having fun

After a few hours of frustration and not knowing how to proceed, I suddenly had fun again painting my large canvas. It's finally coming together in my mind's eye. Not at all finished yet, but it's getting there :-)

Here's another sneak peek:

Yes, an owl ... I had to google it, because while I recognize an owl instantly I had no idea how to paint one. And of course, it's not really realistic, but so are none of my figures for that matter.  They don't need to be either, I'm happy with fantasy-like creatures :-)

Here's how the whole canvas is looking right now:

Can't wait to paint again! Alas, this weekend I will be painting walls and doors in our new house, so this one will have to wait ...

I also made a journalpage for Colour me Positive. This week it was all about living life to the fullest:

Still haven't figured out a way to make art a daily practice, but I'm working on it :-)

I'm linking this up to Paint Party Friday and to Colour me Positive. Lots of great work to see in both of these! And here's to finish on a funny note:

 lol :-D     shared this one on Facebook already, so here's another one:

 :-)

Okay, that's it for this week! Thanks for your visit! Wishing you a wonderful day, and a creative and stressfree weekend. I'll be back next week ♥ ♥ ♥

slowly getting somewhere

I only had a few hours to paint this week, so not much changed on my large canvas. Here's a sneak peek from another part (it's BIG (1mx1m), so lots of spots to choose from ;-) ):

And here's the whole canvas:

It was really dark weather (again!) so this picture doesn't really show it well, but it'll have to do for now.... Not sure at all what I'll be doing with the bottom left corner, I see so many shapes and figures in there, but none has really spoken to me yet. Hopefully by next week I'll be able to figure it out.

I also finished another doodle:

I am looking for ways that I can make art every day in an easy way, meaning even if I only have 10 minutes I want to do something. Now too many days go by without any artmaking at all, and I miss it and I also miss the practice. Still haven't found a way though, so if you have any tips please share them with me!

I started the "Colour me positive"-challenge that I told you about last week. This week's quote was all about being brave and taking chances. And I was very happy to find a journalpage with a quote that fitted perfectly :-) Okay, I made it a (long) while ago, but still .... Here it is:

Have any of you joined? There's already almost 2000 members!
I'll end with this week's funny:

hahaha! Look at him :-) So relaxed and enjoying the company. Love this ♥

Thanks for looking! And wishing you the most wonderful day and a trouble-free weekend! And a happy Paint Party Friday! See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Finally painting something else than walls and doors ... ;-)

This week the school started again, and I decided to take a little break from painting doors and walls and sanding floors, and work a bit on my large canvas. It's more than 2 weeks ago I did anything with it, and while a saw several figures the last time I worked on it, they didn't speak to me anymore, and I decided to play a bit more with the canvas. And before I knew it almost all of my figures were gone....

Never mind. I soon found new ones. And started bringing them out. Oh, it was so much fun finally getting somewhere with this canvas. Seeing images appear and bringing them out is my most favorite part of this intuitive painting process. Here are 2 sneak peeks:

At first, these figures and one bird were the only images I saw, so I decided to just start with them and see how it developed.

And then I started seeing birds everywhere.....

Here's how the canvas looked when I started bringing the images out. Can you find them on there? (okay, it's bad quality so it's not very clear, but the weather is just so dark here, it's impossible to get good pictures)

Didn't do anything else creative this week ;-(  But I want to tell you (in case you haven't heard about it yet) about a new year long artjournal challenge "Colour me positive". The aim is to fill your year with positive messages and creativity. When you sign up (it's FREE), you get an email every Friday with an inspirational quote and a small challenge, that you can use however you like. Each week there will be a featured artist to inspire you, and sometimes there are prizes to be won too! Sounds good, doesn't it!? You can find more information here. Go ahead: sign up, there are already more than 1000 participants!

I'm linking up to Paint Party Friday. Looking forward to seeing you there! Thanks so much for visiting, I hope your new year started out well and will continue to be good to you!

Here's my funny for this week:

Hahaha! Doesn't that look comfy :-D

See you next week ♥ ♥ ♥

Happy new year and a gift to you!

I'm just popping in for a quick hello, and to wish all of my blogreaders a wonderful, warm and joyful celebration of the end of 2015, and the beginning of 2016. May at least some of your wishes come true in the new year, may it begin in a happy and healthy way, and may you celebrate creativity in the year to come!

As a thank you for all who visit here regularly I made a wallpaper for the month of January :-)

I'm planning on making this monthly for my newsletter-subscribers. You can download the one for January here (hope it works since it's the first time I use Dropbox, please let me know if it doesn't).

That's it for now, before celebrating the new year we are now going to our new house and sand the floors :-P

Stay safe! See you in the new year ♥ ♥ ♥

Overview of my creative year

This year I often had the feeling that I never had enough time for painting. There was always something else that was more urgent or required immediate attention. I only finished 3 paintings this year, and 2 of those got their first layers last year already. So for me it's important to make this overview, to see whether the year was really so bad artwise as it sometimes feels ....

January: January was the month that our container arrived from Australia, so almost the whole month was taken up with unpacking boxes and trying to find room for everything. But I did some artjournaling that month. My art supplies were amongst the first things that I unpacked :-)

In this spread I needed to bring out some softness and kindness after all the horror going on in the world. You can see a bit of the progression in this post.

February: February was my 29-faces-month! I managed to keep up with the challenge the whole month :-) Here's an overview of the faces I did:

March: almost all of March was taken up by videotaping my lesson for Soulfood. My very first online workshop! It was a lot of work, but I so enjoyed learning and being a part of such a wonderful group of teachers. This is a spread I did in preparation for this workshop:

And for those of you who missed out on Soulfood: I will be offering this class as a stand-alone workshop on my blog next year! So if you want to learn how to make these weird figures: stay tuned :-)

April: This was a very productive month! I finished one painting and started another one, and I discovered a new love: ACEO's. And finally figured out how to put paypal-buttons on my blog.... Also, my class in Soulfood went live and I loved interacting with the students in my class and seeing what they did with the ideas I handed them :-)
Here are some ACEO's that I made:

May: more ACEO's and finished my second painting! While it was still in the early stages I posted a picture of it on Facebook and sold it to a lady in Puerto Rico before it was even finished. Took me quite some time to figure out how to ship a painting like that, couldn't believe the prices those couriers were charging... In the end I decided to take it off the frame and send it rolled up (the lady suggested this, and I do admit it scared me a bit to do this...), but all went perfectly :-)
It's called "A world that I long to see":

You can find the progression pics of this painting in this post.

June: in June I finally tried out something I'd had in my head for a long time: painting furniture, more specifically small sidetables. I went to the recyclingshop and got some cheap wooden tables, and then went to work on it with paint and dots. LOVED doing this, and discovered my love for dotpainting all over again!

the first three ....

July: the Summer of Color challenge is another of my favorite challenges, but for some reason this year I didn't enjoy it as much. I only did 4 of the 6 weeks, also because it was summer holidays and we went to the south of France with our family. This was a week I really enjoyed doing: 2 shades of green and one shade of pink:

August: in August I did a bit of everything. I was participating in 3 artmarkets and needed to make some new products. So I painted some more rocks and boxes and sidetables and some new things too, like these little papier-machée men, and wooden bowls:

September: another 29 faces challenge! And I managed to finish it again. I always love how many faces I have after this challenge, to use in other projects, like my calendars or my Society6-shop for example :-) Here's the overview I created when the month was done:

October: this was the month I worked on my calendars, and finished my third painting. It's called: "we are never broken", and you can find the in progress pics here.

November: finished 2 calendars (actually 3, since I also made a Dutch version of one of them), and started preparing for my Christmasmarkets.

You can find them here and here. It's never too late to order ;-)

December: made lots of new stuff for my Christmasmarkets: small paintings, boxes, finally that coloring book I'd been wanting to do since a loooong time, postcards and mixed media wood slices, that I really enjoy doing:

And that's it for this year! I must say I'm really glad I did this overview, I'm pleasantly surprised by all the things I did achieve this year. I always tend to focus on all I didn't do, but that's wrong of course. And it has to do with the fact that I always plan too big. Things always take much longer than I think, and it's only natural to feel frustrated when you sometimes don't even get half done of what's on your todo-list. So that's my goal for next year: plan less, go more with the flow, and be aware that I do the best I can with the (sometimes limited) time that I have.

And now it's time for a break! I want to wish all my blogreaders the very best end of the year; whether you celebrate Christmas or not: I do hope you can be together with loved ones and do things that you like doing. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and taking the time for reading this blog. I love connecting with each and everyone of you :-)

I might post one last time this year, if not: I'll see you in the new year ♥ ♥ ♥

A bit of a rest ...

Did my last Christmasmarket last weekend so I finally have some more time on my hands :-) Which doesn't mean I did a lot of art this week. But I did throw a few more layers on my big canvas, and finally some figures are starting to emerge. Phew ...

At this moment I'm seeing 4 faces, 1 dog (!) and 2 birds ..... Do you see them? I'm not sure yet whether I'll go with all of them, but I'm so happy they finally showed up. There must be at least 15 layers of paint on there already.

For my markets I made a few more smaller dotpaintings. Here are some of them:

They all measure 20x20cm (7,9"x 7,9"). I really need to update my websites now, haven't added anything in a long time, even though I made quite a few things.

I also painted more of those branches that I showed you last time. So much fun :-)

They are a mixture of collage and paint, and measure approx. 7x5cm (2,8"x 2"). Very small, especially to put quotes on there. We just got a lot of wood for our woodstove, and there are some branches there that are a bit bigger, so I might try to saw those into little slices. Or better yet: I'll ask my hubby or my son to do it for me, since I don't trust myself with a saw ....

Here's a box that I painted to try out a technique that I want to use in our new house. I got the idea here at Sandra Kaye's blog. Have a look there, her blog is colourful and inspirational and fun! I loved it right away, but just starting like that on the walls felt a bit daunting, especially since I don't have much practice in painting flowers. So I tried it out on my box, and this is the result:

It's a very bad picture, the weather was horrible and dark and misty and it's almost impossible to make good pictures now. But you get the idea.... Not sure whether I'll do the walls like this though, I want to throw in some birds I think .... I'll keep you posted ... ;-)

And then last but not least: I got a surprise Christmascard in the mail from Robin from Pink House Studio. I "met" Robin during the 29 faces challenge, where she made the most original, fun faces out of drops of paint and collage. I just loved seeing what she would come up with next. Check out her blog, it's full of whacky funny posts :-). This is the card she sent me, it's one of her own unique designs:

Thanks to the fact that it arrived on an exceptionally rainy day (although, now that I think of it, it's not thát exceptional....) some of the print got ruined a bit, but I just love it. Thanks Robin, it'll get a prominent place in between our Christmas lights ;-)

Well, that's it for now! I'm linking this to Paint Party Friday. Didn't get a chance to visit last week, so I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone's been doing. Thanks for your visit, I hope you're having a wonderful day, and that the weekend will be relaxing and fun. We will be working in our new house again, won't be moving this year anymore ... :-( Oh well ...

Next week I'll be back with an overview of my creative year. I did that last year, and it gave me a boost knowing that I had been doing quite a bit of "work" even though I sometimes had the feeling I got nothing done. Hopefully it'll be the same this year :-)

And here's my funny for this week:

lol :-D

See you next week! ♥ ♥ ♥

Back again !

This being the busiest time of the year, I don't really succeed anymore in writing a blogpost every week. But here I am again :-)

Last weekend I had my first Christmasmarket, so I spent the week before putting the finishing touches to everything. Which always takes up much more time than I count on. With a lot of last-minute stress and late nights as a result. But it was fun and I sold quite a bit.

Here are some things I've been making:

A few boxes:

Some wooden hearts with a (Dutch) quote:

A few mixed media branches (these were fun! I'll definitely make some more ☺)

I also got my copies of my 2 calendars and I'm very happy with how the colours came out:

And I got my colouring books from the printer, and sold half of them already :-)

 It looks a bit hazy but that's because there's a plastic cover on the outside....

I did only one image per page, so that it's possible to tear them out and frame them.

And lastly I made a whole bunch of new Christmas- and New Years cards. Here are a few of them:

I will put these in my Etsy-shop, along with some more coloring pages.

That's it for this week! Haven't had the chance to work on my big canvas anymore. Still painting in our new house, but it looks as if it's going to be the new year before we can  move in. We're experiencing a lot of delays in getting things done, f.i. we don't have any heating at the moment, which is not very comfortable in the middle of winter  .... ;-) So we'll just stay with my sister's a bit longer until everything is sorted out.

Linking this as always to Paint Party Friday. I haven't been able to visit your blogs this past week, looking forward to seeing what everyone's been up to!

Thanks for visiting! I wish you a very pleasant day and a relaxing weekend! Here's my funny for this week:

hahaha! Love this :-D

See you next week! ♥ ♥ ♥