Summertime = art time

I love being creative, and any creative person knows that creativity can take many different forms. This summer I've started attempting to channel it through painting. Me, paint? HA! Yeah, I never thought it'd happen. But I've had a couple opportunities to try it out in the past week, and so far I'm not too disappointed in myself.

We moved into our current house about eight years ago. Nine years ago? ... Eight or nine years ago. Ever since we moved, my mom has wanted to decorate our back porch with a theme. The first move towards accomplishing that goal was made just a few years back, through the purchasing (or receiving? they may have been a gift...) of a set of chip and dip bowls. I don't know what specifically, but something really lit the lightbulb, and all of a sudden Mom knew our porch was meant to Mexican fiesta themed. Or something like that.

one of those inspirational little bowls

So the steps following the inspiration have been slow-paced. Incredibly slow-paced. My parents knew way back that they wanted some artwork to put on one of the porch walls, and they were really hoping that my brothers and I would paint them. See, here's the thing. My brothers and I are all creative in our own ways. They draw. I sketch and sew. We're all musical in some way. But I can't remember any of us painting. They painted those intricate little Lord of the Rings figurines for a long time, and about fifty of those are on display in a case in our living room, but I don't think they painted anything larger than that. Except their bedroom walls right after we moved in. But you know what I mean.

I finally got motivated enough to attempt some paintings. It helped that canvases were on sale at the Michael's Arts and Crafts store ten minutes away from my house. After doing my best to get paints that matched the bowl colors, and after acquiring a 15 pack of really cheap brushes, I was ready to begin my mission.

my chosen colors. I think I did a pretty good job ^-^

For the first one I wanted to make a purple flower the focal point, but I didn't want to be so precise as to copy the flower on the bowl. So I aimed for abstract purple flower. It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Once you eliminate your mental barriers, the painting gets a lot easier. I had drawn up a sketch for one of the paintings a few days earlier. It was pretty free-flowing, but still very rigid and exact in its patterns and shapes. I'm not sure what eliminated that idea (besides the fact that I could tell my mom didn't really like it) but I'm glad it disappeared, because I like the end result much better than the initial sketch.

I see a flower. My mom sees a peacock feather or something like that. I really don't care what it looks like, 'cause that's the point of abstract, right? I'm just happy with how it turned out. But I wanted to make another that had a shape more similar to the flower on the bowl. That was part of my first drawing that I actually liked. So the next painting started out with another purple flower, and I wanted to use blue as more of a base color than red. But after I started painting, I didn't like how solid the flower was, and it obviously needed more than just the blue border. I looked at the pot again and saw that the green part had a checked pattern on it, so I decided to add that on top. Then I filled in the empty space by following the flow around the edges of the flower.

Ta-da! Second painting! I'm happy with it too. So I had one canvas left and wanted to do something different with it. When I doodle on my notes during class I usually alternate between swirls and flowing lines and geometric shapes, so I thought it'd be cool to go geometric for the last one. I also wanted to include the criss-crossing that's on the bowl.

I scratched the pattern on using the back of one of the paint brushes.

So here's all three together! I'm really happy with the first two. Not quite sure how I feel about the third one, but I can always paint another =^)