Paper and Threads

Last week I posted some pages of a watercolor book that I'm creating to document my handmade Christmas ornaments.  I've been making them every year for 30+ years and decided that it would be fun to have a book full of paintings of them.  Here are 3 more pages.

The dove was made out of a piece of lace from my wedding dress and hopefully will be passed down by my daughter to her daughter.

The two red cats are actually red embroidery, outline stitch, on white fabric.

I smocked the eyelet on the cuff of the stocking on the top right.

                   At last count, there are 124 ornaments made by me on our tree.

Posted by Shirley at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I made a 16 page Teesha Moore watercolor booklet to paint many of the Christmas ornaments I made for our family and friends.  Last year I posted several of the pages here and here.  I am still painting more ornaments in the book while the ornaments are unpacked and easily accessible.  Here are the next pages in the book.

Here is our fraser tree this year.  It is full of ornaments and I made 95% of them since 1976.  Each of our children have a full set on their family trees and each year now I give them enough for our grandchildren to start their collection.

This is the painting on the front cover of my book. 

And here are the four pages that follow the ones in the above links. 

This is a duck made on a big white jingle bell.

Posted by Shirley at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

When we were standing on the Charles Bridge in Prague, a group of seagulls were taking off and landing right next to me.  I took multiple pictures and painted several of them when we came home to remember the lovely day.

I brought home a newspaper front page  from Berlin, Prague, and Budapest to use for collage.  I tore strips of them for this double page spread and glued them in place.  Then I painted on absorbent ground and allowed it to dry thoroughly before drawing and painting my gulls.

Posted by Shirley at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I finally returned to live figure drawing!  It is one of my favorite art activities and I promise myself sessions once each month.  After September, we were on vacation, the City was recovering from Hurricane Sandy, and my husband and I moved my Mother to a nursing home and closed up her apartment.  I didn't know what to expect when I returned, but I loved one of the models and thoroughly enjoyed drawing her.  She was tall, thin, and extremely flexible.  And she had a fabulous head of hair!

 2 Minute Poses, including multiple head drawings as I concentrated on her face and hair.

5 Minute Poses:

10 Minute Pose:

20 Minute Pose:

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We had a big family Thanksgiving at our apartment on Thursday and I painted the Gerbera daisies I had in the bud vases on all of the tables.

The following day my husband and I relaxed and then I started planning the Christmas ornaments I will make for our grandchildren.  I made one prototype in order to work out problems with the pattern.  But then I needed to make a second one to tweak things more.  Now I'm almost done making a total of 15 Santas - assembly line production.

The Santa head is the ornament - measuring about 6" long.  The green square is artistic license on the page! 

Posted by Shirley at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)