Creating again...

Hi!

It's been a while since I posted anything and life has been incredibly busy and chaotic especially lately with renovations. I did find a little time to create though (and of course work behind the scenes with Kristin at PPF - creation of a different sort). I am hoping I will have enough time to visit you this weekend, so here are some of my paintings since my last post...

Balloons in the Setting Sun

Flowers

Spring Branch

Birds on a Wire

Paintings finished on my deck (I so enjoy painting outside... that is over for this year...)

I did a bit of work in my art journal....

How I Spent my Summer

Rainbow Unicorn

Our Moon with Mark Twain quote

Until I went away on vacation, I also participated in Tammy Garcia/Daisy Yellow's ICAD challenge. The first two are a Mondrian look at the colours of my garden...  (Others are posted on my instagram account along with a few photo challenges.)

Garden a la Mondrian #1

Garden a la Mondrian #2

Another theme of mine was Birds:

Blue Herons

Owl

False coloured....(I forget what...)

Colours of my Garden - Abstract

And a few Zen Doodles....

Elephant

Yuri on the Railing

And those are some of the highlights of my creativity this summer. Hopefully it won' be as long until next post! ;)

Happy PPF! Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians and I look forward to visiting you!

ICAD - Playing with Watercolour Crayons etc.

This week I continued my index cards for my ICAD project and played with my Neocolour watercolour crayons.

Koi - with pens and acrylic background

Pears growing on my pear tree...

My Clematis...

A duck playing in puddles...

Octopus cheerleader...

Playing with crayons...

Zen Doodle

And those were my ICADs for this week.  A few days I wondered if I'd keep it up, but I did! How are you doing?

Paint Party Friday - Week 14 - ICAD and Prepping Canvases

Another week of mostly small stuff but paint and paintbrushes were involved! Therefore I do have something to show for Paint Party Friday - Yay! - nothing major but I do want to participate.

This week (well late Thursday) I prepped some canvases, following Kristin's idea of using black gesso. Very cool!

4 canvases with black gesso - what a neat effect!

WIP -Started painting one of them ... but barely

I also continued with the ICAD challenge I mentioned the past two weeks - an Index Card A Day. 

Inspired by my Sea Thrift/Armeria

Fun with left over red paint

Watercolour inspired by my peonies and bleeding hearts - tied for my favourite this week

 

Acrylic and watercolour tulip - my last this year

 Doodling

Total silliness - my other favourite

And a non painted zen doodle.

More work on my weeding was done until the ants started biting me as I got too close to their hill in the middle of my flower bed! Still more to go, so I will visit all you magnificent artists between my outdoor efforts.

Hope you have a great time at the party! Happy PPF!

Opposites

The theme for this month's Sketchbook Challenge is OPPOSITES. This started me thinking about colour theory and colour wheels. Purple and yellow are opposite each other on the colour wheel. The yin/yang symbol  represents opposites (though I know there is much more to it than that). And I wanted to further represent opposites within each colour so I zen doodled this painted version with hard lines in purple and softer, more flowing lines in yellow/gold.

I wish the scan beds of these printers were just a bit larger or maybe I just need a bit smaller sketchbook to prevent the shading and buckling here! 

Are you participating in the Sketchbook Challenge? 

LUCKY

To me, and to many others, four-leaf clovers have always symbolized luck. And I am lucky. Almost every time I am near a meadow of clover, I will look down and find at least one clover with four leaves. I have even found one with five, and six! (Does that make me even luckier?) If I find them when I am with someone, I give it to them and if I'm alone I stick them under my desk blotter or in a book. Sometimes I find them again (in books) and I feel like I get a second bit of luck! They also symbolize love to me*. So today, I have done a zen-doodled version for Mr. Toast's Creative Tuesday challenge on the LUCKY theme:

*So why do four leaf clover symbolize love to me? First of course are the heart shaped leaves. They always make me smile. But mostly it is because of a story a friend told me about his father who was always lucky in finding four-leafed clovers. When he (the father) was older and in seriously declining health, he wasn't outdoors much (and probably wasn't feeling very lucky). So on his wife's birthday, he had his sons take him outside to sit on the grass. He sat there and found enough four-leaf clovers to present his wife with a lovely birthday bouquet! A bouquet!! I have always thought that to be the most loving and romantic gesture I have ever heard about! And one that only the lucky could have given!

This zen-doodle is also inspired by a lucky little boy, Artoo, the son of I am the Diva. Her Weekly Zentangle Challenge (#9) asks us the incorporate her new tangle "Artoo" into the design. While not strictly a zentangle, this little sketch and pen piece of mine plays with that. I'm so happy Artoo is recovering well!!

To Kat and any of my other blog friends who have noticed my absence/missed me - I'm baaaaaackkkkk! But busy, busy and I haven't had much of a chance to visit anyone yet or do anything creative (other than business presentations) until now. I hope to get back to normal and visit you all soon!

In the meanwhile, I wish you LUCK!  

xoxo

EVA

A Valentine for Creative Tuesday

It started as a sketch and morphed into a zen doodle once the pens came out. Inspired by Mr. Toast's Creative Tuesday theme of "Valentine" (as was my Sunday Sketch this week), this is my little submission for this week's challenge. .

It may also be a wedding card for a wedding I am attending this weekend in Whistler B.C. 

I'll be out of touch likely all this weekend so hope everyone has a great rest of the week! 

PEACE

This week's Inspiration Avenue challenge is PEACE. Definitely a timely theme with Christmas quickly approaching and songs of Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Man abounding.

I went with a zen hippy inspired version:

Wishing you a holiday season full of peace and happiness.

AEDM Day 27

An incredibly busy day today cleaning and organizing (all puckered out) but I did take some time out to do a zen doodle for AEDM.

AEDM Day 22

This year I have done a number of zen doodles which start as circles. Are these zen mandalas? Or something else? I don't know as really it's just me playing around. Yesterday I thought I'd do another version of "the tree" using that type of zen doodle but I got distracted with a crayoned landscape (that I'm quite taken with and may turn into a new header...). So here today is what I meant to do then.

It's Monday and back to work, so it will be harder to check in on everyone's AEDM activity... but I will try to sample as I can!

AEDM Day 11

Variations on a theme. Yesterday day I did a tree with falling leaves in a pen pointillism style. Today here is roughly the same image in a zen doodling style.

Now to decide if I want to try yet another style with this image/theme or move on to something else? What an amazing gang of artists that are participating in AEDM at Creative Every Day! Wish I had the time to look at everyone's efforts but it is totally overwhelming. I kept up when the check-ins were weekly but unfortunately this is too much for me. Sampling it will be...

AEDM Day 2

Travelling from California to Texas....

Zen doodling....

While travelling, pens and pencil seem to be the easiest tools to use.

AEDM Day 3

In Texas, in meetings....

Zen doodling.....

AEDM Day 4

Zen Doodling in Texas....

AEDM Day 5

Travelling home from Texas and zen doodling on the plane.....

Butterflies, Grapes and lots more!

This week I  created a mixture of things. I did a few favourites - the people with funny hats, zen doodles, sketching faces from magazines and I went back to working with pastels. For some reason I had an odd desire to do butterflies and, like last week, I wanted some colour! So I tried butterflies using pens and my Caran D'Arche watercolour crayons - without the water. I am really loving those crayons!

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday: The theme on Inspiration Avenue's Weekly Challenge was Metamorphosis. I didn't get my act together to put in a submission but I was thinking about my grape vines and how they have matured from the small green of early summer to the full purple of today, and then to....

Sunday: ....jars of grape jelly! 45 cups of grapes (+ 1/2 cup water per 4 cups grapes) boils down and strains to = 22 cups of juice boils down to = 11 jars of jelly. Just add sugar and hours of effort and lovely grape jelly is created! I added @1 cup of sugar for every 2 cups of juice as I don't like things too sweet. Most recipes call for a cup of sugar for every cup of juice. This year there were lots of grapes!! 45 cups - wow! And a healthy addition of stems and the remnants from boiling - pit, skins etc to my compost bin! I was so tired after all that work!

This was a creative week in other ways. I started The Sketchbook Project and I finished my first painting! More on that later. Last week's update was my 100th post! (How did THAT happen?) And I am almost finished my 3rd book for CED2010! Finding new ones I like is so hard though. Maybe there will be something new in the stores?

That was me. How about you? How was your week? Are you doing The Sketchbook Project? If so, what is your theme? 

Hope you have a great week ahead!