As I looked at this painting at various stages I realized I thought it was precious.  That is a wonderful thing when talking about time with my kids, date night with the hubby, or a girls night out my  friends.  Those types of things are precious.  My painting is not nor should it be!

It sat at this point for a while.  I didn’t like it much and had no real spark with it.

Since it wasn’t precious I had no problem smearing paints around and making various random marks.

This is when the trouble started.  I started to really like parts of it and it was becoming precious to me.  My ideas dried up.  I felt frozen for fear of “ruining” it.  Thinking it is precious was in my way so I decided to try something big on it…Nothing happened. Frozen.  Trying to think of something big  or perfect just left me frozen.

So I thought small.  I grabbed a black paint pen. Only I was too stiff, too in my head.  So I went left handed and closed my eyes and started drawing.  The most important part is that it got me interacting with the painting instead of just looking at it.

When I opened my eyes, I thought, “boy this is ugly with all these black lines” which is a good thing for me I am learning because now I was willing to take a risk and try something on it.  I smeared paint on with my fingers, used a brush to make shapes and lines, and began to cover up some areas and leave parts peeking out.

So here is where my work in progress is at for now.  I added a bit of drippy paint, a few dots, and more paint.  I am liking where it is going and just parts are feeling precious.  Before I am finished with this I imagine it will have some more ugly phases and more precious phases.  Don’t know where it will end up but I will just trust my muse…

If you have a moment stop by and visit the encouraging and creative  artists at Paint Party Friday and Creative Every Day!

I was hearing voices today- the paint was calling to me- beckoning me to get my fingers messy.  Perhaps that was because I was toying around with the idea of a manicure- not anymore.  I get way too much gesso on my fingers to invest in my nails…

I started with this background made who knows how long ago.  It is spray ink and gesso layers.  It has been around a while but today it sparked my interest.

A bit of colored pencils to define the shapes.

Added  a bit of color and glued down some triangles cut from notebook paper.  I chose the diamond  shape since I only had 1 area of diamonds on the page- the larger size let me play around with scale and proportion a bit.  Man do I love cheap notebook paper!

Added paint and markers.

I need more white space, so gesso to the rescue!

Lost all the white space to watercolors.  Really have a tough time leaving white space in my art…

I made a roller stamp based on a tutorial by Alisa Burke and rolled my words on with black paint.

I have this great huge foam flower stamp by Donna Downey.  When I lifted the stamp the paint barely showed the image.  Not what I expected.

With a paintbrush and more orange paint I filled in the image so it would stand out more.

A quick black outline to define the flowers. A sloppy messy white pen added a touch of white to the flowers.  Still not much white…maybe in my next project…