Have a "Hoppy" Weekend!

 

Have a "Hoppy"  weekend wherever it should take you!  

(Fischer called dibbs on this painting before it was even finished!) 

Paddle Ball Champion

Illustration Friday:  Talent

Flowers a flutter

I finally finished the piece I've been working on for the past week or so.  It has a very summery kind of feel to it.  The color palate is very similar to my last painting  with the orioles in it.   I think they would go well together.

The part that took me the longest with this painting are the leaves.  It's probably hard to tell on the monitor, but each leaf segment is a separate piece of paper.  There are a couple segments per leaf in which it is watercolor right on the paper, but otherwise they are cut from either painted tea bags or coffee filters and then glued to the paper with gel medium.  It took me a full day to complete all of them. The flowers were created with painted tea bags and then I dipped the edges in a darker paint. The flower center is coffee filter and the stamens are with black ink.  The little butterflies made from tea bags and then painted with acrylic and black ink.

I'm starting to feel the call of spring.  The days are starting to get longer, I've noticed the birds are singing a little bit more and my chickens are much more active and they walk around with a happy little cluck.

Have a Happy Weekend!

Cheery Chipmunks

I keep seeing chipmunks running across the trails when I'm mountain biking.  They're so cute as they speed across with their tails held high, I even saw one in the pouring rain last weekend.  I knew I needed to do a painting with one of these (or 5) of these guys in it.  I didn't like the direction this painting was going and then I started adding the flowers and I still didn't like it.  It wasn't until I was finished with it and held it from a distance did I realize how cheerful it was and that I actually did like it.

Playing around

I love reusing tea bags in my artwork.   Fortunately for me there seems to be no shortage of them at our house.  I love the look, transparency, the feel and their durability.  Sometimes the color of them can be a challenge.  In my head I wanted these flowers to be a brighter pink, but many times with the tea bags you get a darker color.  Of course it depends too on what kind of tea was in the bag.  My morning Chai makes for a darker tea bag, while my afternoon  green tea is usually very light colored.

When I want a truer color I choose the lightest tea bags as possible.  These flowers were painted with watercolors and then I used acrylic paint and white ink for the stripes.  Usually I paint them with a very watered down acrylic, like the brown circles in the painting.  When you use acrylics though you loose a lot of the transparency. 


 
                                                                            Print available here.


My goal for this painting was to just play around a little bit with the tea bags and  especially with patterns.  It started out feeling very rigid and tight, but I feel like I got over that and I'm feeling happy with the results.

Blooms

This little piece was a fun one to work on.  The paper had been used as practice  for stamping with  the plastic doily that I used in my last piece.  I didn't know what I wanted to do with it and had actually thought it might end up in the recycling bin, but then I just started to draw, doodle and paint on it with no worries of what will happen and this is what came about.  My garden is filled with little seed heads from my poppies and were the inspiration for these little flowers.  
I used coffee again for the background in this painting.  I'm really loving the feel that this gives. I used little bits of painted tea bags for the bottom and also used some little scraps that Amelia painted.  (they just happened to be laying on the table and seemed perfect for the piece, the purple and the brighter blue pieces are hers.) The piece is mostly painted with watercolor, but I did use acrylics in a few areas. 
This piece made me realize that I need to doodle more and loosen up, and that I don't always need to have a plan.  Just go with it, if it works, great, if not, oh well, nothing lost, but always experience gained.

Another daisy

Daisies remind me of being a little girl and sitting on the grass in the summer with my friends as we talked about  what boys we liked  at the time.  We would take the daisies and pluck off the petals one at a time and say "he loves me" for one petal, and then the next petal would be "he loves me not" and pull all the petals off one by one and see what the last one was, always hoping it would be "he loves me".  Of course if we didn't' get the answer we wanted, we would start over with a new  daisy!   While working on this painting, I began to wonder if the boys ever did this with flowers?  or just us silly girls!  I'm almost sure they didn't.  While the girls were sitting in the grass daydreaming, I'm sure the boys were off doing fun things like baseball, climbing trees, catching frogs and bugs and not thinking about silly girls and their flower predictions!

Have a wonderful weekend

Pink

Summer Colours Week at Poppytalk, today is Pink. 

small things forgotten

Remembering how flowers in your hair can make you feel pretty.

Nature in Red

Oh my goodness, my lovely poppies are already done blooming.  It all goes by much too fast.  They lasted a little over a week and poof, they are done!  How can it be?






























I knew right away a poppy painting was in order.  I really liked how last years poppy painting turned out (pictured below) and wanted to do another one with the poppies in the same style.


 
I have to say, that I'm very glad to be finished with this painting.  It didn't come together very easy at first even though I knew how I wanted my poppies to look.  I think I was so afraid of ruining the painting, that I couldn't figure out what to do with it.  I eventually decided it didn't matter what happened and that's when things finally started to flow.  I need to remind myself to stop taking things so darn seriously and loosen up! (this is with art and life in general)  At the beginning this painting was putting furrows in my brow, but in the end,  it puts a smile on my face!   Yeah!

Giveaway Day

Hello everyone!  Thanks for stopping by to see what I'm giving away for Giveaway Day at Sew Mama Sew!  I've never done anything like this before or given anything away and I thought this sounded like a great chance to meet new people and also to go visit new blogs and maybe win something for myself!

I'm giving away this collage of this sweet little girl, it's titled "For You".  I just made her last week specifically for this giveaway.   She is on an  8 x 10" piece of watercolor paper.  I used painted scrapbook paper for her dress,   (originally the dress was pink with white polka dots and then I painted it orange and I like it soo much better now!),  recycled packaging paper for her face/arms/legs, recycled coffee filters for the flowers/hair and shoes and  watercolor, acrylics  and ink. 

In order to win her, all you have to do is  leave a comment.  Comments will be open through May 25.  I will pick a winner at random on May 26.   Please make sure that your e-mail is linked to your name or leave your e-mail in the comments so I have a way of contacting you.  I'll ship internationally too.

Thanks for stopping by my blog!  I hope you like her!

in bloom

I've had these flowers made out of old coffee filters lying around on my kitchen counter for the last month and a half.  I had meant to use them in a previous painting but they didn't look right.  So there they have laid just waiting for the right painting or inspiration to come.  I've tried them in quite a few different settings but they always would wind up back on my kitchen counter.  I was getting tired of looking at them, but didn't really want to throw them away, so here they are in this quick little painting.  I'm not really sure what I was trying to do in this painting or how I feel about the results, but here it is.

Dragonflies

I'm having visions of warm sunshine,  flowers, and dragonflies.  Soon, very soon!

IF: Swarm

I have a little "swarm" of butterflies this week for Illustration Friday.  There are all sorts of layers to this one.  I started with a pink checkered background I painted with watercolors, then added flowers drawn with india ink, next came all sorts of scrap papers and acrylic paint, followed by stitching to the butterflies at the end, all done on watercolor paper.  I had a blast creating this piece and found it hard to pull myself from it this past weekend and do more important things such as cooking meals for my family!