After the parade

I had such fun making cards yesterday that the dining room looked like a confetti filled parade route by the time I finished in the early evening. I wrote a few letters and have enough new cards on hand to take care of my mail for weeks to come.

I'm not sure what I'll work on today. I'll start by sweeping up the mess and take a look at some of the other projects waiting on the table.

Tomorrow I plan to get back to watercolor.

Watercolors in the mail

 These are the follow up to my post about using watercolor masking fluid.

 Once the masking fluid was removed all I needed to do was paint in the flowers and a couple of leaves.

 I painted some envelopes to match and enjoyed using them to answer my mail today.

 Here's a close up of one of the cards. 

 Here's a closer look at the envelopes.

The New Painting Settles In

 Yes, I found a bit more wall space to hang that tulip painting as I list the pattern books for the knitting machine for sale on eBay. It will be funny to see what sells first-the painting or the books but this is a busy little corner of the living room these days.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying "playing" with the painting on Zazzle and discovering how many different ways it can be used to design products. I love the idea of turning it into something useful and challenge myself to keep trying new things with it.

Every Last Scrap

 If this looks familiar, that's because it is. It's part of a piece from the last salt technique watercolor paintings that I did. There's also a lot of merchandise based on it in my zazzle store  http://www.zazzle.com/julia_art*  

 This card is made of scraps from several watercolor paintings and card stock mounted on a blank card.

 I thought about developing this piece into bunches of grapes and vines but decided to keep "playing" with it instead.

 Here are the results: That card is the one on the left of this photo.

A bit of fun in the mail to brighten your day

This card contains bits of a card from a friend, a photo of flowers from my garden, a picture from some note paper and a bit of pen, ink and pencil. We find it kind of fun to write back and forth and keep adding things until the cards (or art, depending on how you look at things) get too thick and heavy to drop into envelopes to mail. This one is starting to get pretty interesting...and it's an idea that you and your friends might enjoy too.

Practice and results

I combined the cards I made from the sunflower photos with some of the drawing and painting techniques in the books I've been reading and come up with something I really like. I've given away 2 of them already! The fun thing about this project is how the altered photos make you look at the same old subject in different ways and each of those different ways led to different painting techniques. Can you tell which strokes came from the rosemaling books?

Double Daffodils

I grow 3 different types of daffodils here and there are just a few of two of them left so I'm drawing as often as I can while they last.