A Very Merry!

A very Merry Christmas to all my friends both near and far, both face-t0-face friends and world-wide web friends!  I hope this day, the first of twelve days of feasting, will be filled with joy and peace, rest and rejuvenation, love and inspiration!

A must-read for you this holiday is a Christmas story written by my husband.  He read it to all of us at Grace Pres last night for our Christmas Eve service…it was truly enchanting!  Draw up with a cup of cocoa and read here! I have visions of how to illlustrate this wonderful story…perhaps this time next year, I’ll have images to his words…it would be so much fun!

May the New Year bring you all creative inspiration in all your endeavors, big and small!  I look forward to sharing 2011 with you!

 

A Holiday Line

I seem to drift back into one-liner drawings when time is limited.  This method of drawing is very centering and meditative, which I’m in huge need of these days!  I have a little tabletop white tree this year in my studio.  Some of my sketching/painting supplies are set under the tree for lack of another place to put them.  I love the intersection of lines, incomplete shapes, connections between objects that this way of drawing reveals.  It always makes me think of that invisible common thread that DOES exist in my life between all the disparate elements.  That golden thread is always there, even though I don’t readily see it.  Typically life feels like a jumble of disconnected stuff.  But if I sit, and ponder, and really SEE…the line, or thread, appears winding it’s way in and out of everything creating a lovely whole.

Collage Bushes

Ooh, this was too much fun…colors, textures, patterns…yum!  Yet another version of the “broccoli bushes” you’ve seen here, here, and here.

Life is increasingly holiday-crazy around here which makes for very little creative time.  I’ve got to carve it out somehow and I’m hoping you can do the same in the midst of all the christmasing.

 

Cupcake Bushes

Another version of those sculpted bushes at the top of my neighborhood.  Instead of broccoli, now they look like cupcakes to me.  This is watercolor used very much like acrylic (only it’s so much more agreeable than acrylic, because it blends better and you can get wonderful color passages with watercolor AND it’s less work than acrylic).

Anyhoo.  It’s a blast trying out different styles and media with these bushes.  Stay tuned for more…

Petites Prières

I’ve been making pages of these little images for years.  They are just for me.  Just for the fun of putting down watercolor in little blocks.  To breathe, as it were, and expand a bit on the wonder of color, line, texture, etc.  They are ramblings, stream-of-conscious painting, exhalations.  When life gets really busy, like these holidays, they are the perfect thing to keep me going.  When your brain and time can’t slow down enough for large scale work, it’s lovely to make little puffs of paint on paper.  Mini prayers, so to speak.  Here’s just one of them.

I do like it on its own.  But I like them even more altogether on the page.  They all work together somehow to enhance the others.  They may seem messy and unrelated (just like the jumble of thoughts in my prayers), but they end up being lovely as a whole.  And I LOVE LOVE my Edwards stamp that my sister and brother-in-law brought back from China for me several years ago.

You should try these…don’t think about them being anything, not even thoughts or prayers…just make several boxes on your page and go to it with watercolor, pens, crayons, whatever floats your boat.  I recommend watercolor so that you don’t have to be so precise about anything.  If you want to make something recognizable in each box, fine!  But if not, just let the paint oozle and wazzle around.  Scrape into it, add more on top of it, splatter and splash til your heart’s content.  Let ‘em dry, go back into them, if you want.  If not, just enjoy how they turned out…tiny little puffs of paint.

I’ve created a section in my Flickr of just these pages, so if you want to see more of them check here.

Late Night Drawing

Waiting up late this past Saturday night for my oldest daughter to return from her high school Winter Formal, I decided to draw to keep myself awake.  I worked from a photo of Maddie drawing in her big tablet.

Perhaps I should do more late night drawings:)

Puffball Bushes

Another version of the broccoli bushes.  Not terribly different from the first version, but more line work here.  I think I’ll try some really thick watercolor next!

Elf on the Shelf

Last year, about a week after Maddie returned home from Brenner’s, our dear next-door neighbor gave her an Elf on the Shelf.  If you’ve never heard of these little guys, click here, to discover the world of the Elves who visit in children’s homes for the duration of the holidays.  He came with a book telling us all about himself.  Maddie named him Lucky.  Every night he would go to sleep with her, but each morning be found in a different place in the house.  He left after the Christmas holidays (Maddie was very sad about that!); but Maddie did not forget him at all during the year.  Every month she would ask us what we thought Lucky was up to.  Of course, we told her, he was busy making toys for the next year’s Christmas, and he probably couldn’t wait to return to see her.

Well, sure enough, he showed up a few days BEFORE December 1st, the date she figured he would arrive again.  He gets carted around everywhere with her (even though the book says he should not be touched…he’ll lose his magic!)  but doesn’t seem to be losing any of his magic.  I think these little elves are actually to keep an eye on the kid’s behavior, making sure they are nice and not naughty.  It’s great fun all around!

Here’s Lucky, as he was found a few morning’s ago, sitting in the sash of one of Maddie’s dresses hanging on the front of her closet door.  The only drawback to this guy being in our house, is the worry that we might, one night, forget to move him to a new spot!  But if that’s all we, as her parents, are worried about this Christmas (as opposed to last year), I’ll take it!

Maybe you know a young’un who would benefit from an Elf friend visiting for the holidays:)