Creative Dawn

Tomorrow I get to sleep in and relax, YEAH!  It is a well earned day off after the business of this past weekend.  My plan is to get up late, watch some guilty pleasure TV, paint and maybe make dinner if the mood strikes me.  Oh, and weather permitting have few beers outside.  What bliss! For today I sewed up this little felt creation.  The flowers are black felt and the beads are brown.  This to me is a great color combination although I know a few people that would disagree with me.  But if you have been paying any sort of attention to this blog you will know that my style is a mix of colors.  Besides, there are no rules in art.  This contradicts what my high school art teacher said, but the teacher was wrong! Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes and having fun.   ---Mary Lou Cook

Guess where this was purchased from!  You are correct it was the Goodwill.  It was an Easter decoration on a wooden board.  It measures about 8 x 24, so it worked out well for a design like this.  For a week it sat on my todo pile until this idea for some styalized flowers came to me.  It is like a really modern still life vase painting.  This is one of those things that I couldn't stop adding details to.  Some dots, some squiggles, and a few more vines, the more I painted the more interesting it became. 

I bought two wooden plates at the Goodwill recently.  This is the larger of the set, tomorrow the other one will be posted.  Sometimes when I get an idea it gets stuck in my head I feel the need to create a few items in that style or design.  That is probably true with most artists and creative people.  Picasso had his blue period and if you look at a lot of artists they do seem to have times when certain styles or themes dominate their work.  So, both plates are painted in a stained glass style and both are flowers.  I remember mentioning way back when this blog was started that flowery designs were not a preference of mine and now there are many posts with flowers.  Maybe I should clarify, the girly pastels and foo foo floral do not appeal to me.  The ones in this blog are more stylized. It's a rambling kind of day, sorry!  Hope you like the post for today.  Have a great Friday!

It was a dark and stormy night...it was really, we had storms all night and it has been thundering and lightning today as well with a few tornado warnings and watches mixed in.  Welcome to spring in Minnesota!  I can't complain because I actually like watching storms, the sky turns such interesting colors.  Right now there is rain but you can see the sunlight through the cloud cover and it is getting brighter by the minute.  Yes, I will complain when it is 100 degrees and July and -10 in January but the change of seasons and weather patterns are a few of the things that I love about this state. My post for today is kind of a stylized cutout rose picture.  I drew flower with white pencil on the brown cardstock and then using my small scissors cut out the design.  This one took a while because it was more complex and I also was trying to be careful not to snip through any of the thin 'borders' of the pattern.  The easy part was attaching the colored pa...