Thursday, February 16, 2012

Decorative Paintings

These are paintings that I completed a few years ago.
This triptych I sold on ebay. It was hard to let this one go. 
 I created these for my mom's dinning room. There is a large mirror in between the paintings. I applied molding paste to the canvas first to create the peonies. Then painted them red. In the picture the gold looks very intense, but it is not that way in real life. The gold is a paint is only visible with it catches the light in a certain way. If I remember correctly it is called gold interface? 
 This was a commissioned piece. This is a large watercolor. 
 Another painting I sold on ebay. 

This is a study for a mural for a powder room. It turned out to be a nice stand alone painting. Happy accident!

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Mod Podge Dry Erase Board

 As I was making my "to do" list for the day I thought of something. It would be so nice to mod podge scrapbook paper to this ugly board and make it pretty. Then looking at the long list of things to clean I decided it would be more fun to do a craft then do all my "to do's." 


Simple. 
All you do is:
1. apply mod podge to the board 
2. slap on the paper
3. run a credit card over it to squeeze out bubbles and excess glue
4. trim with exacto knife once it is dry
And TA DA!


Now on to the rest of my "to do's." I didn't list all the things that needed to be done around this house. It would scare you. 




Friday, February 3, 2012

Bleach Pen Shirts

Anything 100% cotton you better watch out. I have a new obsession. Really easy. Draw on a shirt with a bleach pen. Like the Tide pens except it is Clorox. This isn't a new idea, but the first time I tried it. I used the entire bleach pen in one afternoon. I was kinda dizzy to say the least. Not really.  


The teal on in the top left was my demo shirt. It already had paint on it. I learned that you have to get it started on something other then your nice shirt. It comes out liquidy like ketchup at first. You would never open up a bottle of ketchup and put it directly on a nice grilled hot dog. Same concept. 

It works best if you use 100% cotton. Synthetic fibers don't bleach as well, or not at all. I tested out a small dot on the underside of the hem to see how well the fabric would work with different shirts. Easy way to test the 60% cotton 40% polyester. It worked on one but not the other.  



I really loved the concept of the palm trees. I pulled the design from a screen printed shirt from American Eagle. But the 100% cotton shirts really accept the bleach. You might want to let it set for a shorter time. Some places said 30 minutes. I wish I had only let this one sit for 10 minutes. You can tell when it starts to bleed. So since the trees' leaves bleached larger with less detail then I wanted I added some paint. Just tulip fabric paint watered down in pink and brown. I thought it added more depth. And at the bottom it says "Nothin could be finer then to be in Carolina." If you don't know, it is from an old song. I am referring to the beaches and state in general, not the school. 



And this one I was inspired by a wall mural I saw on pinterest. And isn't pinterest the best thing in the world? I did take the design to the back of the shirt as well. This shirt has spandex in it. I also got impatient so the bleach made some neat halo effects.