Day 25, portal.

 

Day 26, hope floats.

 

Day 27, leg­end of the shrim­panzee — half shrimp, half chimp, all sea mon­ster! “rawr, get out of my lagoon!” *bats at rocks* Inspired by these awe­some paint­ings.

 

Day 28, sea­weed nest and pearls of wisdom.

 

Day 29, shrooms. Was writ­ing a guest post that day and I men­tioned mush­rooms at the foot of a tree.

 

Day 30, over a field of pop­pies. I paint­ed this at my par­ents’, as I was spend­ing the week­end there. I brought my most used brush­es and used the paints from my sis­ter’s old paint-by-num­ber kit. 

Hur­ray! Project com­plete! :D

 

Here’s how they look alto­geth­er. I’ve been hang­ing one up every­day on a string, like a bunting. (Please excuse the clut­tered back­ground. Our apart­ment comes with a mir­ror-cov­ered wall and we put all sorts of posters on it.) You can click on the pho­to to see a larg­er image.

 

Kind of hard to believe that I actu­al­ly stuck with it, paint­ed a square a day for 30 days. It was a lot of fun. Often I just paint­ed what­ev­er came to mind but some­times it offered such a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to work through the thoughts and feel­ings that were both­er­ing me.

Also, I did­n’t men­tioned that all of the paint­ings, except the 30th one, were done with dol­lar store paint! Not the great­est qual­i­ty, but does a good job actually. 

I’m going to have to take bet­ter pic­tures of them. The Insta­gram ones are fun but some of the colours and details don’t show up very well. And then I’m going to have a first ever gen­uine mud­pie give­away! :D To thank every­one for trav­el­ling with me on this jour­ney of redis­cov­er­ing the joy of paint­ing. Still have to fig­ure out the logis­tics of it, but will post details soon! 

I’ll def­i­nite­ly do this again, maybe a square a week or some­thing. But for now I’m going to fin­ish the pat­tern I’ve been work­ing on (eeep!) and a mys­tery project! With mys­tery posts! Stay tuned! :D

 

Wish­ing you a fun-filled day!

 

Pre­vi­ous square-a-day posts:
First post
Update 1
Update 2
Update 3 

 

 

Day 19, a quick study of Kat Sue the felt­ed cat hailed from Fel­pa Felt, Mex­i­co. Pos­si­bly my favourite square yet!

 

Day 20, octo­pus in the distance.

 

Day 21, con­tem­plat­ing good­bye. Deal­ing with some dif­fi­cult things these days, glad to have a way of express­ing it.

 

Day 22, lis­ten­ing. For direc­tions, I guess.

 

Day 23, not alone. An exper­i­ment with freez­er paper sten­cil­ing, then real­ize that freez­er paper and wax paper are not the same. But I only had wax paper, and don’t know where to get freez­er paper. Had mild suc­cess on this square piece of can­vas, so tried it on a t‑shirt any­way, on a larg­er scale, but failed miserably :(

 

Day 24, duck glar­ing at peo­ple tak­ing pho­tos. I admit that I’m one of those peo­ple. Inspired by recent trips to city parks and Mo Willem’s pigeon series. 

 

More on the square-a-day project:
First post
First update
Sec­ond update 

 

 

Day 13. Inspired by a pho­to I saw.

 

Day 14, deep sea navigation.

 

Day 15, red bam­boo. I was teach­ing Chi­nese writ­ing with cal­lig­ra­phy brush­es at a sum­mer camp that day. Tried using Chi­nese cal­lig­ra­phy brush with watered down acrylic, but it did­n’t work so well.

 

Day 16, wood and daisies. It was our 5th wed­ding anniver­sary, and my sis­ter told me that wood and daisies are tra­di­tion­al gifts for a 5th anniver­sary. We toured Black Creek Pio­neer Vil­lage that day (pic­tures to come! :D) and took lots of pic­tures of old wood hous­es and daisies.

 

Day 17, nests. Mask­ing flu­id and sewing on some beads.

 

Day 18, guests of the land. Used white glue instead of mask­ing flu­id. Came to the con­clu­sion that white glue does not func­tion well as mask­ing flu­id. I think I’ve exper­i­ment­ed with this before. For­got what the results were. Should have checked my own blog first :P 

 

Have a love­ly day, every­one! :D

 

 

More on the square-a-day project:
first post
sec­ond post 

 

 

 

Day 7, repli­cat­ing a leaf I picked up on the way to school last fall.

 

Day 8, the great escape.

 

Day 9, sys­tems the­o­ry, or, “if I could write my paper in colours and shapes”.

 

Day 10, resilience. I made a stamp using craft foam and a bot­tle cap. A city ris­ing from the sea. A recur­ring motif of the Wall City.

 

Day 11, lantern. An attempt­ed sun print with a paper snowflake kind of paper-cut­ting method. But the sun was­n’t con­sis­tent enough (despite the heat) that day to make it work. Used the paper cut as a sten­cil instead. I like how bright the magen­ta and yel­low are. Almost flo­res­cent and glowing.

 

Day 12, lantern, 2. Thought the paper cut sten­cil­ing was fun, made anoth­er one.

 

Hap­py Wednes­day! :D

 

More on the square-a-day project:
first post 

 

 

About a week ago I decid­ed to start a paint­ing project. To reac­quaint myself with paint. I decid­ed to paint one square (4″ x 4″ ‑ish) a day for a month (30 squares). 

Because part of my work involves facil­i­tat­ing art groups. Peo­ple in the group work on paint­ing projects. I work with them on the paint­ing projects. I encour­age peo­ple to paint (amongst oth­er art things). But I don’t real­ly paint in my own time.

I’m tak­ing a sum­mer course and the prof once said, “don’t ask your clients to do things you would­n’t do yourself.”

I don’t usu­al­ly call the peo­ple I work with “clients”, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I don’t paint. So I feel like a hypocrite. 

So, I was cut­ting can­vas square for a project for the group and I came up with this square-a-day idea.

It’s a bit of dis­ci­pline, but it’s fun so far. I try to paint what­ev­er comes into mind and not give it too much thought. But usu­al­ly I have an idea of what I’m going to paint ahead of time. I try to be spon­ta­neous and accept the final prod­uct for what it is. Ideas that I try to pro­mote in my work.

Some have titles, some don’t.

So this is the set up, on the kitchen counter. Not that I don’t have oth­er spaces, it’s just near the sink. 

 

Day 1, I was glanc­ing at my hat as I was get­ting ready in the morning.

 

Day 2, Red Wing. I was look­ing at a place mat lean­ing upside down on the kitchen counter. Remind­ed me of the res­i­dent red winged black bird in the near­by park.

 

Day 3, Ghosts. Inspired by an Insta­gram pho­to I saw. But kind of got frus­trat­ed by the way the watered down paint blotch­es on raw can­vas. End­ed up rins­ing the paint­ed can­vas under the tap and fin­ished with just a few strokes of dark­er blue because I could­n’t deal with it anymore.

 

Day 4, blend­ing the back­ground was pleasant.

 

Day 5, The Observ­er? Also reminds me of the humans in Moom­in­val­ley. Was just exper­i­ment­ing to see if wax crayon/ink scratch­ing work on canvas.

 

Day 6, ce n’est pas un Å“uf. Thought I would try to paint from some kind of still life. In this case, an egg. 

 

Will keep you post­ed on the project! :D

Have an awe­some weekend!

 

 

 

 

 

Remem­ber I men­tioned that I bought a super awe­some neck­lace from City of Craft the oth­er day? This is it, the jel­ly fish!

 

Isn’t it spec­tac­u­lar? It’s like a water droplet with a tiny jel­ly fish in it :D (it’s all made of glass — when I showed it to peo­ple every­one asked me if it were a real jel­ly fish. No jel­ly fish was harmed in the mak­ing of this, I assure you.) It’s made by Tosca Ter­an, a local glass and met­al artist (I am hop­ing to take a class with her one day!). Nev­er seen any­thing like this before. So after cir­cling back to the booth sev­er­al times I final­ly bought it. 

And then it inspired me to make a paint­ing of jel­ly fish.

 

It’s paint­ed on the back cov­er of an old book. See?

 

An old book called The Trum­pet of the Swan by E. B. White. I love the cov­er with the writer’s sig­na­ture in gold foil.

 

The water stain on the low­er right cor­ner was already there when I found the book. Kind of goes with the oth­er two jel­ly fish. Also has fab­u­lous green end papers :D

 

Hope your week is filled with new inspirations! 

 

 

 

This was inspired by some­thing I saw on Pin­ter­est a while ago, draw­ing on leaf with a sil­ver pen. I went and bought a sil­ver pen soon after I saw that, and found a leaf to draw on. I’ve been car­ry­ing both in my back­pack for the past few weeks but haven’t used them until yesterday.

Oak leaves are great for this because they have a kind of durable leath­ery tex­ture, and pre­serve well with­out hav­ing to be pressed. 

It’s been real­ly rainy these days, so I’m hop­ing for dri­er days to col­lect more leaves before they’re all fallen.

Think­ing of a cozy squir­rel nest with piles of leaves and acorns in it… Have a hap­py Thursday!