Day 226 ~ Design a unique playing card.

2 1/2 " X 3 1/2 " , the size of a regular playing card. This one done with blue felt-tip pen and watercolor on watercolor paper.

Day 225 ~ Make a critter house.

What kind of critter? I dunno. Whatever critter wants to live there. S/he has to be small, though, because this piece is 6" X 8". The background is a watercolor with some stamping and designs drawn in watercolor pencil, then painted. The house is made of cut sticks glued to a piece of watercolor paper that has been formed over foam core ribs so that it bows out. The door was cut from the paper and swings out. Inside the house is a piece of leaf for a back wall. The squares decorating the facade, also pieces of pressed and dried leaves. The roof is grape vine pieces with some raffia, the ladder and stilts are painted sticks tied with sewing thread. The metal piece at the base is something I found on the road.

Day 224 ~ Use dirt as an inspiration.

Well, seeing as how this little watercolor (it's 9" x 12") took me the better part of four days, I guess completing my 365 projects in 365 days is getting less likely. I can live with that.

I drew the image in pencil first, went over that with a brown watercolor pencil, painted a wash of water over the whole 'dirt' part, then painted in the sky, the seedling, then all the little spaces between the roots.

This is such a great quote from Margaret Atwood. That's my handwriting, made bold and filled in with paint.

Day 223 ~ Create a Mad Libs-style story.

You are invited to fill in the blanks to make your own story! Have fun!

The background is made from a photograph I took of shadows on a road, turned on its side and messed with in Picassa, which is where I added the type.

Day 222 ~ Make something appetizing look unappetizing.

If you eat this much ice cream you will gain 1300 pounds!

Day 221 ~ Be inspired by trees.

Hey! I'm back. I know I have quite a bit of catching up to do.

I'm finding that I want to spend more than one day on some of these projects!

This is an acrylic painting on a Baltic birch panel, 12" X 16". It is a tree I'm particularly fond of and which I pass on my morning walk. I'm sorry I can't tell you what kind it is.

The piece was inspired by a quote from my good friend, George. It is from the email he sent me for my Day 204 project ~ Ask a friend you haven't seen in a while for an idea of what to do today. I've printed it on translucent paper in olive green ink and nailed it to the board with copper tacks.

George is a woodworker. He lives in a home which he built himself and where he and his wife, Beverly, raised their two children, surrounded by magnificent trees. Here is the quote, in case you can't quite see it ~

Today, spend five minutes appreciating the grandness of trees. How tall, strong and long-lived they are. How self sustaining and beautiful; each one with its own character. How many species there are. How they rise out of the ground defying gravity by pushing water and nutrients to such great heights. How without them and their low lying cousins there would be no source of sustenance for us animal folks. How they provide such essential raw materials for us. They cool us in the summer and warm us in the winter. Magnificent.

George Biersdorf

Day 220 ~ Work only with blue materials.

Made the same way as the little red horse on day 113 and the yellow one on day 185. I start with a paper core, fastened with masking tape. Then I wrap material scraps, that have been coated with glue, around the paper armature. Then the blue yarn is wrapped in one long length, adding the paper ears and the tail as I wrap to secure them on. The mane is slipped under the wrapped yarn in short lengths and tied . The nostrils are beads, glued on. Blue here is 9" tall.

Day 219 ~ Create a mosaic using cut paper.

Again, the 6X8 format with kimono. The cut paper pieces are from a New Yorker magazine, glued onto the kimono shape cut from card stock. A wooden dowel, painted gold, runs through the sleeves. Holes on each end allow a gold chenille yarn to run through and up to a piece made of polymer clay and painted black. The background is Thai banana paper.

Day 218 ~ Do something with measurements.

I found the pictures for my flip book (Day 217) in Ernest Thompson Seton's book, Art Anatomy of Animals, first published in 1896. He had taken them from the famous Muybridge photographs of a horse in motion. Also in that book are charts of precise measurements of animals, including the horse.

For this piece I started with one of my brightly painted watercolor papers, cut it into 1" squares and reassembled it, quilt-like, onto a 5"X7" piece of mat board. Using translucent paper, I copied the charts and diagrams of 'The Size and Proportions of the Horse', found in Seton's book, and embellished them with some ink work. I layered the copies over the watercolor and attached them by drilling holes through the surface, including the foam core background, and sewing on beads, knotting the ends of the thread together on the back. I used archival adhesive on the other details ~ the bundle of horse hair from a violin bow, smaller pieces of the bright watercolor, a tiny print of an ink and watercolor painting I did, and you might recognize the drawing of the running horse on the bottom from the flip book.

Day 217 ~ Make a flip book.

Day 216 ~ Do something with light.

When I saw the bright full moon on Thursday night I wanted to see if I could do a painting in which the moon would glow. I noticed how the values in the foreground were the darkest and how things got progressively lighter 'closer' to the moon. I don't live on a lake, but I have a memory of what the moonlight looks like on one.

I'm using the 6"X8" format again. Seems I'm in a mood to turn these daily projects into real pieces when I can. Probably because I have a show coming up. It's okay. It still feels like play!

This painting was first a watercolor. It didn't look strong enough to me, the moon didn't look like a light, so I painted over the watercolor with acrylics. It's a much cooler (as in temperature) look. I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing until I finished, and then I liked it. I'm thinking the white shell might work against the effect, but it needed something at the bottom, and I'm inclined to add things like bundles of painted sticks, etc., to my work.

The triptych format is something I've been exploring in larger paintings. Not always easy getting the composition to work! Thank-you to my wise and generous friend Doug for some guidelines.

Day 215 ~ Do something with graffiti.

Those of you who know what you are doing with computer graphics would have laughed at the archaic way I did this. But I enjoyed the process.

I found the 'typeface' under graffiti alphabets on Google. Printed in out. Traced the letters I needed to spell out the saying. Then there was a LOT of retracing, sizing, composing, etc. We'll leave it at that. Except that I also changed the color of the type three times, which meant painting over it each time. The 'shield' is cut from one of my stock papers I make for my mixed media pieces, as was the background. There's an arch-shaped piece of foam core behind the shield to make it bow out and to mount it to the background paper. The letters are painted in acrylic. The bundle above holds painted sticks, horse hair, grasses, a feather, a shell, some beads, all wrapped with yarn.

The words, Why should we two ever want to part, are from a poem by Kabir, a mystic poet and saint who lived in India in the 15th century. If you look on Google for Kabir and those words you will find the whole poem. Here is the rest of this beautiful part of it...

Why should we two ever want to part?
Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives
floating on the water, we live as the great one and the little one.
As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and the little one.

  
 

Day 214 ~ Make something with toothpicks.

Wanted to try the kimono idea again. And in the 6X8 format. I cut the shape of the kimono out of a watercolor I did. Cut the toothpicks to fit the panels of the kimono and glued them into place onto the watercolor. Painted them with white acrylic, added squares for surface design. Mounted the toothpick kimono onto foam core and then onto another piece of the same watercolor, trimmed with gold paint. The writing is on a translucent paper, sewn to the backing with beads.