Thank you for all the crackle love and questions that came with it. I am preparing a post about my experiments with different products for crackling and my results with them. The results are not always pretty, but I hope that it will be interesting to show all of it - the good, bad and the ugly. xo

Feeling grateful for happy weekends

Not only I didn't make the last video, I didn't see my studio at all. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, so we spent a wonderful and active weekend enjoying every minute.  Here are some snippets of our days seen through my husband's lens.

I planted a vegetable garden.

He says that I'm a humming bird, because I can't pass the wisteria without putting my face right in them, drinking in the amazing fragrance.

Hana's eye.

A welcome guest.

Unwelcome guests.

Yummy grilled dinner.

Do you know that when we moved into our house the cala lilies were just starting to grow (no flowers and tiny foliage) and I thought that they were weeds, so I tried to destroy them. I'm so happy that they survived!

Painting on Rosin Paper - Part 3

I paint so fast! The music is fast, my brush is going like crazy... it is pretty funny. This is another video of my Rosin Paper experiments. It shows how I painted on a collage background. I used acrylics, water soluble crayons with gesso, inks (or just one ink - not sure)...The journal from this painting is already in hands of her new owner (I hope that she'll enjoy seeing the process).

My computer received a fresh pack of added memory (thanks to my dear husband) so now editing videos will not (hopefully) take forever. I might have the final video (#4) tonight.

Reverie

Reverie:

1. Daydream

2. Lost in thought

Did you know that daydreaming is good for the brain? Not to mention the soul... I read about it HERE. Good to know that I'm doing something healthy and useful when I think I'm wasting time.

I don't know if she wanted to have a crackled surface as the previous one, but I know that I wanted to play with it again. It is so interesting when you pour something and know that you can't really control the way it will turn out. I love the feeling (but won't be able to play with crackly surfaces for a while because I used all the crackle making stuff).

 This is what I wrote on the back:

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. 
It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
~Gaston Bachelard

She lives HERE now (in case anyone is interested). Happy pre-Friday!

Promise

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep...

~Robert Frost

I spent the afternoon with a piece of wood (6.5"x14") and she showed up.
She said that the painting should be called Promise. And that it should have a crackled finish.

So I made it that way. I also wrote Robert Frost's words on the back. And she's now finished and living in my little shop. I wonder who will show up today when I sit with another piece of wood...

Painting on Rosin Paper - 1 & 2

You may know from THIS post that I love rosin paper. I like that it is inexpensive and that I can create freely on it without thinking about the outcome. I wanted to see how a similar painting looks on different backgrounds and I thought that rosin paper would be a good surface for it. In the first video you'll see how I created 4 different backgrounds and sketched a similar face.

The next one shows me painting two faces. One of them is hilarious.... I choose colors so poorly that it was making me laugh all the time. I guess it shows that if you just continue painting, not reacting to the ugly phase, something will appear. After all, it's only paint and paper...

I hope you'll enjoy them. Two more to come. Happy almost weekend!

Finally!!!

I finally carved out some time to edit my photos, list my journals on etsy and write a short blog post. I'm not done with the movies yet, but I know that at least two will be up tomorrow. I listed one of my journals for a very cool price of $2,550.00. One person saw it before I caught my mistake and probably thought that I am out of my mind :-)