Holiday Time, Ho, Ho, Hum

 Moving right along, Christmas has been showing up everywhere since around Halloween. 

As we're urged to shop for the things we don't need and can't afford anywhere.

This is my response:

I cut up 2 sheets of red and green colored paper and made a miniature paper chain to trim the orange tree that I grew from the seed of the snack I was having one day.

I plan to use the image in one of my stores either as a photo, drawing or painting with the caption "Ho, Ho, Hum". What do you think of the idea?

I realize that it's risky posting all of this here but Christmas is a season of giving and if you're able to do a better job with this than I am then it is my gift to you. Just let me know how it works out for you or send me a copy- Thanks. 

This wildly fun pair of florals were the result of sorting through my art and craft designs while writing to a friend. I can't wait to hear what she thinks of them.

I usually post the horse photos in my dala horse blog but this snowflake idea will span all sorts of media, objects and surfaces so it really needs to appear here as well.

I suppose showing my notebooks is a risk as well but I would hope that no one reading this wants to hurt or steal from me. What I want you to see here is that I collect snowflake pictures anywhere I find them and just keep practicing until I can can come up with a snowflake that combines bits of these different ideas.

I am entirely self taught and I guess I'm vain enough to hope that some of you may want to learn from my methods.

 Along with my sketches I include some inspiration photos as I let the ideas  "cook" until I'm able to get back to them they are figuratively "on the back burner".

Hopefully by the time I get back to it I'll have a fresh approach to the whole thing.

This next page is inspiration photos as well and a bit of practice with collage.

Well, none of us are perfect. Especially in our sketchbooks so I really had to laugh when I discovered I had spelled Ideas wrong on my label maker when I put that page together and I'm far too busy to go back and fix it now. You get the idea, don't you? LOL

A few thoughts for the Holidays

How are you today? I'm so bored that I'm making paper airplanes out of the junk mail to fly into the recycling in. LOL

I've been trying ,but not too hard to clean up the living room to get ready for Thanksgiving 

All except for this one spot on a shelf, you could barely walk around in here. Where would I ever put a fully set table and chairs for five?

Of course the first thing to do was to put things on the shelves. That would help a LOT. I KNOW there is floor space under all of this!

I'd been moping and feeling kind of sorry for myself until I heard that my sister out east had bought us an entire Thanksgiving dinner to share with my sister's here. That Cheered me up a lot.

It even inspired me to start some holiday themed painting.

I had gotten to the point where I just want to hide under the bed until all of the holidays are over. How about you? 

The fact that I won't have to shop or cook this Thanksgiving should put a jingle in my bells as I limp through life on my way to Christmas.

We had to stand in a food line again and it's not the first time this year but I'll bet it happens to more people than you know.

Oh well, that's a great reason to look forward to a Happy New Year. Almost anything has got to better than things have been this year.

My Best Wishes to all of you that you'll find your self warm, safe, dry and fed in that Happy New Year. It's more that a lot of other people have. a lot of the time that it's one of those things that just slips our minds.

There is joy in life, we forget it often. It's kindness that brings it back

Brush away your troubles and paint something happy,

Julia

The Biggest Surprise Falling My Way

While looking through a catalog yesterday I was surprised to see a set of bed linens that looked a lot like a painting that I'd done last year.

Of course my background color is different but you can see that the design idea is much the same.

I always find that exciting because it means that my ideas are marketable and already popular with some people.

After that, the next thing I did was pull up photos of some of my other leaf designs to explore the possibilities of developing a new product line with them.

This is actually an "in progress" photo of the painting that currently has a blue background. I'm wishing now that I'd left the blue paint off of it.

Here's another painting that I wish had a different background on it.

These are a couple of old watercolor studies I did in the painting group years ago at the Forest Lake Senior Center. I would often do a bunch of quick watercolors and give them away to people.

It never occurred to me to do anything more serious with them.

This is a fun acrylic leaf stamping that I did at home one year. I went around my yard and painted directly on the leaves and then stuck them directly to the canvas then pulled the leaves off, leaving the print behind.

There are so many different things you can do!

Get Creative and Join the Fun!