My two great loves...

I'm feeling happy tonight. We just got Pumpkin a new bike. I know, it's a little bit early here in the great North, where the snow is FINALLY beginning to melt. But she rode it all around Wal-mart, which was hilarious, racing with particular abandon through the lawn and garden department before Superman and I decided we couldn't put it back on the rack. It would be too heartbreaking. So the bike came home with us. As soon as she got out of the car, immediately in fact, she rode it up and down the loooong block we live on exactly a zillion times. A ZILLION. I had a blast watching her.

This whole week was a great one overall. Even though Superman was on spring break and I was still at work. I think we went for a walk with Pumpkin every single night. We played, we ran, we skipped, we read books together, we ate ice cream, we enjoyed each other. It was wonderful. So wonderful. These two beautiful people are the great loves of my life. I have come to a point now where I know I cannot live without them. They are a part of everything that I am. Just wanted to share the joy...

More watercolors

Sun I, Sun II

Here are two more that I finished within the last two weeks. I'm really enjoying this. I may be in a bit of a rut, so to speak, for a while. (No, a groove, let's call it a groove.) Seeing as I'm really digging these watercolors. What do you think? Give it to me straight...

Some other projects...

Here are a couple of watercolors I made. They are not recently completed necessarily, but I had them at school and finally decided to bring them home. I think I would like to frame them?? Not sure. The clockworks piece was finished about a year ago, the season's end about three or so months ago. Let me just say that I love watercolor. Love, love, love it. I think it's the rich, transparent layers, and the myriad variations of tone and value in every inch of the artwork. There are so many things that could happen when you touch your watercolor brush to your paper. So many wonderful "happy accidents" as one of my art professors used to call them. I've been using my watercolors a lot as of late. I will have to post those works later.

Good Things to Come...

The past several weeks have been so stressful for Superman and I. (And for hundreds of thousands of others in this great state of Wisconsin.) We are both teachers. And to dispel the grand amount of myth and misinformation circulating out there, we are not rolling in the dough. We make a pretty modest income. So modest, in fact, that I have to work. I struggle with this fact often, you can read about that here. Anyway, the outlook seems pretty bleak right now, but however crazy this sounds, I know we'll be just fine. Our faith will see us through. I have no doubt that though this will impact us greatly we will be watched over. We will not quit. We will keep going. We will overcome. We will find joy.

...a thousand words, a snapshot linky

I'm doing my first photography link up ever. It's my sister's link party. I think it's a fabulous idea. You can read about it here. You can join her every Sunday. She will provide the title of your photo for the following week and your job is to find the perfect shot. Fun! So, here goes...





"Welcome to the Jungle"

I don't know if I can think of a wilder, more untamed place then the hallways of the high school where I work at passing time. You know, in between classes. In fact, there is one hallway specifically where particularly large crowds of teens tend to gather on a regular basis. I call the groups "people clots". You know, instead of blood clots. Same idea really, but instead of blocking major arteries these guys block the flow of traffic. It's crazy during noon supervision, trying to navigate this gauntlet. It's a big, fat party in the hallway. (I say this somewhat fondly as I love the energy that's always present working at the highschool level. There is always something going on.)





Stop over and have a look!

It's done

So, here are the deets on my mixed media piece. It is 24" x 30". It's on a canvas panel. I used the following materials to complete it:

tissue paper

mod podge

acrylic

cotton fabric

tulle

ribbon

handmade paper

hot glue

ink

printer transfers

gel medium

ummmm, and I think that might be it.

Here is the finished product. I added a bit of prose I wrote that I feel really captures who my daughter is at heart. And, for the record, I like it now. I might even hang it in her room.

My Little Dancer

She is a rough and tumble kid, an expert runner, jumper, climber, skipper, tumbler, and faller...at any given moment she has quite a collection of bruises, bumps, and scrapes...battle scars from her adventures. But she will pull her hot pink tutu from her pile of frilly fru fru and turn her three year old face to me and suddenly she is a dancer. She tells me she needs to find her "slips" so she can dance. I help her put them on and she leaps and twirls. She is the most beautiful dancer I've ever seen...

Mixed media update

I've been working on my mixed media project and it's coming along. I added some transfers to the canvas, all pictures of Pumpkin over the past three years. You start with a computer print, on a regular piece of printer paper, you apply an even coat of gel medium (I use Blick) to the print side of the paper. You lay the print on your canvas, where you want the transfer to be, and press firmly, starting in the center and working your way out all the way around. (You're trying to remove any wrinkles and/or air bubbles.) Let the transfer sit for a while. After a time you should be able to peel up a corner to see if the ink is adhered to the canvas. If most of the ink stays on the canvas then you can begin peeling the top layer of paper off. This is what I was left with, and while I enjoy the process, I wasn't sure if I liked the product in this case.

Not really very cohesive, and I wasn't at all sure where to go from here. But this is what I did next:

See the vine there? The color is a bit off in the above photo. Next I added detail and shadows to the vine. And cut out a whole bunch of leaves from some handmade paper. I painted detail on the leaves and then glued them to the vine.

That's all I have for tonight. It's not finished yet. But again, I'm not sure where to go from here. I think it's good for my students to be able to see my artistic process though, and that even someone who's been producing artwork for years gets stuck. We all have some successes and some failures...I was just hoping this would be a success. We shall see!