I'm back :-)

I'm back from holidaying with the family and busy preparing for some markets. I almost completely disconnected from the internet during the time we were in the south of France, and I must admit it's something I could get used to... Although I'm also looking forward to seeing what everyone's been up to during my absence :-)

I made myself a new artjournal from gelliprints and tryouts. I need to make some more pictures and then I'll show it to you next week. This is one page in that journal, that I did during our holidays. Somehow I thought the artjournal would be almost full by the time we returned, but alas, that proved to be pretty unrealistic. I mostly relaxed and read heaps of books :-)

I experimented a bit with making patterns though, and had a lot of fun in the process. I want to use these patterns for duvet covers and all over tees in my Society6-shop. Here are some examples:

This is a drawing that I made for the Inktober challenge last year, and I turned it into a pattern. Love experimenting with this!

And this is a detail of a journalpage that is turned into a pattern. I have so many ideas that I want to try out now. Wish the days had more hours ....

But for now these things will have to wait, since I'm very busy preparing for 2 markets that I'll do at the end of August. I did one last week already, and these are some rocks that I painted and took with me (and sold ):

They both have a quote on the back, as all of my rocks do, but it's in Dutch so I'm only showing you the front. I need to start using more Dutch quotes now, since that's the language they speak here. I will still use English too though.

I don't have much more to show for now. Lots and lots of things in progress. I will be linking this to Paint Party Friday and to Show your Face. Hope you'll visit there, lots of things to see!

And I'll end with my funny of the week ;-)

lol :-D

Thanks for visiting! Have a lovely day and a fun weekend. See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Summer of Color week 5 !

Yes, this week I'm participating in the Summer of Color again! Two shades of green and one shade of pink.Very interesting colour combination, and one that I hardly ever use. So I made another doodle and painted it in a darker green (emerald green), a light green (brilliant green) and a pink (quinacridone rose light). I kinda like this colourcombination, might use it more in future projects :-)

I scanned it but the colours look much darker than in reality. Somehow my scanner always has trouble with pink. I changed the colours a bit in Photoshop, but still, the original painting is much brighter. And the light green looks more green instead of the yellowish it looks in this picture. But well, you get the idea ....

Didn't have time to work on my furniture anymore, but I did manage to do some work on my intuitive painting. It's been so long since I painted a large intuitive painting, last one was somewhere in May last year I think, and it felt so good to be doing it again. Looking for figures and creatures in all the layers.....

This is what I showed you last week:

Asking you whether you could see the figure in there with outstretched arms ....

I outlined in white what I saw, but there are so many lines on there that it's not easy to see....

This is where I am now:

Not sure whether I'll have much time to work on it in the coming weeks. We'll be holidaying with the family, so I'll take a blog break for the next few weeks. When we were living in Australia this time of year it was winter and we didn't have holidays. So it was always easy for me to do the Summer of Color challenge. Now that we're back living in Europe the summer holidays are around the same time as the challenge, and I won't be able to finish it this time. But I'm happy I participated for 4 weeks :-)
I enjoyed it although not as much as other years. I like it better when there are 3 colours to use. I'm a colour junkie, I know.....

Last but not least: I listed a few of my doodles as instantly downloadable colouring sheets in my Etsyshop. For now there are only three, but I might list some more in the future. For those of you who like to colour: give it a go! It's a perfect way to de-stress and relax. You can find them here.

Anyway, thanks so much for visiting me here and leaving those lovely comments! I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday, to Summer of Color and to Show your Face. So much wonderful art everywhere, I'm getting a bit frustrated that I don't have the time to see every single entry...

Ending this post with another funny:

oooppss .... busted ! :-)

Well, I hope you are having a fantastic day, and that the weekend will be even better! See you in a couple of weeks! Take care ♥ ♥ ♥

Colour .... Give me colour .... LOTS of colour ....

Well, no entry for Summer of Color this week. This is the first time that I skip it, but I might join in again next week. Why don't I join in this week? Well, I have a confession to make: I crave colours at the moment. Using lots of colours, all at the same time. And I can't satisfy my craving for colour with SOC this year. Which is weird, because other years I had no problem whatsoever with the limited number of colours. But I could still use different shades and tints of the prescribed colours, and that made it exciting for me. Just how many tints can one colour have. I love experimenting with that.

For this week the colours are red - red - metallic. Well, I hardly ever use metallic colours in my work, and if I do then only in very small quantities. But the real problem for me was the two shades of red. Too similar. You can take a dark red and a light red, but there's not that much difference between the shades. Not enough at least for me to create enough contrast in a piece. It would be too similar to the result from week 2 with 2 pinks and one orange. And I really didn't feel like that. So, no SOC-entry for me this week...

I did go back to the background for my intuitive painting. In the past few weeks I've been smearing paint on there every time I was doing something and had some leftover paint. Last time I showed you it looked like this:

I kept searching for images in there but I couldn't find anything that spoke to me. After adding little bits and pieces in the past few weeks it looks like this:

And finally finally finally I could see a figure emerge from the background! Phew, so happy! I can see a female figure with outstretched arms, but I must admit it's hard to see it in the photo, it was much easier to see just looking at the canvas. Can you find her? I'll show you next week :-)

I also finally finished another doodle:

and another ACEO:

Summer really has started here now! We are experiencing a heatwave at the moment, and I'm loving it! It reminds me so much of Queensland.... School summer holidays also started this week, and we're doing a lot of lazing around and catching up with stuff that we never have time for. I am still finishing those side-tables, but painted the base colour on three new ones:

And last weekend I went to a flea-market and found some cute old little cupboards, that I've been sanding and putting some primer on as well:

The top one I'll use some kind of dry-brush technique on I think, and the second one will be dotted, with some mosaics around the mirror. Oh, so much fun, I'm a bit addicted to recycling furniture at the moment ;-)

Well, that's it for now! I'm linking this as always to Paint Party Friday, and to Show Your face. 
Both places are worth a visit!

I'll end with my funny of the week:

lol ... ;-D

Thanks for taking the time to visit! Wishing you a beautiful day, and a weekend filled with warmth! See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Summer of Color week 3

Every year for the Summer of Color challenge I choose a theme in which I want to do all my paintings. The first year I chose intuitive paintings, the second year I chose coloured doodles, and last year I chose negative space painting. This year I wanted to do intuitive painting again, but alas, for this week I couldn't.... Why not?

Well, you see, the colors this week are: two shades of purple and one shade of yellow. Purple and yellow are complementary colours, meaning they're opposite eachother on the color wheel. And complementary colors, when mixed together, create mud. Hmmm, not a "colour" that makes me happy...

Since the backgrounds for my intuitive paintings are the three shades mixed and mingled and dripped together, I couldn't do that for these colours. So I decided to do a coloured doodle. Here it is:

I had an old wooden painting with a kids' scene on there, that was in my children's bedroom when they were little. Since they are teenagers now, they don't want that kids' stuff anymore, so I sanded it, put some gesso on there and then painted my doodle in two shades of purple and one shade of yellow.

I must admit I find it a bit hard this year to work with only three shades. Before I usually used more shades of the colour prescribed, and I like that more. I am getting curious about the colours next week though. Hope they're not complementary colours again ... (hint!)

I also worked at my sidetables, and they are almost finished. Still some more work to do on the sides, and then they need to get some layers of varnish. But most of the work is done!

Here they are all three together:

This is the smallest one:

The middle one:

And the largest:

I love running my fingers over them, the texture feels so lovely. Here you can see a bit how the dots are raised:

LOVE doing this. I already sanded the new ones, tomorrow hopefully when I find the time I will do the base colour, and then it's playtime again :-)

I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday, to Summer of Color and to Show you Face. Lovely work to see over at those sites, have a look!

Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha! Sorry if I offend anyone with this, but jeesh, aren't these hairless cats ugly? Who ever got the crazy idea that a cat without hair would look nice? It would scare the hell out of me if it crossed my way in the hallway at night ....

Anyway, that's it for this week! Thanks for visiting! Hope your next days will be wonderful and full of everything that you need :-) See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Summer of Color week 2

This week's colors are pink-pink-orange, which means 2 shades of pink and one shade of orange. And although these are some of my favorite colours, especially the orange, I didn't really enjoy using them in this piece. Mostly because they are too much alike, and I always love the contrast of these bright colors with blues and greens. And I couldn't use those .... That's the challenge of course, but still... Not so happy with this week's piece as a result. This is the background I started from:

It was the result of putting some layers of 2 pinks and one orange (sorry, no idea which colours I used ☺) on a canvas, and then putting plastic wrap on top. After it dried I took it back off and it left these lines in there, which I really like. Such an easy way to mix some colours :-)

I saw two birds and that was it. And then I saw an eye. And the painting was born ...

In the end I had to use more shades of pink to get some contrast and make some shadows, but I think it's still okay for the challenge. Seems like I got a bird theme going again this year ;-)

The rest of the week I have mostly been working on my side-tables. Oh, it's addicting, it really is. I had forgotten how much fun it is to make dots, how a piece can transform before your eyes with each new line of dots. They are nearing completion, but I'll show them completely when they're all finished. Here's the biggest one :-)

I already went back to the recycling-store and bought three more tables. It's just so much fun to do in between other things.

That's it for this week. Linking this to Paint Party Friday, to Summer of Color and to Show your Face.
I hope I can find the time this weekend to look at all the art on all these sites, it's so interesting to see what everyone has been doing.

I'll end with my funny of the week:

hahaha! Love that dry British humour :-)

That you so much for visiting! Hope you're having fun today, and let the weekend be all that you need it to be! See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Summer of Color week 1

Yes, the Summer of Color has started! I decided to do some small intuitive paintings for this series, because I still don't see very much in the background of my new canvas, and I know it's just a practice thing. The colours for this week are blue-blue-green, meaning I can choose whichever 2 blues I want mixed with one green. I decided to use these colours:

I can't say which shades these are, because I mixed them myself, and I always keep mixing until I like the colour. Which of course makes it difficult to reproduce exactly the same tints.

And this is the background I ended up with, after dripping and spraying and splashing paint on :-)

I had a hard time finding something, but when I put the canvas in this direction I could see the beak of a bird and its tail (or how do you call that...). As well as an eye and a strange-shaped face.....

So this is what came out of it:

I can clearly see a bird hugging the girls' head, but I have no idea whether other people see it that way. Maybe some people see her as a strange kind of Santa Claus with a weird beard ;-)

I'm still wondering whether I should put a quote on there, but for now I leave it as it is.

I have also been putting some more layers of paint on my side-tables:

It's going to be another sunny day today, so I will start the fun part this afternoon. There'll be lots more different colours on here before I'm finished.

I'm also still doodling, and have several ones in progress. Here's one:

And last but not least: remember the painting I finished 2 weeks ago? This one?

It's sold and on its way to Puerto Rico! It's the first time I've sold a painting before it was even finished. Someone saw it on Facebook when I had just started painting the figures and contacted me. Luckely I had some time to figure out how to do the shipping, because I've never shipped a big painting like that. Most of my bigger works I sell during shows or in the gallery. So I'm quite nervous now and hope it arrives well and in time! Thanks Patricia ♥


That's it for this week. I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday, to Summer of Color and to Show your Face. Click on the links if you want to get inspired by some gorgeous art!

And my funny for this week:

hahahaha, I can relate to her ;-D

Thanks so much for your visit and your lovely comments! Hope you have a lovely day and a weekend full of things you love! See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

doodling

Yes, I am doodling again! It's a long time ago, all of a sudden I had had enough of doodling. But as it goes with these things, the urge to doodle came back, and I had lots of fun with this one. It's a perfect thing to do when you have to wait somewhere, all you need is a marker and a journal.

Í am going to make a coloring book out of these doodles. Still figuring out whether to bring it to a local printer or self-publish it on Lulu, where I do my calendars. But I'll first make some more :-)

I tried working on my intuitive painting today, but alas, I couldn't find any figures in there. Nothing was jumping out to me, at least nothing that spoke to me, so in the end I got out my paints and just splashed some more layers on there. A painting can never have too many layers I think. Maybe I will start to see some figures now .... If there's one thing I learned, it's that you can't force these things.

It was such a beautiful day today, the first really warm (hot) day, so I decided to do something I really don't like but that I needed to do outside: start sanding my little side-tables. I bought three small ones at the local recycling shop, and I plan on painting them in bright colours and dots and then try to sell them at the art-markets in summer that I signed up for.

I am looking forward to playing with them, very happy that the sanding and priming is out of the way ;-)

I am linking this as always to Paint Party Friday, and I am linking this face to Art it Friday - Show your Face :

And next week there should be something here for Summer of Color :-)

That's it for now, it's bedtime! Thanks so much for being here, and for leaving your wonderful comments. It's highly appreciated !

And not to forget: my funny for this week :-)

  haha, so true :-)

See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥