My dream

In response to the prompt on Creative Therapy about what I want to accomplish in my life, I created this painting/layout to hang above my desk. This is a splash and pour watercolor painting in that you wet the paper, drop in paint, and then take a short straw and blow the paint around. After the paint dries, you look for places that look like things (leaves, flowers, fairies, fish, frogs, whatever) and enhance them with negative painting (painting darker around something to make it pop forward). Actually in this painting I was trying the technique of masking out areas and I began to paint birds in those areas; however, I hated the birds so I covered them with cutout watercolor leaves and with the money receipt. My journaling reads - My dream is to become a self-supporting artist - to sell my paintings and hopefully to win some watercolor competitions.
I am an extremely goal-oriented person and writing down goals always helps me to keep them in mind as the bigger picture. Life itself and other smaller intermediate steps and goals often interfere but if I can keep the bigger goal in front of me, I can achieve it. I have been extremely fortunate to have accomplished a lot in my life - I have been truly blessed and I feel grateful every day. I have a healthy and happy son who is a superb teacher, I have a loving husband, I have an affectionate little fur ball to keep me company, and I am healthy and productive.

Now - to the opposite extreme - trollbead LUST - okay, I know this is totally frivolous but this was also a goal - to create a trollbead bracelet. LOL!!!!! It took me about a year of haunting ebay to find the beads I wanted at reasonable prices - and this is my piece de resistance - a green-lilac armadillo!!!!!! I will have to do a layout showing the entire bracelet. This layout is for the Candy Shoppe striptease challenge - I followed the sketch, I used cream, turquoise, purple, and fuchsia, I used strips of paper, I used something gold (the little flower just above the swirl on the right). For the background I took an old toothbrush, wetted it, and dapped it in watercolor paint, and then flicked it with my finger - it spattered on the paper. I made the velvet flower after seeing pix of the new Prima velvet flowers - so beautiful! and the feathers are printed kitschy digitals which I got free from the Year of Color blog (hey, if you subscribe to it, I will be having another tutorial this month - this time on a fabric flower wallhanging - not sure exactly when Kari is going to run it).
Well, I have talked enough today. Thanks for looking and hope your day is going well.

ttfn