Thursday, April 29, 2010

Moleskine Car?

My car is going be covered with paintings and line drawings, as if I used it as a giant travel journal on my imaginary trip west on Route 66. So when I was trying to decide on a color, I gravitated to the warm cream color of the pages in my Moleskine sketchbooks. It's a little more interesting than white, but still easy to paint other colors over. If you like to peek in the sketchbooks of different artists (I do!) there are lots to look through at their flickr group Moleskinerie.
Here's a look at the inside of the windshield.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Grouting


Whenever I grout something, I wonder if I've ruined it with this huge mess...but never more than this time with black grout. Yikes! Looks like my car needs some mentos for his dirty mouth!

But when I clean the grout off it's kind of like magic....it looks so different! I especially like the rims on the tires. Time to get the paints back out and get busy.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Rolling along....

Slowly coming along....just doing big surfaces and still have a looong way to go, before I'm doing something interesting to watch for Red Carpet weekend.
I'm liking the windshield, though I might be a little high from the adhesive. Yikes!

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Art Car....

Pontiac will be have a public art event called "Crusin' the Square" this summer. There will be cars and pick-up trucks created by local artists all around the square. They are just the right size for a photo op for the kids. You can come down May 1st and 2nd for the Red Carpet Corridor Festival and see everybody's cars. And you can watch me work on mine at the new Walldogs Museum on the square. I'm nervous about working in front of people, so be really, really nice to me :)

I'm just getting started, but hopefully by May I will have something a little more interesting for you to watch. Here I'm multi-tasking...painting and talking to my future daughter-in-law about the upcoming wedding.

My back is already appreciating this little cart Joe made to get the car off the ground a little!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Pu'uhonua o Honaunau

And in the spirit of getting off my duff and doing more artwork, here's a page from my sketchbook. I'm working from some of my vacation photos from Hawaii. The mark in the middle is a postmark that I got while I was on the trip. In the future, I'll be sure to tell them I want it over on the edge of the page.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Inspiration...

Did you ever paint on rocks as a child? I did. My sisters and I had a fabulous time collecting rocks from the lake and painting them up. I think there are still a few of those rocks floating around the cottage and my parents' house. Last summer we painted rocks with my niece and nephews and the magic is still there.

I've been thinking about inspiration a lot lately. What did I like to do as a child? As a girl I was drawing on everything all the time...not just paper. I knew I'd be in trouble for drawing on say, the furniture, but I knew it was all right to draw on other things....so my mom would open the fridge and see all the eggs had faces, or all the chalk in the junk drawer had little drawings on them, or you might find yourself in the bathroom using TP that had words doodled on the squares.

Painted Rocks by McCabe

Recently I ran across McCabe's wonderful blog, Dancing Mermaid. I had to smile when I saw that this woman is still painting on rocks and rockin' her whole world with inspiration.

These days I find myself drawing on paper more, but sometimes I get the chance to paint a mural on a wall, and of course there is plenty of old furniture in my life as an antique dealer and I sometimes take advantage of that. I'm also working on a piece for a local public art project (you'll see more of that soon). The main thing I'm realizing is that I just don't do enough drawing and painting.........lately it's mostly when I have a deadline that I get something done. And since I'm not making a living as an artist, I have very few deadlines! I used to paint when I was happy, when I was sad, when I was goofy, when I was serious, when I was madly in love, and when I was royally ticked off.

So I'm on a mission. More paint, more lines, more chalk, maybe even more eggs with faces.