A little bit of morning painting

Video today instead of words. :)

Christmas Watercolors

Once upon a time, I used to send holiday cards. I loved doing it actually but my perfectionism tended to make me procrastinate mailing them and often I had handfuls of beautiful cards... that I never sent out.

I still love Christmas images though. So this year I played with some of my favorite Christmas things and made mini watercolors.  I really only love the pinecones but they were fun! :)

I posted them as a collage on instagram. :) People like them. That always makes me happy. 

Do you send Christmas cards? If so, how many?

Watercolors

I struggle with watercolors, but I've been playing with my watercolor pencils a lot lately.
Here's something that will go in my sets of cards.

Today some of my pieces of Zentangle pottery go up for sale at the Glen Park art festival where my friend Sara of Goldhawk Pottery is participating. It's pretty exciting!

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and that you are doing something great.
My brother is making me my birthday dinner tonight. YAY for birthday dinner!

Do something awesome today ok?

Colors today!

Not really tangled, but inspired by beloved tangle patterns. Created using watercolors, some sprinkles of salt and my markers.

I really like how it turned out even if I didn't know where I was going with it!

So today I encourage you to reach out and try something new or in a new way.
Have fun!

Things never go as planned

Yesterday I was feeling messy. :D
Sometimes that happens.

This is actually much more pink that it appears in photos, but instead the photos instead prompted several people to ask if I'd been making sacrifices in my studio. :D
I promise not even to the gods of pens and paper.

It was the start to the second journal project I had, which involved including a quote.
I selected instantly a quote from Neil Gaiman...

Go and make interesting mistakes.
Make amazing mistakes
make glorious and fantastic mistakes
Break Rules
Leave the world more interesting for you being here.
Make.
Good.
Art.
~Neil Gaiman

First, I love him. I think he is amazing, and second.. that quote spoke to me from somewhere deep inside, which means it's the right one.

So that was to be these pages...except it didn't feel right. I made a face and went to set it aside to think on it and dropped my journal. Ooops. I'm kind of a klutz sometimes, and it fell open, onto the pages BEHIND my watercolor creation that may have been inspired by my 12 hour criminal minds marathon.
And I made another face...
Because I saw, all along the left side of one of the pages a smear from my red watercolor. Dang it. On my nice, pretty, supposed to be CLEAN pages behind it. Ugh. Double Ugh. Now I wasn't happy with 2 things in my journal and I was only 4 page in...
And the inner monologue starts...
The little voice in my head that I like to keep locked in the closet started to say things like, "That isn't supposed to be there, take those pages out, they're not good enough, isn't this the 2nd time in 10 days you've messed up in something you are supposed to post? You keep making mistakes...."
Cool me responds back with... "Whoa there brat voice, what did you just say?"
And then I realized... I'm making a lot of mistakes ART.
With that, comes things i don't like. I once had someone tell me that all art goes through an ugly stage, an awkward, teenage, adolescent stage and that my quote was about it being ok to make mistakes.
So I came up with this. I messed the pages up a little more. Every word has something I'd have "fixed" in the past. I splattered some ink, and then I did in fact ooops again and closed the journal when I didn't mean to so it transferred.. and came up with a glorious mess.

I don't really like it, but I think I will. And whether or not I "like" it right now.. I love it.  I am going to add in pieces of art that didn't go as planned throughout the year. Things that in the past I'd have relegated to the back of a drawer or tossed in frustration. They now have a place on these pages.. the pages that give me permission to make mistakes.
That's a really nice gift to have given myself.
This art journal thing might be pretty good for me.

Creative weekend.

I got some new tools this weekend and I've been having so much fun with them.
I wanted to share some of what I've been doing in the interest of beating my perfectionism as well as just to let you know how much fun I'm having... and isn't that what the whole creative thing is about? Having fun with it anyway? None of these are my "usual quality" or really anything I put any REAL effort into. And that is kind of the point of this post.

So I got 2 sets of Aqua markers, which are watercolor markers. I've not really played with any like these before, and it's been a lot of fun, but I didn't use watercolor paper so I had a lot of pilling, which kept things from going clean and the colors didn't photograph right... so there's that.

I also spent less than 10 min on each of these, cause I'm just seeing what they do. :) (I tell people all the time, just do it! Don't hesitate to post it! Just DO it!)
Neither of these is any good (can you hear my inner critic??? She's a loud mouth isn't she?) and yet I really love both of them, mostly because while I was making them I was having so much fun just PLAYING with my markers. I wasn't worried about making art, it was making itself, I was just having fun.

Earlier this weekend I posted about my spiral art set, which I just love. I've played with it ALL weekend!
And then my I did this with my spiral art set... again... just something really quick to see how it worked.
Again, not more than 10 minutes and it was after midnight when I did it!

Then our other project was creating homemade ice chalk. (and erupting ice chalk!) It's finally going to be gorgeous out and we love chalk here so we thought we'd try something new.   I didn't take many pictures because we were still experimenting... but I will share some of our creations if it worked out right.. and if it did I'll do a post on it. (NOT my creation ... and I will find where I got the idea originally to share with you as well!)
I did snap this shot as I was mixing 1 batch though. Isn't that gorgeous?

Well... What did YOU do this weekend?
I hope you are doing something great!

The rest of my day is going to be spent playing with erupting ice chalk in the driveway with the kids and then making ribeye and shrimp kebabs... YUM! so I think my art with take a backseat today, although I will probably be posting the recipe for my kebabs on my other blog if you're interested. I don't post there very often, but I try and post fairly easy, really tasty food.


In case I don't post tomorrow, Happy Memorial day.
Memorial day is... well... I'll post about that tomorrow ok?
Please remember what the day is about and take a moment at some point to remember.




Only a few days til the challenge kicks off here! Do you want the details in advance or should I post them on the 31st like I was going to?