sharing the love, fighting fear and some painting progress

Again, I want to thank everyone who participated in my giveaway.  It was such fun.  I really enjoyed putting together the prize package, too.  And the lovely Jenny Blair wrote such a sweet post about receiving it.  Fun, fun!

Thanks to Jenny's post I've bounced around to a few other blogs and discovered that sign-ups for another stitched postcard swap are going on right now!  Beth Nicholls of the blog Do What You Love is coordinating the third Great Big Stitched Postcard Swap.  I immediately signed up without really knowing what I was going to do or how I was going to do it.

Signups go through tomorrow and then there's a really short turnaround.  I'm going to have to have my stitched postcard finished in order to send out the beginning of the week of March 7th.  But I'm up for the challenge.  I've been wanting to do some more embroidery anyway.  I was so thrilled to see that I wasn't completely inept when I experimented for a brooch I was making for my Etsy shop.

It may look kind of funny like that, but those are three leaves that I cut out and sewed together for this rose brooch.

This swap will force me to do something I've been wanting to do anyway.

I've had a lot of fears and doubts sneaking up on me lately.  One of my big fears is my Etsy shop.  I try to be very relaxed about my shop, slowly building it up, but sometimes I do worry about it.  Silly, really.  I was happy to see that some of my items were included in treasuries lately.  Like this one and this one and this one and this one.  I've never made a treasury of my own, but in the spirit of sharing the love, maybe I should one of these days.

My painting class has also been a challenge.  The first week I painted with abandon.  The second was both easier and harder.  I had one painting that wasn't at all successful and a few others that worked better.  I wanted to paint roses and I found that it was really hard to do.  I also didn't have a fine enough brush to do the detailed work that I wanted to.

I should probably go back to it and finish it.  I think one of the things I've learned about painting from working on projects for this class is that I need to take my time and that with acrylic paint I can go back and layer and layer and layer.  Watercolors (to my limited experience) can't be layered in quite the same way.

I had fun painting a crow.  And first, mixing and painting the background color.  I love that turquoise.

I knew I wanted to paint some sort of word in the corner, but for days I didn't know what to do.  Eventually I chose "brave."  Partly as a reassurance to me and encouragement to be brave and partly because I watched some crows chasing a pair of bald eagles and figured that was a pretty brave act.  Again, I could have used a finer brush to paint the text.

My last painting that week was an abstract.  I was getting frustrated with trying to work on details and working carefully on those first two paintings.  I also wanted to try something other than canvas.  I had some clay board that I hadn't used yet.  So I painted this spontaneous painting:

I know it's no great masterpiece, but it was fun to let go and play (isn't that what painting should be?) and I like how it turned out. 

Last week my painting time was shortened a bit by visitors on both ends of the week, but I did manage to finish one painting. 

I worked (loosely) from the model of my mini orange tree.  I don't like how the salt deposits/algae turned out on the side of the pot, but other than that I'm happy with the painting for the most part.  I do want to figure out how I can work more spontaneously and less literally.  I know it will just take practice.

This week I'm having trouble even starting my painting.  I'm not sure why that is.  Just fear?  I'm at a loss for ideas, which isn't like me.  But instead of worrying about it, yesterday I did some sewing and worked on the rough draft of a story I started back in the fall.  Interestingly enough the character in that story is an artist who is struggling with not painting.  I hadn't remembered that until I started work on the story again.  I'm often surprised at how my stories echo parts of my life in that backward sort of way.