I am loving making atc’s (they are the same as aceo’s …the acronyms stand for artist trading cards and/or art card editions & originals) they are small, about the size of a business card and so gratifying! If you go to Etsy and just search for atc or aceo you will come up with many of these treasures by wonderful artists! They are lovely and affordable and I just love ‘em!

I have been making these babies a lot lately because they really fit into my time schedule and they give me the opportunity to experiment with some of my sketches and also different mediums.

I would LOVE to get a swap going so if anyone is interested PLEASE send me a message!

water color atc by me, kristen

thanks for visiting. x’s & o’s kp

In my last blog entry I posted the beginnings of my watercolor self portrait. I really liked what I was doing and had in mind what I was going to do with it. But, alas, my painting had a complete mind of it’s own, as I soon found out!  LOL! Instead of getting stressed out about it, I decided to relax and have fun and enjoy what I was doing. I wanted to let the painting take me where it wanted and not force it into something just because I had a part of it completed. That was sort of hard, to let go of that image. But I figure I, can still do something with that later…..Here is my self portrait. It’s pretty much finished, though I may do a couple of small tweaks before our critique tomorrow. I am pretty happy with it but who would ever thought that my self portrait would be in black and white? I find that sort of ironic. Well, please tell my what you think

self portrait watercolor, mixed media collage

This is my ’sketch’ for a painting I am doing in class. I know it’s silly but I couldn’t bring myself to do a still life of a flower! Ugh. I guess I will never be a “real” artist, because I just cannot seem to keep my head from going a million different directions and FOCUS on actually creating a body of cohesive work. I just want to make stuff and paint and draw whatever strikes my fancy. I think “real” artists are much more disciplined than I can ever be! Oh well, I will have to be happy with being a “real” crafter and maker of stuff!

Anyway here is my post for today of my latest “work”…

another version....

I like to think I will make a card out of it that says, “hope you fillet better soon!” or something like that…

Just want to say thanks for all of the nice comments I have been receiving. I am really excited by the response to my new digi-stamp shop! I have so many projects that I want to do, I feel like I may burst! I think my new painting pretty much sums it up with the statement,  “It’s all in your head”. This is something I did a few weeks ago, I consider it a sketch because it is still very much a work in progress!

peace.

kp

I have been taking a painting class this semester and how lucky am I to get Carol Carter as my instructor?!! Her work is just incredible and it is a thrill just to get to see all of her work that she brings in to share! What is even better is that she is a great teacher and a wonderful person. This week we have been working with different textures and experimenting with a variety of ways to achieve texture in watercolor. Here I have done a sampler using things like, tissue, matte medium, salt and texture paste to create a texture palette. I wanted it to look like a quilt. I figure it will come in handy for some future projects I am planning and I thought it looked pretty cool too.

watercolor texture palette

And here is the first painting I did in class of a tiny still life….

"firestarter"

more coming soon!

If you have looked at my blog at all, you know I love rainbows! I wanted to paint a different sort of rainbow! And here she is!

and no I don’t mean a kaiser or a jelly roll. LOL ! I am on a creative roll and I can’t seem to stop! My only problem is that there are not enough hours in the day and I find that I don’t want to do anything else but paint and make stuff. Life is too short to spend it doing  laundry and dishes, don’t you agree?

Here is another painting I just finished. (with more to come soon)…

I admit it. I am a bad blogger. I don’t mean to be, it’s just that time goes by so darn fast and there is always so much to do! I always WANT to post things to my blog but first I have to either have the time to MAKE or FIND new things and that is the hard part!

I promised that if I painted anything (because I recently took up painting) that I would post it here first. Well, here is one of my new paintings…

Please let me know what you think 

Here is one of my finished pieces! I keep trying to do larger paintings but keep getting the desire to make these little one’s and turning them into charms!Please visit my Etsy shop to see more. And as soon as I finish my first painting that is larger than a breadbox, I will post it!

Here is a “sketch” I did for the beginning (idea) of a new collection of paintings I am about to start. This is just done on a small 3×5 piece of w/c paper. I just wanted to do some samples to get an idea of colors, and how well the paint works on this particular paper. I actually posted this the other day and then accidentally deleted it! oops!