This Holiday stocking is for baby August. Isn’t he cute? Doing a robot theme was way more fun than I even imagined! This stocking is for the brother of the Dinosaur Stocking I posted over a year ago. Click below on the tag ‘dinosaur’ to see that set pf stockings. I think I this one fits very well with the rest of the family’s. Thanks to my youngest son for coming up with the concept!
This stone was commissioned as a memorial to a loved one. I painted the motorboat at its regular mooring with “Johnny’s” hat painted in Trompe L’oeil style. I worked from photoes of his boat and the lake where he moored it, but I had Johnny’s real hat sitting on my work table as I painted it. I tried to capture the feel of the canvas fabric and the stitching. It was such a big hat that I could not make it life size or it would have covered the whole surface! A simple message on the side says it all. The stone is about 16 ” in diameter and 2 inches thick. The shape of the stone suggested a heart to me; It was all I needed for inspiration. My first step in starting the piece was to block it in with chalk.
This Memory Board was a most unusual and challenging project painted on a 30″ X 30″piece of wood . A gentleman requested that his family business be memorialized in a painting that also portrayed his parents and his siblings. We chose to give the piece the appearance of a loving collection of photos posted on a bulletin board. The family patriarch had been a blacksmith who worked first on ice wagons and later converted trucks for specialized needs such as fuel delivery. The client described the building to me as he recalled it since he only had a modern view for me to use . The photos of himself and his siblings, from which I worked, were small and not particularly detailed. I faux painted the border frame right on the wooden board. I thought it might be interesting for you, the viewer, to see the faded sepia toned photos from which I did the larger portraits.
A new Grandma commissioned the painting of this rocker for ‘Gianna’ and when she came to pick it up, the first thing she said was, “This was worth the wait!!” The rocking chair was factory painted white. It is wide and solid and needed delicate decoration to feminize it.
Each whimsically painted side is unique. On one there is a little flower fairy floating away on bubbles. On the other, another little flower fairy tightrope walks on a spider web using a toadstool parasol for balance. Chicory is such a pretty wild flower; It’s delicate and yet sturdy enough to support one end of the spider silk tightrope while wild grasses support the other end! It is so easy to add too much profusion of growth when painting wild grasses and flowers and I resisted that temptation because this piece called for a delicate hand. Subtly was my aim for the butterfly clinging to a blade of grass. I chose mostly wild flowers which a child would encounter in her own world, such as Purple Vetch and Violets. However, I couldn’t resist painting these delicate pink Poppies which were inspired by some I had seen waving gracefully by a pond when I was in Japan visiting my son. Did you notice the ladybug?
