Tee Time

When I was at the Driftless Area Art Festival a few weeks ago, I met another Tammy Olson.  It's the second one I know besides me in our area.  When I was a guest artist at our local art gallery this past May she said she had congratulations from family and friends on her FB page for it!   Earlier this summer someone had heard I was pregnant, only to find out it was another Tammy Olson!  (Thank goodness)

Tammy wanted to know if I had any girl paintings in which they were playing golf, which I didn't.  I'm not a golfer so I hadn't thought about doing one.  (Though a love a good game of miniature golf!)  Tammy loves to play golf and described her outfit to me which she wears while golfing.  She pretty much drew the girl for me.

So this one is for her!





(I forgot to put the golf ball in the painting and had scanned it already and Fischer said to me, "I like it, but it's missing one thing."  I asked "What?"  and he said "A golf ball!"  So obvious, but I had never even thought about it.  Like I said, I'm not a golfer!)

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

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.