As you know I’m redecorating a room at Mister’s house for my studio.  It’s going to be yellow, pink and live green.  Well, you know how you always have boxes and baskets of stuff sitting around that you keep doo-dads in?  I decided I’m going to color coordiante all my boxes to match the studio.

My siter got 12 packages of fibers for me at a garage sale.

I got so inspired by the fibers that I used them on my boxes.  For a day I did nothing but paint and glue on these things.  I have a lot more to do but thought I’d share what I’ve got so far.

Three green wooden basket had a rope handle but I covered it with fibers by using hot glue.  The one that says Create is a cigar box. I lind it with scrapbook paper and hot glued the ribbon around it and made a bow for the handle to open it.  The pink one with swirls has some eyelash fiber glued around the top edge.  The two small ones are paper mache boxes that I covered with scrapbook paper.

My studio is going to be sooo purty! 

I have fixed the glitches that occured the last time I tried to offer this course.  You can read more about the course, and sign up here.

The course is three separate lessons that will teach you everything to create beautiful artwork on any shoes.  The cost is $20.00.

Course will begin on May 9th, so sign up soon!

Here is the latest pair of shoes I painted…

I finally have all the cracks filled in and almost everything, including the ceiling painted with Kilz.   Now I’m going to paint all the walls yellow.  In the picture below, you can see the part where the celing slants into the wall.  On that slanted part I’m going to paint the word “create” in huge letters.

I’m not done with this wall (below)  because Mister is going to help me install shelves on the wall from the little door to the end.  Mister’s son, who is a fantastic artist, is going to be at Mister’s house on Sunday.  I’m hoping he will have time to draw Alice on the little door for me!

Another project we are working on is a dining table.  The table that I had when my kids were growing up is an nice, oak pedestal table.  I haven’t had room for it for about ten years, so my niece was using it.  She moved recently and doesn’t have room in her new place so she gave it back to me.   Mister and I are gluing the pedestal back together because it has gotten dry over the years.

We glued one section, and it’s in clamps curing.  We’ll do all the other sections, one by one.

At a thrift store I found this cool shelf that’s about 4 feet high and 12 inches wide.  It is shelves (cubby holes) that are about 4 inches deep.  And they have little clear doors that close in the front of each shelf.   I didn’t buy it but I am hoping it’s still there when I go back.

This has been all over the news all over the world, so you have probably seen it already.  I  saw something about it on the tv a few times before I actually went and watched the video on YouTube.    I’m posting it here to bring your attention to this incredible story.  Please take a deep breath and allow yourself to really take in what is going on here.  Try not to see this as just a nice story.

All of us have creative talent.  And I believe that most of my readers have chosen to nurture that creativity.  However, our society has taught us that to be recognized as “an artist” you have to have an art  degree, or someone outside yourself must make that distinction.  Watch Susan Boyle in this video.  No one came to discover her.  She took the initiative to allow others to hear her talent.  She knows she has it.

I can’t imagine the courage it took for her to go on that show.   But before she goes on stage she says   “I’m going to make the audience rock.”  She didn’t worry about her looks or whether she was going to “make a fool of herself”.   (That’s one of my biggest fears.  The mean voice in my head is constantly saying “They’re going to make fun of you.”)    In a later interview on Good Morning America,  she talks about how kids made fun of her in school.  That’s a trauma she has probably carried with her all her life, and yet she still got on tv and faced Simon and risked being made fun of once again.   But in her heart she knew she could sing.

Now, sit back and really think about YOUR dream while you watch this video.  Allow yourself to believe in YOU.  I truly hope this inspires you to believe in yourself and know that you can make your dream come true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnmbJzH93NU

This is a small pumping unit inside I restaurant in Midland, TX.  A pumping unit is what is placed on a completed oil well to bring up the oil continually to pump it into a pipeline.  The countryside is full of these, but the real ones are much larger.  This one is about 6 feet tall.

Today’s photo comes from a store in Irving, TX called Cost Plus.  It’s the strangest store I’ve ever seen.  It has everything from groceries to cooking stoves (appliances).  It’s geared toward the Latin population so they have everything you could ever want in the way of Mexican food cooking.  And their bakery is fabulous!  This is not the Cost Plus that’s like Sam’s Wholesale.

Their cakes are outrageous!  Lanny snapped this picture with my cell phone to send to Mister as a suggestion for this Groom’s cake at the wedding.  lol

Today is my only nephew’s birthday.  Hope it’s a good one, Jim!!

I haven’t forgotten about my challenge to take a photo every day and post it.  I’ve been taking photos although not every day.  But I just haven’t been posting them.  I’m going to get started again, though and catch up on some I’ve been taking.

This one is a “for rent” sign in front of a house on Mister’s block.  I’ve tried to imagine what they were thinking, and all I can come up with is that they were smoking something funny when they made this sign

Oh my gosh, my internet died and I haven’t been able to get online since Thursday!!  It was awful!!  I’m so happy to be back   The good news is thatwithout being able to get online, I did a lot of art.   One of the things I did was doodling.  I’ve tried this before with sharpies and with Twinkling H2O’s but this time I just used pencil.

If you haven’t tried this, please do!  It is so fun.  And it helps you learn a lot of techniques like shading and perspective.

I’ve seen artists that do large black and white drawings similar to this.  Theirs have much more detail.  I can’t find any of the sites right now but if you go to Deviantart.com you might could search for black and white drawings and find some.

If you do any doodles, I hope you’ll share them with me.  It’s my newest passion!

But I did some work on canvas, too.  Here’s a painting I did.  The dots were made with gloss liquid gel medium.

It’s a chunky canvas so I painted the sides.  Here’s a picture of the side.  The lines aren’t very straight so I’m going to try and clean them up some.

I should take an internet vacation more often.  Nahhhh…I didn’t like it 

I cleaned my art table and made room to work on some large canvases.   I started out like I used to, to create a collage – going through images to find something to inspire me. I selected some images and laid them out on the canvas but nothing was working.  I started hearing that critical voice that told me I suck at collage.

The actual process of applying to paint to anything is very meditative for me. So, I decided to paint the canvas and just let the muse take over. Two days later I had finished three canvases and they aren’t truly collage.  More mixed media, I guess, but here’s the exciting part! Remember my last post where I talked about how I wanted to get back to collage but it would probably be different than it was before? Well, I think this new art is coming more from my soul than previously.

There is the art that you look at, then there’s the emotion and self-expression that’s in the piece. Doing these collages, I was not very interested in what the finished piece looked like to anyone else. I was expressing some important personal and spiritual things with these pieces. When I look at them now, I don’t critique them, I feel the message that’s in them for me.

Here are two of them.

It’s cloudy so it was hard to get a good picture.  On both of these, I used spackle.  I used it as the background in the one on the left, then glued paper dresses over it.    I created the dress from the spackle in the right one.  This spackle is so cool!  I feels just like shaving cream!  Then you can sand it later if you want.  It’s by Red Devil and it’s called One Time Spackle.  I bought it at Home Depot.