paper lanterns

It's taken me a bit to get back into the swing of things after our busy weekend.  There was lots of hockey, sledding and birthday celebrating.   Yesterday I was finally able to find enough energy to do a little painting. 
I find that if I'm really tired I can work on a painting that is already in progress, but if it's a new painting, which was the case, I really need a certain amount of energy to motivate me to get going.



My little girl looks like she is having a garden party.  I'd love to have a garden party with colorful paper lanterns hanging everywhere, lighting up the evening sky.  Since it's January and I live in Wisconsin, summer parties are a loong way off.  Luckily this painting didn't leave me longing for warmer weather. I actually enjoy winter and I'm not ready for it to be over, too much hockey and skiing to do yet!



I thought I'd show you a little bit of my process.  I love it when people show their works in progress. To start with, I draw my idea out in my sketchbook first, which I forgot to take a picture of and decide on the color theme I'm going to use.  I then use acrylic paint on some tissue paper (which was left over from Fischer's birthday party.)  Tissue paper is so delicate and tears so easy.  Every time I'd get a hole, Amelia would say "That's ok Mommy."      I then put the tissue paper over my drawing and traced all the lantern parts and cut them out.



I then traced my little girl onto some tracing paper so I could figure out how to position the lanterns and also to trace the drawing onto my scrapbook papers for the dress.   For her face I used the kids drawing paper and painted it with watercolors, and her hair was from some leftover  tracing paper that I had painted black.



Here she is in all of her pieces.  It makes me think of playing with paper dolls, which is something that I never cared for as a kid, but I definitely enjoyed it here.  I start by gluing her head first and then work my way down and ta-da, a little girl appears.  A few little touches were added to the paper lanterns with acrylics and also to her face and I glued a little colored tissue paper for the grass, and I was done.