Te Amo!

I did it!  I finally made something that I like enough to hang on my wall!  I am willing to go all the way and say that I am in love with this painting.  Wow, this has been a long time coming.  Art was my favorite subject all throughout school.  Heck, I even took a studio art class nearly every semester at Hastings College just for fun.  But I hadn't been able to produce anything I liked well enough to display, aside from a fish from my beginning glassblowing class and he is a little bit sharp and cuttey to have out with Willa around. 

Now, I really can't take much credit for this painting.  The idea was completely, 100% not mine.  I can only claim to have put in the labor, and it did take quite a few hours of painting (which I found very soothing in the evenings for a few weeks.)  The idea (and tutorial) came from The Pleated Poppy which I stumbled upon on dear brookie's Pinterest.  If you don't have a Pinterest account yet, that means....you still have a life outside of your computer.  Good for you!

There she is.  She is so pretty.  I want to get back home to her, whisper things to her.  If you want one of your own, I suggest you check out the tutorial on The Pleated Poppy (link above) but I will walk through the process anyway, as I like to hear myself type.  I didn't use a canvas, I can't remember what my initial reasoning was, but I'm glad I didn't.  This is a piece of 3'x4' Masonite that I roughed up a little with a few layers of gesso.  The gesso step is totally skippable, I just didn't want the surface to be quite so smooth.  Then I painted the entire board with a very neutral tan color.  Next, I found a very nice coffee mug with a picture of a basset hound on it in my cupboard and I measured its diameter.  Divided that in 2 and made a grid over the whole board using the measurement of half of the coffee mug.  Then I drew a whole-lotta interlocking circles inside of the grid lines

This isn't the best picture, but it might help to understand the pencil/ruler/coffee mug set-up.  Once I had all the circles drawn, I went back over it and lightly erased the lines that were inside of the circles (they didn't erase very well which initially freaked me out.  More on that later.)  Then came the fun part which was to mix up a color and randomly fill in a bunch of the little circle do-hickies.  And repeat a million times with lots of different colors.  Back to the lines not erasing...I have always been kind of a perfectionist when it comes to projects like this so I thought I was going to have to scrap the whole thing, or go back and repaint all the tan color in the middle of all the circles (which would have taken years) so that it would look perfect.  But, the more I looked at it, the more I really loved those pencil lines in there.  So, I cured my stupid craft-induced OCD thing!  Yay!  Also, Willa colored in one corner of the board with a purple Crayola marker and I didn't beat her even once, just sort of covered it with darker colors and called it character.  Lastly, we added a little claw hanger thing and threw her up on the wall!  And OMG.  Did I mention that I love her?