While I am waiting for my courses to be posted over at CraftEd Online I decided to put all my courses on sale. Every course is $10 off!!! Click here for descriptions and ordering instructions. I have them set up to be ordered through PayPal but if you would rather pay with a check or money order please email me.
I have been trying to do doodles like Nici does for a couple of years now. I have never been able to do them in a way I liked. But I have enjoyed doing designs for a while now that are squares with various designs in them. Here is an example of one of them.
This gave me the idea to try the same thing with a circle. And I was pleased with the result of this sort of funky mandala design.
What I liked about Nici’s doodles was that she did some of them with twinklink H2O’s ( metallic watercolors) so I tried this type of mandala with the twinling paints. And it is as close as I’ve come to liking a doodle type image I’ve done with them. I think it’s a mandala doodle 
All of these were done in my journal which is a sketch pad. The first two were done with sharpies. The last one was done on a page coated with black gesso with twinkling H2O’s as I said.
Just before I decided to focus on art to sell rather than more e-products, I had started writing a book on creating art journal backgrounds. I’ve decided to share these techniques with my readers as tutorials. Here is the first one using cut-out letters on your background.
Materials needed:
• magazines
• letter stencils or die-cut letters
• craft knife or scissors
• acrylic paint
• water soluble crayons ,oil pastels, watercolor pencils, or plain colored pencils
• baby wipes or damp cloth
• glue stick
If you don’t want the lines of the pen or pencil you are using to trace, showing up on the front of your letters, trace them backwards on the back of the page.
If you’d like to use a bird, also, you can click on this picture and it will take you to the original image that you can download.
6. Decide how you want to arrange your cut-out letters on the page. Once you’ve made this decision, glue them on with a glue stick.
Remember I talked about the binding machine that Mister got me for Christmas? I’ve been practicing and finally got a good one made. It’s a journal that I made for my creative ideas. I put different kinds of paper in it – watercolor, black paper, vellum. It is so cool to be able to make my own books!!
I painted the cover of the journal. I wanted to name it something that implied a place where ideas percolate. I always loved the room in the game of Clue that was called the Observatory. So I made up the name Creatory. I thought it was so cool. Then when I saw it painted, I realized it looks a lot like crematory. That’s pretty funny, isn’t it? But I still like the name
This is my youngest son, Laddan. He is on my mind this week because he is in Las Vegas for the finals for the Championship Bull Riding (CBR). It’s the culmination of what he worked for all year. If he wins, it is BIG money and could change his life drastically.
I had planned to be there with him but last Sunday my sister had a small stroke. She is out of the hospital and doing fine. No lasting effects, thank God. It was very scary and for the first time forced me look at the fact that we are aging. I don’t feel comfortable going a thousand miles away at this time, so I’m staying home, near my sister.
Laddan recently attended a school that prepares rodeo ministers. If you don’t know what that is, let me explain. Nearly all rodeos have some sort of church service. The people that lead these services have a ministry to go to rodeos. Rather than pastoring a church, they just minister to the cowboys and cowgirls that compete at rodeos.
He called to tell me recently that he and two of his friends have been asked to do the service at the CBR Finals this year. That is a great honor. They usually get someone who has an established rodeo ministry.
I am so proud of my sons. They have chosen very different paths from each other, but they both excel at what they are doing. More importantly they are both very good people and touch others’ lives with their kindness everyday.
I feel so blessed, so so blessed.
I have been enjoying the journal backgrounds I’ve been making so I decided to go a little more intense with the same technique and try it on canvas. I did this one on a canvas board. I can’t tell you exactly how I did it because I just kept experimenting with different things until it looked like I wanted it to.
I started by thickly applying gesso to the board with a putty knife. I just left the blobs and lumps. I let that dry overnight because it was really thick in places. I started coloring it in with watercolor crayons. It looked good but the color was too pale. I used some wood stain and some oil pastels but nothing looked right. After a lot of experimenting, I colored the various sections with liquid acrylics. I put it on thinly so no brush marks would show.
Once that was dry I used a brown oil pastel to highlight the texture. I love the patterns that it created. It’s like looking at clouds – you can see images there if you look long enough. I see a person on the right side of the bottom-left section.
I never appreciated abstract art but recently have been drawn because of the way it just creates it’s own patterns and textures. I am going to try more of these, probably with some brighter colors as well as some with beige and black together.
From Eternal Seasons by Henri Nouwen
For many people, waiting is a dry desert between where they are and where they want to go. And people do not like such a place. They want to get out of it by doing something.
In our particular historical situation, waiting is even more difficult because we are so fearful. One of the most pervasive emotions in the atmosphere around us is fear. People are afraid — afraid of inner feelings, afraid of other people, and also afraid of the future. Fearful people have a hard time waiting, because when we are afraid we want to get away from where we are. But if we cannot flee, we may fight instead. Many of our destructive acts come from the fear that something harmful will be done to us. And if we take a broader perspective — that not only individuals but whole communities and nations might be afraid of being harmed — we can understand how hard it is to wait and how tempting it is to act. Here are the roots of a “first strike” approach to others. People who live in a world of fear are more likely to make aggressive, hostile, destructive responses than people who are not so frightened. The more afraid we are, the harder waiting becomes. That is why waiting is such an unpopular attitude for many people. . . .
A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us. Impatient people are always expecting the real thing to happen somewhere else and therefore want to go elsewhere. The moment is empty. But patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there. Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her womb.
If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.
— Emmett Fox
If you doubt that this statement is true, think about Mother Teresa. She didn’t have marketing plan or a public relations secretary. And yet, there probably isn’t anyone in the world that doesn’t know who she was. All she did was act on love. It was that simple and look what she accomplished.
You start in your corner of the world, and I’ll start in mine
Who said “Love conquers all?” I sometimes get slapped in the face with the reality that love can’t stop pain. When I see my kids and grandkids suffer I wish love could conquer it and make everything okay. I am glad that I believe something bigger than me is in control, because if I felt like I was in charge it would be scary.
My four year old grandson, Gus, was diagnosed with scoliosis this week. It is unusual for it to be noticable when a child is this young, so that’s a blessing that they’ve already found it. And since he’s so young, the treatment will likely be more effective.
Another blessing is that they live in Dallas where the Scottish Rite hospital is. I went to occupational therapy school in Dallas and worked with Scottish Rite, so I know it’s a top-notch place for any type of orthopedic problem in children. And it’s free! Gus has an appointment there on Feb 4th.
The hard part is thinking about how tough it’s going to be for him to understand what’s going on. He will likely have to wear some sort of apparatus that restrains him in some way. He’s a boy full of curiosity and wonder and is constantly on the move, so he’s not going to do well with anything that slows him down. I hope that none of the treatment is painful for him or too scary.
His mom and dad are so involved with their (4) children and they are both so tender and caring that I know this will be hard on them too. I know there are parents and grandparents dealing with more serious conditions in their little ones. So I am focusing on all we have to be grateful for in this situation. Yet, my heart aches a little at the struggles that lie ahead for my kids and little Gus.
Keep Gus and his mommy and daddy in your thoughts and prayers if you will.
I have just added a plugin that will allow you to draw a picture when you comment on one of my posts. I can’t comment because I’m the administrator of the blog, so will you try it out so I can see how it works? Just use your mouse to color with any of the colors in the selection boxes. Click on the Comments link below this post to see what I’m talking about.
