Just Mary Designs

Ever wanted to paint, but just not sure how to do it?  "Wine & Brushes" was just the ticket for these ladies and gentleman! Getting Ready for Class

Held at the fabulous Indigo Palette, we gathered on a Sunday afternoon and painted while drinking wine - what could be better?!?! Believe In Your Beauty

I took these students step by step thru a mixed media painting.  We used this canvas as a guide, and the students all created their own vision using their own special photographs. 

Students hard at work

I showed them how to start with an intention in watercolor crayon underneath the first layer of paint.  We then experimented with laying paint on with a credit card and with a paint brush....playing with the color and seeing how it reacted to the water color crayon.            

Painting away!

The group loved the saran wrap technique that creates fun and crazy texture.  Slowly we built up layers of paint and collage elements.  Everyone's canvas turned out different - and very beautifully!  These three were from a family who just added a new baby to their family!   These gals had a blast with their canvases....and look how lovely they came out!     I finished one up myself - and left the picture slot open so I can customize it for some lucky person.  If you have a photo that would look just perfect on here, click here to see how to set that up! Ready for your own photo!

Wine & Brushes - a great time and super fun creative outlet for a wonderful group of people! A great group!

Sometimes the basic colors of black and white fascinate me.  The symmetry of piano keys can beautiful.  I wanted to meld the perfect alignment of ebony and ivory with chaos and color! This was my first experiment with using photoshop to merge a canvas.  For all of you artsy followers, this was a ton of fun!  The canvas itself was too big to fit on a scanner, so I had to scan it in 4 parts.  Photoshop Elements allows you to bring all four scans into one piece and "stitches" them together perfectly for you!  The technology is simply amazing! I used my new scanner, the Epson Perfection V600 Photo Color Scanner .  I was amazed at the color match - I didn't have to adjust color settings at all - and it was a perfect color match for the actual painting.  VERY impressed with that! I love how you can see the actual texture of the real painting also.  Fun for me.  Hopefully inspiring for you! Anyone interested in the PhotoMerge steps - read on! 1.  Set your scanner settings to at least 350 dpi so you have a good high resolution scan to save. 2.  Scan in as many parts as you need to and save each scan separately. 3. Open photoshop elements editor.  Select File, select new, select Photomerge panorama. 4.  Under the Layout options, choose auto. Then click the browse oval on the right to open the files that you just scanned. 5.  Select the scans you want to merge together.  Click Open. 6.  Check the boxes for Blend Images Together and Vignette Removal.  Click Ok.  Let it do its thing! 7.  Make sure you flatten your images (Found under the Layers Menu bar) and Crop it (Found under the Image Menu Bar). 8.  Save it at whatever size you want!  Voila - a large canvas is now a cohesive single high resolution print!