Just Mary Designs

Art.  I love it.  I love making it.  Love looking at it.  Love reading art books.  Love reading art blogs.  Love trying new techniques and finding new supplies that delight me. I love creating in my studio....such a place of peace and therapy for me.  When the world starts to feel like it's closing in I can escape to my little art studio and paint out all of my frustrations, angers and overwhelm.  When I have something to celebrate it's a place of private haven where I can relax, bask in my joy and paint brightly colored pieces expressing my love and radiant life. The funny thing about my love of art is that it is all about exploring.  I can explore with a new medium.  A new class.  A new photoshop trick.  A new color.  A new friend.  A new style.  I can constantly invent and reinvent.  If I don't like it I can paint over it.  I can shade it.  I can chuck it and start something new.  Then come back to it later and breathe new life into it. And I love, love, love the art supplies.  I'm like a kid in the candy store when I walk into a Hobby Lobby or a Michaels.  I want to have one of everything....and two of the things that sparkle!! Right now, apparently I am obsessed with learning everything I can about not just making art, but the business of art.  I am taking three e-classes - Hello Business Hello Soul, The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design, and Bloom True by Flora Bowley.  I am finding my way as I learn new things about WHY art is speaking to me - heck its not just speaking to me - it is shouting at me to pay attention!!!  And I am loving it!  Loving it all!!!

What does loving someone mean to you?  For many people it can mean the joy and bittersweet sorrow of being a parent.  For some, love has brought heartache and tears.  Love lifts us up and inspires countless songs and works of art.  Wars have been fought and lives have been lost in the name of love.  

The writing on this painting says "When you love someone with all your heart, you give it away."  So true.  We can loose ourselves in love.  How many women have lost themselves in a bad relationship - only to rediscover their own essence upon becoming single again.  How many mothers have wearily looked up when their toddler turns two and ask themselves in a sleep deprived haze - where did the last two years of my life go?  Where did I go?

When we love with the ferocity of a mother, a lover, a friend, or a family... we give our hearts away. 

(Mixed media acrylics using a masking tape technique!)

Due to recent flooding, we had to move my office to a temporary location.  It is in the basement of an office building, typically used as a tornado shelter.  I hadn't paid any attention to the fact that we didn't have windows until one of my team members put up a piece of paper with taped off "window panes" and stuck a sunshine in it.  It gave me the creative inspiration to make windows for everyone!

I started dreaming about what I would love to wake up and see outside my window.  A tropical beach?  A flower garden?  The streets of a foreign village?  Once I started dreaming...I started painting!

Here is the first of the windows - a vintage scene from Paris!

This is a closeup of the women in the window.  I used an image transfer technique to add them.

Lastly here is a close in shot of the upper part so you can see the many layers of paint, collage, crackle paint, image transfer, stamping, gesso and oil pastel shading fun!

Today I wanted to get my hand dirty on a project I am working on that has a number of steps to it.  I will post more as I complete it, but here are a few snippets!

First, I took a blank canvas and stenciled a flower pattern with gesso.  The gesso will act as a resist to color when it is applied.

 

Secondly, I added some color with my Stabilo water soluble Woody's.  I envisioned a fower garden and just randomly colored spots on the canvas.

 

You can see in this little subsection how the gesso flower pattern shines through.

 

The artists tools...

 

Then I took a wet paintbrush and began to blend the water soluble colors together to make a pretty flower palette.

 

I have an idea of what this will eventually turn into...it will be fun to see if what I start out to create ends up being anything like the finished product!!!