Thank You

Thanks everyone for your guesses on the background collage element. It is Coffee Filters dyed with watercolor. So much fun to do and I like the texture and the color. I'll be posting more paintings with this techique, hopefully soon. My daughter is on the swim team, so every night and most Saturdays are filled, but I'd love another day like last Saturday soon. In the meantime, I'll be sketching and reading.

Make Art!

This is the cover of my 9 x 9 Aquabee sketchbook. I have this thing for Mary Engelbreit's art. I love it! It's so inspiring and happy. These papers are from her daily calendar. The words, "Make Art" are stamped with Stamping Up alphabet stamps. But the big question is -- what have I used in the background?

More Saturday fun!

More of my Saturday art. This is a piece I started about a year ago and finally finished yesterday with the collage technique of the previous piece. It fit perfectly with this painting and was the right finish for it. The writing around the edge is a quote I found several years ago. I tore the house apart at about 11:30 last night trying to find this quote in one of my sketchbooks. I knew I had written it somewhere, but I had no clue where and I looked through every sketchbook I have and finally found it.

"The real joy of life is in its play. Play is anything we do for the joy and love of doing it, apart from any profit, compulsion, or sense of duty. It is the real living of life with the feeling of freedom and self-expression. Play is the business of childhood and its continuation in later years is the prolongation of youth." Walter Rauschenbusch

This painting has so many layers and mediums. Oil sticks, watercolor, acrylic, gel pen, words printed from computer, stitching, fabric collage, and the technique I want you to guess ---

The full size painting is 18 x 24 and the last three pictures show closeups of certain portions of it. FUN!

A Saturday full of ART

Yesterday was the most awesome day! My creativity and inspiration was in high gear. I painted, collaged, and played from 12 noon until 12:30 a.m. Twelve hours of doing what I love! My daughter had a friend over and they painted and collaged with me for quite a bit of that time. I did the painting below. I want to see if you can guess what I did in the background. It's a technique I did for the first time yesterday and I can see myself going crazy with this, creating painting after painting. This is so much fun and has such a good effect! So does anybody know what I've used as collage in the background?

Beach Collage

This is a collage I did at the beach. My husband found this beautiful shell - I couldn't believe it was unbroken and so perfect!! Yesterday I thought up the idea of using a necklace I received as a gift as a sort of frame for this piece. I took the necklace apart and glued the stones around the canvas edges. The size of this is 9 x 12. The text is from an old book on plant and animal life - which amazingly I took with me to the beach for collage without realizing it had pages with seashells. Perfect. The other words are from a magazine that was in our condo. This evokes a lot of good memories of a great beach trip!

ED in May "finish" at Holden Beach

# 23 and # 24 were completed before I left for the beach, and 25 and 26 were done on Holden Island. Bliss!
# 25 is the view one morning from our balcony. # 26 is the view from Betty's Waterfront Restaurant. It's a housetop and some trees done in a Design Ebony pencil, so it didn't show up well on the scan.

The weather all week was absolutely perfect. Hot and sunny every day. I did a collage to commemorate our trip which I hope to be posting soon. I had such a good time. We all three did. My daughter stayed in the pool through most of the week and loved every minute of it. My husband sat on the balcony, walked on the beach, and took very long naps. It was as if we swtiched roles - normally I'm the long napper. I was too exhilirated by the views and the chance to paint, paint, paint!

I picked up a book on Wednesday at a little bookshop on the mainland and it was the PERFECT beach read. Sharon Owens' The Tea House on Mulberry Street: http://www.amazon.com/Tea-House-Mulberry-Street/dp/0515139947/ref=pd_bbs_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212889244&sr=8-4.

We arrived home last night and I finished the book today. It was such a good read! Highly recommended, espeically for us women :-) I want all her books now.

We came home to newly installed central heat and air. What a great vacation!

Updates to 3 sketches for EDinMay

We just returned from a wonderful week at Holden Beach, NC! I painted and rested and read and walked on the beach.

These are updates to 3 of the EDinMay sketches. I didn't really make a big finish on this project. In fact I didn't even complete 28 - 31. I stayed behind most of the way - but it was a fun challenge and I enjoyed the extra sketching.