"Happiness never decreases by being shared" -Buddha

I am enjoying painting whether in mixed media, at Wine and Design with acrylics or on my own with watercolors.

My husband when I remarked on his rice bowl to the right looked at the screen and said "Buddha looks like he is sitting in a high chair". 

This was created with watercolors, the blue stamping was done with  recycled bubble wrap with various saturation of paint and various pressure when stamping. I love that each bubble looks nothing like the other.

So in the spirit of Buddha I hope this happy Buddha brings a bit of happiness to your day as he has brought to mine!

Beading my art makes me happy!!!

I so love making necklaces with pendants I have made.
The tiles ended up so lovely and I wire wrapped them and made them into necklaces. The oriental butterfly I beaded with fresh pearls and crystals. Love the richness of the gold pearls and faceting of the crystals are really stunning.

The monkey pendant is made in honor of my new mantra

"NOT MY CIRCUS NOT MY MONKEYS"

This was one of the upcycled art tiles with a green gold background and the monkey in black with turquoise and red. I love the colorfulness of the beads with it.

One of the other tiles was light purple and I created Etz Hayim, the Tree of Life the drawing is my own and the leaves are copper and gold metalic paint and them embossed to give them a 3D effect.

I also worked on some polymer clay pieces. I had made in the past and wire wrapped a koi fish to it. I love japanese art I am sure living in Hawaii and being friends with Eiko fostered this.

Lastly I worked on a scanned hand cut stamp of our dog Bolt. I had made two stamps our pitbull Blaze wore a Marine Corps cover and Bolt was styling a plebe Dixie cup for the USNA. We printed the stamps on linen and when scanned it made a very textured picture. We printed it added blue permanent marker decoupaged it onto a tile. Then used washi tape in bright colors around the outside. Wire wrapped with matching color hot pink and green. This is for my daughter so a simple silver chain is how she would wear it. I am sure if it had been for me I would of used some brightly colored pearls and beads.

4th of July Art Camp Day 2

We were up early and Gail made us a lovely omelet breakfast even though I did have to have keep the jalapeno's out of my omelet.

We both loved our pendants and pieces from the day before. Gail remembered she had some blank ones and we decided to try doing it all....as we are fond of saying "let's try! nothing lost if we don't like it". Well let me just say I am so impressed with what we did. I used a great Japanese butterfly stamp with so many components in the stamp. I ended up making three sets of tiles.... in bronze orange and gold, royal blue and turquoise, and purple and pink each set is three pieces of varying sizes all with different imaging. I brought only three home, two that we framed as accent pieces.The third is going to be made into a pendant.

The rest of the time was spent creating parts of the next 'fox tales" bag, adding layering. The construction will have to wait until next time at the lake. 

I also used the time to make the linen labels for the inside  we use for the bags. I used multiple stamps- anchor, monkey, zebra, giraffe, elephant we stamp with black  fabric paints and then I added a bit of red permanent marker for accent, I did have to restrain myself as I love to add lots of color.

Well we did stop for lunch the only thing was it was 5 pm before we remembered to eat. 

I had another wonderful art camp. We are dreaming of being able to bring this to others we talk about it and the seeds are planted we just have to see how we can grow the dream. Until then it time to start planning for our next Hector Art Camp. 

4th of July Art Camp-FREEDOM OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION DAY I

This 4th of July weekend was spent at art camp at Gail's lake house in Hector NY.
As usual the weekend started with happy hour- cheese, salami, olives and gluten free crackers. This time is spent catching up with each other.

On the way to art camp I stopped at two second hand stores. The first is a treasure trove of 25cent items. They had bought a whole household sale in Ithaca of a woman who was a paper artist-so bargains included painted items, items she had done artist exchange for. I also got some lovely embroidered and crocheted pieces to use in mixed media. The find of the day was some painted domino's about 20 for two dollars.

While waiting for Gail to get dinner in the oven I went up to the studio to work on two upcycled bags

 
The second bag is two sided this is the larger crocheted piece the opposite side is the same style crocheted piece only predominately white with yellow.

Then I started on some mixed media pieces. One of the found treasures was a luggage tag which I then created my own back to include my information.


Then altered a pendant with using a fun piece of book page behind the transparent ballerina she then became a more me piece by labeling her a "hussy".

 Late that evening after a delicious dinner and wine from Villa Bellangio we started to play with the plastic tiles that were already colored- stamping, using metallic paints and embossing. We are using some of these as buttons for other bags, I will wire wrap some for pendants and several are being used in picture frames.

This elephant pin is on an altered book bag. The elephants are stamped on linen.

 Circus monkey will be made into a pendant

Etz Hayim  a Jewish piece with the Hebrew Tree of Life, the verse is written on the side in English. This will also be wire wrapped.

Finally we were so tired as once again we had lost track of time and we headed to bed.....already on day 2.