Quick post

The dog is sitting next to me, pushing his nose up against my leg, as if to say: "hey, it's time to go to sleep"... And yes, it is, so this'll just be a very quick post. Don't have much to show anyway, the week was rather full with other stuff. I did start painting in our toilet, and it's looking bright and busy already. Hubby visibly paled when he saw it, and is anxiously waiting for the next steps.... But he did promise me I could do whatever I want with it ;-)
Will take a while before it's finished, but it's fun. I'll show pictures when it's ready :-)

For now I just have a sketch in pencil and marker:

 That's it! I will be linking up to Paint Party Friday, and I might also link to Show your Face again.

Here's my funny for this week. A bit rude, but I can't help laughing everytime I see it :-)

Thanks for visiting, take care and have a great weekend! See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Preparing for the market

As promised, here's the mosaic I made from all the faces I did this month for the 29 faces challenge:

And an overview of the faces from last week:
Number 26: another scribble-face:

Number 27: made with a tool called Harmony: great fun, check it out here. It's free!

Day 28: another rock-face

And the last one, number 29: weirdo :-)

This whole week I have been busy preparing for the market that I will be attending this weekend. I painted quite a few stones:

And tried out something new with dotpainted mirrors:

 

And I also made a new wallpaper for my newsletter-subscribers. And for you too :-)

This is the wallpaper:

And you can download it here!

That's it for this week! I will be linking this for the last time to 29 faces, and to Paint Party Friday and Show your Face.

I will be offline for the next few weeks. We want to move into our new home by the beginning of April, and there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. Plus I need to start packing ... :-p

I want to thank all of you who visit me here. Your comments are truly appreciated. Here's a funny to end this week:

that's me .... ;-)

Wishing you a wonderful day, and lots of fun in the weekend. I'll be back in a few weeks time! 

Take care ♥ ♥ ♥



29 faces almost over ....

Only 4 more faces to go! The month has gone by too fast again. Oh well, at least I have a whole bunch of faces to make up for it :-)

For yesterday's and today's face I painted rocks again. The first weekend of March I will be doing a market, and I needed some more stock for that. Here they are: faces number 24 and 25:

I love coming up with different weird faces all the time :-) This really is a perfect way to let your imagination go wild!

And here are last week's faces.

Face nr 19: watercolour and marker

Face number 20: another miniature-painting. I will be adding a quote to this one....

And number 21: scribble-face, yes! I love doing these!

Number 22: Finally another journalpage again. Too long ago that I played in my journal....

And face 23: another weird one :-)

Linking up to Paint Party Friday, to Show your Face and to 29 faces. Hop on over there for some serious eye-candy :-)

Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha! Love the minions :-)

Thanks for  stopping by and for taking the time to comment. It's highly appreciated!

Enjoy your weekend ♥ ♥ ♥

Still doing faces .....

I had been thinking about starting another painting this week, but I've been too busy with the 29 faces challenge. It always amazes me how much time it takes to produce a face every single day. Even though I had planned to not pressure myself and just draw a circle with 2 circles in it on days that I don't have time, I find I can't do that. So what I do now is on days I have a bit more time I start several faces at once, an then I can finish them on days I have less time. It works for me, even though it's still hard work sometimes. But it's also very rewarding, because I get a lot of practice and at the end of the month I'm left with 29 faces to use and re-use in my art :-)

That said, here's my face for today: another weirdo ;-)

And yesterday's face, a miniature-painting, acrylics on canvasboard

And here are this week's faces:

Number12: yes .... weirdo .... ;-)

Number 13: watercolour sketch

Number 14: scribble-face (I'm having so much fun with these :-) )

Number 15: another miniature-painting: acrylics on canvasboard

Number 16: another scribble-face

That's it for this week. Linking to Paint Party Friday and to 29 faces, and to Show your Face. Thanks so much for visiting, and for those of you also participating in the 29 faces challenge: keep going! We're more than halfway! (eeek! meaning February is almost over ....)

I'll leave you with this funny for this week. Well, actually it's not really a funny, but I love it so much and I want to share it with you :-)

Wishing you a lovely day, and a beautiful weekend! ♥ ♥ ♥

29 faces challenge: all my faces so far :-)

The kids have one week off from school, so this week we have been painting and doing things in our new house and there wasn't that much time for art. But I did something every day! I couldn't keep up with posting every day though, so now I'm posting every 2 or 3 days. So far it's going well.

I'll show you all the faces I've made so far. Today's face was a little intuitive painting. This is what I started with:

I saw a big eye and a chin ....

So I brought it out ....

This is yesterday's face: watercolour sketch:

I don't use watercolours very much, but every time I do I really enjoy it. It works a lot faster than acrylics which comes in handy when you're short on time :-)

And here are the other faces I did until now:
The first one: sketch in graphite 

Second one: another small intuitive painting

Third one: the first of my weird ones ;-)

Number 4: another sketch in graphite

Fifth face: a quick ink-drawing

Sixth face: graphite and marker

Face number 7: another weird one (I will have to practice a lot more with these text stamps .... :-) )

Number 8: the one with the bird in her hair...

And the 10th face: coloured pencil sketch inspired by Jane Davenport

That's it for now. Can't believe I did 11 faces already! This is such a fun challenge! And very good practice!

That's it for now. Thanks so much for visiting and commenting in such beautiful ways. I will get back to visit everyone who comments here, even if it takes a few days :-)

Linking to Paint Party Friday, to Show your Face and to 29 faces. Hop on over to those blogs and treat yourself to some eye-candy!

Finishing with my funny of the week:

hahaha ... right! I do that :-)

I'll be back in 2 days with my next 2 faces! See you then ♥ ♥ ♥

Take me home again

I finished my painting! There were times in the last few months I thought I was never going to finish it, but this new year I started working on it in earnest and I couldn't stop anymore.

I love painting on a large canvas like that, it's a totally different experience. It's harder in a way too, because I always turn my canvases around all the time, and with a large, heavy frame like this one that wasn't always easy.

This painting went through so many stages I even lost track of how many layers there are actually on it. But there are lots!

I'll show you the process from start to finish, although I didn't take pictures every step of the way. Sometimes I just sprayed some colour on there as I was passing on my way to somewhere else...

Since most of the pictures were taken on dark, dreary days, the colours are sometimes very drab. The pictures of the finished painting are more or less how it is in "real life".

I'll have to warn you though: it's a long way down before you get to see the finished painting. If you don't want to see all the in-progress pics, just scroll down to the bottom of this post ;-)

This is how it all started:

stamps, stencils and random marks

using lots of water to spread the paint around

adding more marks

and drips of course (my favorite ☺)

trying to soften all the lines

and adding some contrast - ugh

moving into the ugly stages ...

more of the same

no images are appearing to me, so I just keep layering on top

brightening it up a bit

I keep turning the canvas. Still no idea what I 'm doing or where I'm going

brightening it up again.... oh my .... all my marks have disappeared again....

making new marks *sigh ....

at this point I'm starting to see quite a few images: a big dog in front, and 4 faces! But this is around Christmas time and I don't have time to work on it during a week or so, and after that week the images don't appeal to me at all. So what do I do?

Right, I drip some more .... Will there ever be an end to it?

turns out there is .... I can see the outlines of 2 faces in the bottom right

so I bring them to life :-)

And then it goes fast: I see one bird, and while I'm painting it 2 more birds appear

And two faces that were there before and refused to disappear ....

discover an owl in the bottom left corner

now I just need to bring it all together .... (which is often the hardest part)

I had been trying to stay with purple and pink tones (beside the blue), but after I'd painted this bright blue the pinks and especially the purples started bothering me, so I followed my heart and went for my favorite colours: oranges and yellows.

I know now where I'm going with this canvas, but there's one thing that keeps bothering me: the left figure in the foreground. It's a male (I think), and I have no idea what to do about his hair. I try different hairdo's (sorry, didn't take any pictures of those) but none feels right. So I make some circles raining down on his head ...

but don't like it and cover them up again...

In the end I just start moving the paint around with my fingers and somehow he gets a kind of white cloudy hairdo. While I kinda like it, I find it doesn't fit with the rest of the painting and it keeps bothering me.

So I finish the rest of the painting while I keep thinking what to do with his/her/its hair .... In the end I decide on a sort of hat / headband / whatever .... I think it suits him ...

So here's the finished painting:

"take me home again" - acrylics on canvas - 100x100 cm (39,4 x 39,4 inches)

While I was finishing this painting, I realised that for me it represented Australia: the birds, the reds and yellows of the earth, the bright blues of the sky and the oceans, the feeling of longing and home. The country that I fell in love with years ago, and was allowed to call my home for more than 3 years. It still sits in my soul and will stay there. Even though we moved back to Belgium, a part of me stayed behind in Australia and I will always long to get it back. When I look at this painting I feel joy and happiness and longing and sadness all at the same time. How I love it when my feelings get translated onto the canvas without me realizing it. That is for me the biggest discovery of painting intuitively.

So, after this avalanche of pictures, I have a few more things to share, so I better make it quick :-)

First of all: the 29 faces challenge! It's been going really well, and I've been enjoying making a face every day. I have been blogging about it too every day. Not sure whether I'll be able to keep that up though. Since this post is already so long, I'll just show today's face, which is number 4:

You can find the other faces here, here and here.

Secondly: this week I received a lovely package from Jackie. I "met" Jackie online last year and have been enjoying reading her most inspiring blogposts and seeing her wonderful creative art. After asking her about a colourful fruit she showed on her blog, she sent me a whole bag of seeds together with a beautiful artwork and a big bag of "white Christmas"-candy, a delicious sweet that she makes every year with Christmas. Here's a picture of the beautiful tag she made me:

It's so nice to see it in real life, after seeing so many lovely creations on her blog. And I'm looking forward to seeing my own colourful fruit grow. Hope I don't mess it up! Thanks Jackie, you're a sweetheart!

Thirdly: since it's a new month again, I made another wallpaper that you can download if you want:

You can download it here. It should work, please let me know if it doesn't!

Phew, this is it at last. Linking to Paint Party Friday, to Show Your Face and to 29 faces. Go have a look at all these links, so many beautiful and creative things to see and admire!

Thanks for visiting and reading right through to the end ;-) Hope your day is going great, and your weekend will be full of joy. And since I have so many pictures already in this post, one more won't hurt. Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha :-D

See you tomorrow for the next face! ♥ ♥ ♥