! You Pretty Things

I’ve recently sold some of my prettiest images as postcards and very pleasing that is!

Mademoiselle Couture Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Vintage Easter Bride Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Birdcage Blossom Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Blue Bird of Happiness Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Swan & Edgar’s Fashionable Furs #A Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Swallow with Flowers Postcard by FirstNightDesign

Take care and keep laughing!

 

First Night Design | Blue Bird of Happiness #Art #Repost

FROM THE ARCHIVE 6th July 2014

Blue Bird of Happiness harks back to my early collages such as Postcard Kingfisher or Bird in the Hand for which I used vintage postcard backs with lovely squiggly handwriting. In this instance, I …

Source: First Night Design | Blue Bird of Happiness #Art

Carl Jung on an Artist’s Life

FROM THE ARCHIVE 3rd December 2012

“The Artist’s Life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts for two forces are at war within him or her – on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction a…

Source: Carl Jung on an Artist’s Life

Yellow Illustrates Happiness #Repost

Roses are Golden by FirstNightDesign

FROM THE ARCHIVE 14th May 2013

A quick post to show some of my latest tinkering!  This image was created with vintage flowers from The Graphics Fairy and my own backgrounds and textures. I do…

Source: Yellow Illustrates Happiness

Keats on the Joy of Singledom and How Solitude Opens Our Creative Channels to Truth and Beauty – Brain Pickings

Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton

“The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children… I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul… Seek solitude,” the great French artist Eugène Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Just a few years earlier, another timeless patron saint of the creative spirit extolled the rewards of solitude as a supreme conduit to truth and beauty.

Celebrated as one of the greatest poets humanity has ever produced, John Keats (October 31, 1795–February 23, 1821) married an extraordinary capacity for transcendence with an uncommon share of sorrow. His short life was suffused with loss from a young age — his father died after a horseback accident when Keats was eight and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen. And yet even amid his darkest despair, Keats…

Source: Keats on the Joy of Singledom and How Solitude Opens Our Creative Channels to Truth and Beauty – Brain Pickings

The Masons… | Rethinking Life #Fiction

I defy you not to be captivated by Gigi’s writing. Her short stories delight me and in an ideal world, I’d have one for breakfast every day.

Originally posted on Rethinking Life.
The Mason children weren’t like other children.  They were quiet and well-behaved, of course, but Gerald, Ethel, Pearl and William were theater kids and that put them into a different category entirely.  They wrote songs and plays, danced, sang, played instruments and put on grand productions, making their own costumes and performing their own stunts.Harold and Jean Mason were busy parents and thought that anything that amused their children and kept them busy was something to be applauded.  While they never missed show, they skipped their rehearsals and any number of other things in which their children were involved.Pearl was a beauty and boys were starting to notice her.  She shunned them unless they were interested in reading and the theater, which effectively eliminated ninety percent of the males who tried to speak to her.   Harold and Jean were happy about that and, unlike other parents, they were in no rush to…

Source: The Masons… | Rethinking Life

First Night Design | Picnic Beneath a Full Moon

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“Give me Pablo Neruda, picnic beneath a full moon & iridescent stars, black olives, cherries, dark things, canoe on a river…that’s romance.”
― Brandi L. Bates, Soledad

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Just Dropping In Valentine Greeting Cards

Just Dropping In Valentine Dry Erase Boards

Just Dropping In Valentine Cases For The Kindle

Just Dropping In Valentine Neck Ties

Just Dropping In Valentine Personalized Stationery

Just Dropping In Valentine Sticker

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Loving is not just looking at each other, it’s looking in the same direction. ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars, 1939

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Take care and keep laughing!

A Gift

Bullying is very damaging. This is a simple message but explains in no uncertain terms the lasting effects. It has to stop.

Callum McLaughlin

Anti-bullying awareness

October is anti-bullying month. The fact we even need to set aside time to raise awareness for this saddens me and this is a topic I could ramble on about for hours, but sometimes simplicity is best. In light of this, all I am going to say is that while bullying may seem to some people like a meaningless or even fun moment of frivolity, the mental scars you give others will never leave them. Never.

Happiness is a wonderful gift; please don’t ever be the one responsible for taking it away from someone else.

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A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus on Our Search for Meaning and Why Happiness…

Why “the demand for happiness and the patient quest for it” isn’t a luxury or a mere need but our existential duty.

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his 119-page philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else … is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” One of the most famous opening lines of the twentieth century captures one of humanity’s most enduring philosophical challenged — the impulse at the heart of Seneca’s meditations on life and Montaigne’s timeless essays and Maya Angelou’s reflections, and a wealth of human inquiry in between. But Camus, the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature after Rudyard Kipling, addressed it with unparalleled courage of conviction and insight into the irreconcilable longings of the human spirit.

In the beautifully titled and beautifully written A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (public library), historian Robert Zaretsky considers Camus’s lifelong quest to shed light on the absurd condition, his “yearning…

Continue reading: A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus on Our Search for Meaning and Why Happiness Is Our Moral Obligation | Brain Pickings.

First Night Design | Child in White by Pierre Auguste Renoir

Child in White by Pierre Auguste Renoir Postcards

The French impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), painted Child in White in 1883. His sitter, Lucie Bérard (1880-1977), was about three years old at the time and was the daughter of his friend, the banker, diplomat and businessman Paul Bérard.

Child in White by Pierre Auguste Renoir Greeting Card

Child in White by Pierre Auguste Renoir Stretched Canvas Print

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“Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”

“Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness.”

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Take care and keep laughing!

First Night Design | Blue Bird of Happiness #Art

Blue Bird of Happiness © First Night Design

Blue Bird of Happiness harks back to my early collages such as Postcard Kingfisher or Bird in the Hand for which I used vintage postcard backs with lovely squiggly handwriting. In this instance, I have layered several antique French papers (2 Lil’ Owls) at different angles, and added a bird and a Delphinium (The Graphics Fairy). That simple? No! A collage like this requires careful placement, colour changes and various blending modes until it works as whole.

Now, I know that a bluebird is a bluebird not a blue bird but I wanted mine to be different and so a blue bird it will remain! Although ‘the bluebird of happiness’ is a well-known phrase, I was actually thinking of my all-time favourite Gary Larson cartoon when I decided what to call the collage.

‘The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned was visited by the Chicken of Depression.’

Related

• Bluebird of Happiness

Take care and keep laughing!

Yellow Illustrates Happiness

Roses are Golden by FirstNightDesign

A quick post to show some of my latest tinkering!  This image was created with vintage flowers from The Graphics Fairy and my own backgrounds and textures. I do love creating an image with rich, golden yellows.  As colour genius Karen Haller says, it’s the colour of happiness.  ‘Yellow can boost your self-esteem and self-confidence, leaving you feeling full of optimism and positivity.’  It certainly does that for me, Karen.

Linking to Brag Monday at The Graphics Fairy

Take care and keep laughing!

Carl Jung on an Artist’s Life

Carl Jung (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The Artist’s Life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts for two forces are at war within him or her – on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire…there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the Divine gift of creative fire.” #CarlJung #quote

Scenes from the Life of the Artist’s Family (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Take care and keep laughing!