Fall Tree CASE

I have been intrigued by the number of "Paint and Pour" classes that are offered in my area, but have not yet brought myself to attend one.  If you are unfamiliar with the concept, It is a two hour painting class where you sip wine while you paint (acrylics) and come home with a completed canvas.  The approximate cost is around 50 bucks, depending where you go and whether you have to buy your own wine or bring it, and also the quality of the teachers.  I just can't wrap my head around the idea that you can paint something worth hanging, but the sample paintings on the schedules are all very nice looking.

To mess with my head even further, I have recently discovered that there is a home party company that allows you to have a paint and pour event in your own home!  If anything is more mind-boggling than the idea that a person with no art training and experience can paint something nice in two hours, it is the idea that a person can buy a kit and TEACH others to do it!   Now, there are a few cheats - there are specific step by step instructions, and also a transfer where you can copy the base drawing onto your canvas.  For the same $50 I would spend to paint one canvas in someone else's facility, I figure I can do a bunch of canvases in my own home - I only need the paints and brushes once.  The instructions/transfers are inexpensive, only $3 each.  As I was deciding if I wanted to throw money at this idea, I looked at the site to see what paintings they had available.

I tell you this because one of the paintings is the inspiration for this 4x4:

Mine is done with markers on a scrap of kraft I had when I cut apart yesterday's card (I will certainly make another card or two based on the suggestions I've received; give me a day or two to digest it).  This is the original:

I think maybe I don't need all the paints and canvases, or even detailed instructions - I will just improvise with what I have.

Doodled flower inchies

I was feeling a little crafty, so a doodled a few little flowers for a mingle on my favorite inchie group. If I am building a stamped inchie on a colored cardstock background, I will layer the cardstock for a base, but if I'm going to draw or paint an inchie, I prefer the diecut inchies I get from Inchiearts. They have a really nice surface for drawing and coloring of all kinds. They have a really nice thickness and weight, too. These little doodles wouldn't look half so nice on GP100.

Maya road bird

I had so much fun doing the Mary Engelbreit chipboard teapots that I had to join another chipboard shape book swap. This swap is for the Maya Road Bird chipboard coaster books, which the swap host found on sale for only a dollar a book. Each book has six pages and the first page has diecuts. We are to keep the diecut page and the ball chain that connects the whole book, and decorate the other five pages to swap.

This is what I have so far:



The other pages look a lot like this, with slightly different doodling and coloring. The detail coloring is done with glitter pans. The background paint job is done with metallic paints, so it looks a little different in real life - glitter and metallic paints don't scan well.

What I am wondering is whether I've done enough. Will a few layers of paint, some doodling, and some glitter qualify this page as complete, or do I need to add some deeply dimensional elements to add texture? Is the doodling enough, or should I add more detailing?

If I were sending it to you, would you be pleased?

The cat is not amused

Sometimes I doodle and I know that what I am drawing is not good but I keep going, wondering why I'm even bothering and then I stop and look at what I've done and think, "Oh!"

Midas roses

Good day to play with the pens.



Drawn with a regular black ballpoint pen over a Krylon gold leafing pen, then colored in with a green metallic gel pen. There is a touch of yellow highlighter on the bee.

My tea book is not really that pale, I did a little gesso wash on the page - several of the pages, actually - before I started. I like gesso with markers, not so much with pens, because it enables the pens to smear, but I didn't know what I was going to do when I did it.

The problem with gessoing multiple pages at once, is the fact that wet pages stick together. Some of the pages are really distressed looking now. The fact that I got coffee in my gesso is a whole other reason for a distressed look.