I Love You For What You Can Do

The prompt for this week's Journal 52 page was to incorporate hands into your page.  You can read more about the prompt HERE.  

I will admit that I was a little reluctant about this prompt...and that I had a momentary lapse of sanity in regards to it...  Because hands are hard to draw...at least for me...and that's my go to answer to all prompts...I will draw my way out of this.  But that answer just wasn't jiving with this prompt.  I didn't want to do a collage, because fancy cutting gives me the hives, and all the magazines I have are comprised of tiny people with even tinier hands...it was a scissor-phobe's worst nightmare.  At one point, I even thought about doing a hand print turkey like a kindergartner...I was getting desperate.

Suddenly, I realized that, if I did trace my hand, I didn't have to use my whole hand.  I thought maybe I could make mountains by tracing my fingertips and then draw a person standing on them.  I felt like a genius.  But once I started tracing my fingers, I liked how they looked, so I just kept tracing.  Fingertips up the sides of the page.  And then I felt like less of a genius.  I had traced myself into a corner.

But I persevered.  I painted them green.  I liked the color, but still had no clue where to go from there. Then, I decided it couldn't get much worse, so maybe I'd just draw doodles in the fingertips.  I am not a natural doodler, so I was taking another chance.  But, as I have learned, if it gets too bad, a coat of gesso fixes everything...I could always start over.

But as luck would have it, I didn't have to gesso the page out of existence.  I actually thought it looked pretty groovy.  And that's when I decided to get REALLY bold...and traced my whole hand in the middle of the page.  And here's what I ended up with:

I ♥ U 4 what you can do

The thing about my hands is that I am very mean to them.  I call them my "actual man hands"...as in they are beefy and thick-fingered.  The rest of me is pretty thick and beefy as well, so at least we match.

But, as I looked at my chubby hand outline surrounded by those green tangled fingers, I thought to myself, "Wow, hands, look what you can do!"  My little sausage fingers will probably never play the piano, or send text messages without hitting forty letters I didn't mean to hit, but they do enable me to make some really cool art!  They are my fat little translators, taking what my brain says and passing it onto the page with ever-growing skill!  

I was suddenly very proud of my actual man hands...and so I decided to write the journaling: "I love you for what you can do."  I finished up my spread and gave my hands a treat in the form of some cobalt blue fingernail polish.  Which I promptly got gesso on...  But the thought was there, and that's what counts.  

Another thing my hands finished up recently was this spread:

"Who I am comes in waves."

I want to say a big THANK YOU to my friend, Boo, for the fish napkin that inspired this page.  She sent me a plethora of different napkins, which I keep on my desk and pet when I need a pick-me-up.  But I realized I can't just keep petting them forever...I need to use them!  So I picked the one with those colorful fishes and went to town in my gigantic Dylusions journal.

This picture is more true to color than the other...plus, look at me, with my fancy art shot!
It made me feel fancy anyway...

Those colorful fishes totally needed a mermaid to go with them.  I don't know what it is about mermaids, but that's two in close succession...I just did an adorable chubby mermaid for last week's Journal 52 spread (which you can see HERE)!  Apparently mermaids are currently rocking my world...

One last thing my glorious man hands do (in conjunction with my weird brain) is write this blog.  As of this post, my busy little fingers have written 200 posts!  I have 49 followers in total (still makes me feel like a cult leader to say "followers").  

And, thanks to you and your amazing hands, I have 14,865 page views.  That's completely insane to me!  I just want to say a big, humongous THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!! to all of you who made that happen.  Your support and encouragement give me so much happiness that I can't even express it in words.  All I can do is say thank you again (and again and again) for coming to see me, taking the time to leave comments, and for subscribing to my blog.  You all make me feel so proud and excited and extremely lucky and grateful to be a part of the online art community.  Thank you. ♥♥♥

Little Splash For Amber...Face 16 of 29

I mentioned that I was sent a beautiful background by one of my Facebook friends, Amber.  Amber made backgrounds for the ladies in our group, sent them out for us to add our personal touches to, and then we'll mail them back to her.  I finished my piece today.

Here's the beautiful background that Amber made:

This background is so pretty...I really hated to cover even a little part of it up!  

I thought long and hard about what I would make to go on top of Amber's background.  The more I looked at it, the more I thought it looked like a bunch of raindrops splashing in a puddle, sending ripples out in all directions.  I almost made a girl with an umbrella...but that wasn't quite right.

No, the more I thought about it, the more I leaned towards my second thought...that this water was much deeper than a puddle...and that something underneath the water was disturbing the surface instead.  And so it was:

Lo and behold, hiding under the surface of the water was a feisty mermaid in all her half-fish glory.  This is my pencil sketch of her, that I then cut out and glued to the background.  I think that's the wisest course when one is nervous about wrecking something beautiful...make some rough drafts, get it right, and finally, cut and paste once you're happy!

And so in the end, I was very please with this version of the mermaid, who was hiding in the water all along:

Underneath that riotous surface, she was merely making a little splash with her beautiful tail!

I thought about adding more to the piece, but I couldn't bring myself to do it...I loved Amber's background too much...there needed to be plenty of it showing through!  

I used watercolors, faux gelatos and Silks acrylic glazes (as well as some black Microns for the detail work) on Amber's mermaid.  She's got some lovely glimmer to her that the camera just refuses to pick up, so you'll just have to take my word on it...but it's there, all shimmery and pretty in her hair, her eyes, and her tail.

I hope that Amber will enjoy her Little Splash as much as I enjoyed making her...now I'm tasked with another project that will hopefully go as well as Amber's did.  I get a little nervous about adding things to something someone else has already done!  When the work is already so very beautiful, I get scared that I'll go and mess the whole thing up!!!  But, fingers crossed, ...at least till I start to hold the pencil...that my gal pals will like what I add to their already stunning pieces...

Don't forget to come back on the 29th of September for a surprise prize giveaway...in the meantime, I hope you'll be getting some art on, just as I will be doing every day till then.  Until tomorrow, my friends.  <3<3<3