Deer!

My ultimate goal is to get them to sit at the foot of my lounge chair in the summer. Like cats.

Flowers

Christmas break was so long for me that I was able to create 2 art projects. The first was inspired from a photo I had seen of a what looked like a gallery display. Terry was nice enough to go with me to Michael's to buy everything (I have never painted with acrylics before so had no supplies) and we hit up the Black Friday 50% off sales. I guessed at what colors and paint brushes I needed. Go with your instinct!

From start to finish, it has about 5 different layers of paint and took 15 hours to complete. Did I wing it?  Absolutely. I looked at what I wanted to make and just started painting.

The background took the most amount of effort. It kept being almost right and I ended up painting it twice before I stopped second guessing myself (did I jump into something that was too hard?) and started to like how it was turning out.

After letting it dry overnight, I made a stencil of the next steps. I ALWAYS do these for a few reasons.

1. I hate free hand drawing on canvas - have you ever tried to erase??
2. A stencil lets you mark out squares and areas that you have to work with so my pictures don't turn out all wonky or unexpectedly travel off the end of the canvas because I didn't "measure with my eyes" correctly.
3. I re-use the stencils. If anyone asks me to paint them something (and they have) I don't have to completely start over. I already have a shape that I like working with.

At this point I only owned a pair of regular scissors, so, cutting it out was fun...

Next was filling in the big branches, adding smaller ones, and shading the tree. Shading the tree was also a "figure it out as you go" affair. Terry had just gotten back from work and I believe I said something along the lines of "No talking - shading and I don't know how".

Finally, the last step was adding the flowers. Since they are dots it was uncomplicated and great. I used the backs of my brush handles and dipped them in the pink paint.

This is the photo I found on the internet:

I got the idea for the second art project when I was getting my hair cut a few months ago. The salon that I go to has pictures of flowers on black canvas and I wanted to make something similar that went with our house. On the same Michael's trip with Terry I found black canvases (awesome) and picked one up.

Remember earlier when I said I only had one pair of regular scissors? I knew that was not going to work for this project because it had way too many details and I would completely mangle the stencil. I picked up a craft exacto knife and a much smaller brush so that I could paint with clean straight lines.

This is the stencil for the flower. I wanted to marry that exacto knife.

I had to paint the flower twice to prevent the black color of the canvas from showing. The whole thing took about 10 hours. It looks way less complicated that the cherry tree, but I had to paint so slow. I was terrified of shaky hands, sneezes, earthquakes...anything that would cause that irreparable smudge. I should title this painting "Tedious".

The camera doesn't pick up the actual color of the paint very well. The flower is a light lilac color.