Watercolors!
There are a few "staple" art things I do like sewing, quilting, photography and painting. For example, I may not have turned my sewing machine in in over a year but it's like an old friend... when you get back together you pick up right where you left off. I have this relationship with watercolors too. I guess that's why I consider myself a Jill-of-all-trades but master of none.
In the right hand column where I have listed What I Blog About you can find all of my entries for watercolors. I was going to post some pictures then I realized that I already had in previous posts.
I started a new painting over Thanksgiving while we were at my mother-in-law's house (in Illinois) but never finished it because by the time we got home I was onto something else. A few weeks ago I decided to finish this painting so I pulled it out and began working on the details.
His name is Oscar the Red Panda and he lives at the Virginia Zoo here in Norfolk, VA. I love going to this zoo because of him and if my kids aren't with me I watch him for hours. I am fascinated by this little guy! And as you can imagine I've taken tons of pictures of him. He is my inspiration for my latest watercolor. It measures 11" X 14"
I had this new idea: To dry acrylic paint on parchment paper then peal it off and use that in a piece of art. So I picked out about 4 different colors of paint: dark and light purple, gold and a pearlescence beige. I squirted them all onto parchment paper, swirled them around with the tip of a paintbrush (not the bristle end) and q-tips. Not too vigorously though because I still wanted to see each individual color that was used.
I knew that when this was dry I was going to use it to create flowers. After a few days of letting it dry I then decided to create a background for these flowers. Instead of making the "traditional" blue sky and green grass I decided to incorporate the purples and gold into the background as well.
Now comes the fun part of peeling the paint and balling it up! (Sorry I got so excited at this stage I forgot to take pictures!)
After gluing the flowers down I painted the stems and finished with the leaves. I was leaning towards the leaves being blue since nothing else in the painting was as it seems but I wanted the person to at least recognize the leaves so I elected to paint them green.
Purple Passion Flowers is now for sale at my art studio at Olde Towne Art. I should have taken a side view of it so you could see the dimension on these flowers, I just love it.
Wow I can't believe I haven't posted in 2 1/2 weeks! Sorry guys but it seems like this cold and flu season has decided to check into our house for a while. We are on the upswing now though.
I feel like I've been in another creative rut lately but when I made a list this morning about new blog posts I discovered that it's not a rut as much as "all over the place" and not really focusing on one idea. So I have 4 new posts to do but not enough time to do them but I have my trusty list that I will refer to in the next few days/weeks.
For starters I have moved into a smaller space at Olde Towne Art for financial reasons. But I also found that with the large space I felt that I needed to create large pieces to fill that space and that just isn't me. I don't work in large scale. It felt more of like a burden to create pieces instead of an inspiration. It did get me to think bigger though.
So here are a few pictures of my new smaller space and believe it or not every one of my pieces in my large space fit just fine in my smaller space. I actually think it looks a little better because your eye isn't jumping from one space to another, it now just flows through my work.
And since taking this picture it's changed again! They love when I come in because they know that I'll be moving stuff around. My art dolls weren't selling so I took those down for a while but since this picture I've taken them back in and hung them on the walls like my mermaid. I am also working on 4 new pieces that I hope to finish by the end of the week so more changes will be happening again in my little space so stay tuned!
