Why I do what I do

Watercolor is my primary medium; however, I also enjoy experimenting with other media.   My grandmother use to say “Jack of all trades, master of none.” She didn’t mean that as a compliment, she was trying to get me to focus. I imagine she’s up there now looking down and saying “she’s just never going to get it.” Focus is a good thing and I still struggle with it but I’ve accepted that I’m never going to really get it, it just isn’t who I am. Trying different media gets the creative juices flowing.  There are so many media choices and techniques and each one provides more ideas. When I see a demo I almost always want to try it and there I go, off on something other than my normal watercolor painting. I could be anything from collage to fabric to printmaking to metal-smithing. 

Part of my background is fabric and yarns, my mother and one of my grandmothers designed fashions, my other grandmother was a knitter. Learning all those skills was mandatory. I’m glad I learned them and for years I did all of them, it was my creative outlet; however, I rarely sew or knit anymore as there are too many other things to learn. I still love fabric and all of the beautiful yarns that are out there and that has lead me to venturing into dolls and thinking about art quilts. Dolls weren’t part of my childhood, I was a tomboy and much preferred baseball or climbing trees and I played a mean game of mumbley-peg. Another thing I loved to do as a child was coloring and drawing. One of the things I wanted so badly was a box of Crayolas with 48 colors but my mother insisted I could make any color I needed by mixing the colors that were in my box of 24. I tried and failed. I’ve since realized that she never tried to do that with crayons, mixing those colors doesn’t work the same with crayons as it does when mixing paints together. The other day I finally decided to treat myself; I bought a box of 94 colors. I love to just sit and look at them.  And looking at them makes me think I need to add more color to my paintings.  Spending time with other media always gives me more insight into my painting and what it needs.  A few of the things that I do…

One of my watercolor monoprints

some earrings

a hand-decorated journal

and a couple guardian granny dolls from a pattern

Some Old Works & Some Christmas

I haven't been painting, Christmas gifts are in the works and that has taken up painting time.   But first, some old works... My son has been remodeling their house and they are now in and decorating.  There were a couple of  paintings from my own collection that they wanted so I framed them and gave them to them.  Here they are, you can see boats is not a new theme for me, these are oils that I did when I first tried painting back in the 60's.

and while going through old works I came across this one that I did of my mother-in-law several years back.  I think I'd like to do more people.

And getting ready for Christmas...

My friend Annie Morgan gets credit for the idea here... we put some trinkets, beads, buttons and game pieces in wine glasses and covered them with resin which gave a flat surface to put a tea light on.  Then we wrapped the tea light hold in brass... the result....

Still more in the works and I'll try to post before Friday.  If I don't, I hope you have a Blessed Christmas

Christmas

Last week I showed you the White Doves painting.  That image is from a wetcanvas.com weekend drawing event photo by my wetcanvas friend, Connie van Winsson.  Connie is an artist in the Netherlands and I love her colorful work and thought you might enjoy it too; here's a link  http://home.kpn.nl/henni107/_sgg/m2_1.htm

This week I want to share a decorating idea.  We recently held the annual Christmas by Candle Light Program at our church.  It's for the women in our church and consists of a program in our sanctuary, this year we heard the very talented Grand Haven High School Choral Ensemble, followed by dessert in our reception center where several of us act as hostesses. 

Usually two host a table.  In my case, for the past 30 years it's been one of my dearest friends who co-hosts with me, I do the table and she does dessert.  This year she is going through chemo so my dear husband made the dessert for us.  Our table theme was gumdrops.  I found some gumdrop ornaments at the Muskegon Museum of Art last year and that was my inspiration.  This summer I dipped a zillion gum drops in acrylic, let them dry and screwed in an eye so they could hang from trees I sprayed white.  Another zillion gum drops went into styrofoam balls with toothpicks.  Here's the result.

and the inspiring ornament

A Deer And A Work In Process

Sheri Woodard has made some adorable small deer out of sticks and she brought them to Gallery Uptown to sell.  We had a pile of larger sticks from yard clean up and I thought, why not a larger deer out of those sticks...

Pretty skinny and I may shorten those back legs.  I'm also going to paint him because he's screwed together and I don't want the screws to be quite so obvious.  Then I have to figure out what I'm going to do with him, perhaps he'll just live on my patio this winter.

My other work this week has been a demo for my watercolor class.  I wasn't going to post it until it's done and I can't finish it until the next class; however, I missed posting last week so two projects this week seemed fair.  I'll post the finish on this and the house drawing later.

Off the wall art and a colorful bowl

I haven't accomplished a major piece of art this week but I've been having fun experimenting... first with a couple of challenges from a wet canvas artist friend....  use a black and white photo as reference and add your own color was one challenge.  I did two of those.... I used crayons... a small traveling set.

The second challenge was to do a blind contour drawing and then embellish as you felt like it... I felt like making it look a little more like the person I was drawing...

And finally, the creativity challenge.  This wasn't intended to be part of the March Challenge... Dream... but when I looked at what I wrote in the middle of the bowl I realized the challenge was on my mind. I was looking for color, I wanted a colorful bowl to put on my office coffee table and I didn't want to buy one so I made this one out of paper. In the process I got rid of some old magazines to boot.

Now back to painting....

Paper Flowers

I'm late, I know... we went skiing.   This is what I did, I should say we did because it was a joint effort between my daughter-in-law Jamie and I.  Paper flowers.  She had done some for their apartment out of construction paper and was explaining the project to me.  I had some paper, a brown paper bag that I had coated with acrylic paints which we decided might work.  It did and the result is the copper colored flowers you see in the jar.  Armed with that knowledge we decided to add more color so we coated another brown paper bag and finished the bouquet.  The process is relatively easy though I haven't tried writing them out.  I may because it's a project my Creativity Class can do... thinking about that... definately.... they can do that tomorrow night.  Better go coat some paper!