Tag Archives: Grass

Football Table for a Teenager

This small side table was painted for a middle school young man with football aspirations.   I used his team colors for the uniform as well as  his own jersey number.   The background field is deliberately out of scale so it emphasizes the ideal football player as he ‘flies’ down the field.   On the lower shelf I painted, in the Trompe L’oeil style, a couple of index cards with diagrams of football plays because, well, fool the eye  is what I like to do!!   The table stands 20″ tall and the top is 14″ X 16″ .

Giraffe Growth Chart Mural

This tall narrow mural depicts a life size (baby) giraffe as a growth chart.  Showing you the scale of it is the young man we shall be charting. Isn’t he cute?  Well of course he is; He’s my grandson! The giraffe holds a measuring ribbon in his mouth while down at the bottom  a frog holds it taut.  Watch out for the bee in the high grass! I have included a couple of ‘in progress’ photos taken before the ribbon was added, notice the close up of the giraffe’s face.   A unique feature of this mural is that it is hinged in the middle to fold for easy transport or storage, kudos to my son’s father-in-law for building it!

Garden Mural

Harness Park on the Connecticut shore was the inspiration for this intense, hyper-realism mural, a most ambitious project.  I painted it on the wall of a small breakfast nook, creating the sensation of a garden being accessible right from the kitchen.  In preparation, I took photos from all over the park  and worked them into an imaginary ideal garden.  I painted the path and the base board to match the real stone tile floor.    The real gate you see is an antique wrought iron piece that the owner of the mural eventually attached to the wall so that it could swing open in welcome. The balance of the design is completed by the gate.

Many of the photos posted here were taken while the mural was in progress and you can discern my process in some of them.  If you look close you can see differences between views such as unfinished edges, butterflies that were added last and white spaces for the Peonies which were not yet painted.  Unfortunately these photos were taken in the days before I owned a digital camera, so I apologize for some fuzziness.

Fairy Flower Rocker

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?