You'll have to wait a bit longer for my gal to be finished.  I thought I had a material that I do not, in fact, have.

But, but, but!
Look at what I did:

It's basically posterboard, covered with light batting, then covered again with that fabric I got at that garage sale that one time.  I used popsicle sticks at the seat to help stabilize it when folks sit on it.  It feels like a couch you'd want to sit on.

I just cut out the shapes, and in some cases sandwiched them.  Actually... if you look at where the pearls are, that's where my seams are from gluing the front to the back, or the side to the side.  I think it looks really funky and vintage, and it cost me way less than a dollar to make, since, as a crafter, I had most of this stuff lying around already!

Here's a closer look!

Happy arting!

Garage Sale Saturday was pretty much a bust today.  But I did find a little doll that's just fascinating me.  Look at those strange legs and strange feet.

I'll be giving her a makeover to make her more my style tomorrow! 

Also: it's National Novel Writing Month ( nanowrimo.org ), so November may be a little sparse artwise, but I'll do my best to get things done!  Happy arting!

I had and recovered from a stomach bug on Wednesday and now I'm rocking and rolling again!  But the problem is that I'm rocking and rolling too much.  There are too many ideas rattling around in this big dumb brain of mine, too many things half-started, and my room is too messy and I'm not quite at the energy level to clean it yet.

So there are no pictures today, but there will be eventually!  Don't lose faith in me!

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!

Garage Sale Saturday was a huge success!

First we stopped by a home improvement store and found a glorious shade of oopsie paint and glass tiles that match!  The best part of the glass tiles is that they were in the fifty cent clearance section.

My only problem is that I need to figure out a way to cut the glass tiles so I can actually use them in the attic floor.  I have my feelers out to see if I have a friend of a friend that can hook me up.

As for the garage sales proper, I got a tiny zen garden that might go on the roof as a giant zen garden, but mostly it's for me.  Then I got these:

A teeny bucket and something that would work lovely as a rug.

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!