Under my Umbrella-Ella-Ella

If I atoned for the rest of my life, I'd still never be forgiven for the title of this post.

This project is something I've been itching to do for a while, and I thought it'd be much harder than it was.  I took a cocktail umbrella (which I've always been kind of fascinated with, honestly.  They're tiny, functional umbrellas with moving parts, and people just throw them out willy-nilly!  They're cool) and peeled off the tissue paper, leaving me with a skeleton of the umbrella.  Then I used the tissue paper, which was all surprisingly in one piece, as a template to cut out the fabric I wanted to use.  It actually worked out brilliantly, because I chose spotted fabric, and there's one spot right in the middle where I cut out the center piece.

I glued it on and coated the whole thing with white glue, in part to stop it from fraying.

Cutesicles, right?  Happy arting!

Today I planned to make a little box to put the cards in, but as you can see, it didn't quite go as planned.  The box is too small width-wise, so now I just have a tiny box!

I used posterboard cut into strips and tape to hold them together.  Then I tried to paint it, but the paint kind of... decided to not stick to the tape.  So I decoupaged it with tissue paper, used three small yellow beads, an orange glass tile, and a strip of gold string, and it looks so much better when the picture isn't done with my crummy phone.   Happy arting!

Today I finally felt a little spark of motivation, and I moved to make a tiny deck of cards.

It wasn't as easy as just snipping them out, though.  I painted the back with this cool metallic blue paint that I got when I was painting set pieces for a community production of Alice and Wonderland.  I fell in love with the shade, but I haven't had cause to use it since. 

The tiny cards were printed on cardstock (or photo paper) and I coated the front with white Elmer's glue.  That gave it more of a playing card feeling between my fingers, if that makes sense.

I'm not the best cutter in the world, so I tried to cut it with a boxcutter and a ruler.  Big mistake.  It ended up tearing up the paint on the back (I'll do touchups eventually).  I switched to scissors and I didn't do half badly!  This is Van Gogh playing Solitaire (okay, so my hands are too shaky today for setting up tiny things, but I made them, and that's the important bit!)  Happy arting!

I've been having a really wild week!  No real art to speak of, but I started pressing flowers for projects (and possibly miniatures), trying to write, babysitting, and more, and while I'm inspired to make things, the motivation just isn't there right now.  It's like being an RC car and having good, fresh batteries but the whole car is upside down so no one's getting anywhere.

So I'm giving myself the week off.  I'm going to be obnoxiously relaxed, give my brain a break from building, and start focusing on other stuff without the nagging guilt at the back of my head that says, "Make something."  I'll get to it.  And when I do it's going to be awesome!

What do you folks do when you find yourself in an artistic rut?

Early Easter

I don't want to be the one to tell Hagrid that Easter is tomorrow.  At any rate, he seems to have found an egg.  I'm slightly worried about what's hatching from it.

You might notice that his basket is rather cauldrony.  I got the cauldron at a garage sale, at which point it was dry brushed silver, which gave it a really nice aged look, but it had a very obvious plastic seam down the middle, and MADE IN TAIWAN stamped on the inside.  I used a nail file to file down the seam and the inside, and I used some liquid copper leaf to color the cauldron.  It took a few coats.  Partially due to my own stupidity.  I thought because it didn't say to shake well on the back of the package that I didn't need to.  It's also a kicker to clean off of brushes and hands.

Don't let the bad quality picture fool you... it's gorgeous.  And it was really exciting to work with actual soluble copper, as opposed to copper paint.  I got it on sale, which is also pretty exciting. 

Happy arting!

Wall-t Whitman

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.”   
-- Walt Whitman

Painting these walls involved many barbaric yawps.  For one thing, the paint had seperated.  Even after mixing, it took five coats for the beige paint to cover the gray primer, which must have gone bad or something.  The walls aren't together due to an accident when we were moving houses, and I'm probably not going to put them together until I have the flooring done which will be sometime in the future [/intentionally vague]

Van Gogh is standing there to mock my poor artistry and sloppy painting.  As he does.  Happy arting!