Blue Dog Blues

I went ahead and made an imitation George Rodrigue.  For those of you who don't know his work... he's super famous for painting this blue dog, based on his own deceased dog and the myth of the loup-garou. 

I went ahead and used one of those scrapbooking frames to frame it, and a fancy invitation to paint on.  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!

Guyzzzz.  Today I painted some tiny people.  They can be the elves that live in the house, causing mischief.

I found them, plain white, at an art supply store, in the railroad section!  A darling friend of mine bought it for me, and I had an amazing time hanging out with my buddies all day Saturday.  I even made a new friend (hi!)

This pic might be a little clearer, but I'm taking it with my cell phone so no promises.

From left to right, it's Shirtless Guy, Old Guy, Hipster Guy, Two Face, and the Fifth Doctor (or as I call them, the One With The Celery).

I did the painting with a push pin!  Guys, painting these little people is more fun than a ticklish monkey in a room full of feathers.

Yesterday I made some art for the house!

I used a die cut to make something called an elastic square out of posterboard.  Basically... it folds to look like a top of a box.  You can do the same thing by hand by scoring the lines you want to fold.

Then I attached some of that really cheap brown paper towel that you find at schools.  This way the crayon would have something to latch onto, instead of slick posterboard.  That's right, folks, crayon!

For the sunflower pictures, what I did was draw it first with crayon, then shave wax off of the crayons with a scissor blade. Then I pressed the wax where I wanted it to go with another paper towel.  Without that compression, it would just fly away when I used the heat gun.   While I melted it with the heat gun, I used a pencil to move the wax where I wanted it to go, and make sharper lines.

As for the portrait of Van Gogh... as you can tell, I'm no V.G.!  For starters, I have both of my ears, yet!  I tried the wax thing for him, but melting it distorted the shapes too much, so I moved to tempera paint, applied with a pencil, to get that really nice texturing that you see in Van Gogh's work.

It actually does look pretty great, but the pictures  blur the details.  This picture does it slightly more justice. You can sort of see the texturing and all of the different shades in the portrait!

Happy arting!

How to spruce up quarter machine fish!

Paint it with a coat of white acrylic, then go to town on them with watercolors.  Darker colors will seep into the crevices and create a really awesome, textured, depth-y effect.

Happy arting!

Today, I painted the outside of the dollhouse.  I've been itching to do something big, instead of so many little projects... but I'm struggling with the walling, and I have to do walling before I do flooring.  The one thing I can do is paint the outside.

These are the before pictures.  It's more gray than blue.  I used regular acrylic, and it just soaked right in.

This is the after picture.  I used a really cheap oopsie home improvement store paint, and, miraculously, I found a gorgeous blue shade instead of baby poop color.

It's really just tinted primer!  It covers really well.  I might do another coat just to be sure, but I love it.  It went on nearly white, but it dried this hybrid between sky blue and robin's egg and I love it!

I need to figure out a color for the trim, but, woohoo!

Alrightypants.  I've made a rocking horse and Flounder from the Little Mermaid.  Not really scary/Halloweeny, unless you count the state that Flounder was in. Terrifying, yo.

Unfortunately, I don't have a post-painted Flounder picture, but I'll get one at some point.  The blue paint was all chipped and the eyes were blurred and the mouth was all... at any rate, fixed!


This is the original rocking horse and the original Flounder.  The rocking horse was an ornament that I destringed and repainted!

It's hard to see in this picture, but there are swirls all over the horse.  Unicorn.  Rocking unicorn.  Done in the style of Van Gogh, complete with sunflowers at the bottom, a saddle with the moon, and orange hair.  I was going to cut off one of his ears but my mom convinced me not to.

I made the horn with the pointy bit of a skewer, and string swirled around it and glued.  Painted, glossed, tada!  The mane is a pipecleaner, the tail is the same hair I used for Rapunzel but painted orange.

Happy arting!

The super secret project is still underway!  So, to buffer for time, I made another project that the kids at the school are making.

First, I made this sort of 'canvas' paneling with paper wrapped around a small rectangle of posterboard.  Then I painted the background, and set it aside to dry. 

This next part is super neat.  A pool of black watercolor, thick enough so that it's opaque, and a straw.  Blowing through the straw makes the branches!   Pretty Van Goghy, huh?

Happy arting!

The house has been abuzz with the rumor that Van Gogh was murdered in his time.

I went and volunteered at the elementary school, and I was inspired to do the project the fifth graders were doing, but tiny-sized!

Basically, I just folded a paper into fours, drew a tree on it in pencil, and cut it.  Winter, spring, summer, fall, with watercolors.  Then I used a toothpick to do the leaves, and a thin brown magic marker to fill in the tree!  I mounted it on black construction paper, a little bit apart.  It's a pretty cool project, sure to liven up any itty bitty home.  I did other stuff too... but I don't want to show you until it's finished.  But I've gotta tell you, I'm excited!
Happy arting!

There's been a special delivery of books at the house, for Hagrid and Poe!

Hagrid now has The Monster Book of Monsters from Harry Potter, and Poe has Twilight.  Anyone who thinks that the title says Toilet is sadly mistaken, as I am a mature adult, ahem.
I made the books a pretty standard way, with the folds being in the middle, and stacking tons of papers in there, and gluing them together at the creases, with a scrap of posterboard as the cover.  The Twilight one I just painted.  As for The Monster Book of Monsters... I used felt as the fur, and it worked pretty well because the more I messed with it, the furrier it looked.  I painted the felt to get the right color.  The mouth is made of notecard material, and the eyes are yellow glass beads and I used a pin to paint a black pupil in the center.

Closer look, that I now see is blurry as heck:

I wrote on the insides of the books, too.  Twilight is mostly lyrics to songs and snarky comments.  The Monster Book of Monsters has my actual reimaginings of classic monsters, plus watercolor illustrations.

More books will be forthcoming, once my hands stop smarting so much from writing teeny words!  Happy arting!

OKAY SO PAINT.

This post was going to be more interesting, but the thingy I'm making is still In Production so I'm going to talk about paint.

Acrylic is going to soak right into wood unless you prime it.  So look for legit house paint (sometimes they have primer added, already), and even then, you're going to need a couple coats. 

Every home improvement store has an oopsie section, for when they screw up mixing for a customer and they want to get rid of it for super cheap.  Unfortunately, most of the paint there is a shade of baby poop.  So go check, and check often, and check lots of hardware stores.  Eventually you'll find one that isn't baby poop or fluorescent orange or khaki... unless you like baby poop walls or fluorescent orange walls or khaki walls, hey, I'm not judging.  I've found some epic shades of blue.