Alizarine

Rose of Sharon

Jeff and I met on Match.com--ain't no shame in it!--and one of the things he liked about my profile was that I had answered the "What was the last great book you read?" question with The Grapes of Wrath. It was one of those books that had somehow slipped through the cracks of my reading life, and I remember finishing it while sitting on a bench in Chicago's Union Station. The devastating ending made me cry, and then I just stared at things for a while, a character Edward Hopper had forgotten to paint: Heartbroken Lonely Woman Crying Over A Book.

Anyway, one of the characters in that book is named Rose of Sharon, and I always thought that was so unusual--she has a preposition in her name! Last year we were shopping for plants to decorate our new patio, and I flipped out when I came across a rose of Sharon. The man who sold it to us said it was blue, which is not as common as the white and pink version, and after planting it, we waited for about a month for it to bloom. It's in the center of the above photo.

I took a photo of the first rose and saved the picture for a future painting. I started it a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't all that revved up to paint it at first, but after a day of work I was excited. I loved the light on the petals, and the variety of blues and purples I used to create the bloom was challenging.

I fine-tuned the white thing and added more details and texture to the petals.

Then I filled in the background with some bloopy, blurry colors, and I started the rocks in the lower-left corner. Most of the white areas would become leaves and branches.

Next up: I spent a lot of time with that dry grass on the left side. It had lots of different blurry colors going on. I texturized the rocks with purples, blues, pinks, and browns. Finally, I did some yellow underpainting on the leaves, masked off the major veins (seen above as yellow lines) and added an additional green glaze over the top.

More leaf work...

I added a lot of details to the leaves and attempted to soften and refine the veins.  Leaves in direct sunlight called for bits of blue, permanent green light, and a whole lot of no-paint. The bigger/closer leaves required some micro veins. This process reminded me of the way I painted the colorful leaf from my Mushrooms painting a year and a half ago. The colors in the photo above are a bit too bright--I took the picture during a thunderstorm and got aggressive with it in Photoshop.

On my last day of painting, I added a branch and some grassy shapes in the center. Those were surprisingly complex and colorful. And then, as if on cue, our new scanner arrived in the mail!

Eleven years ago I bought a kind of so-what HP scanner that did a wonderful job with my watercolors and cartoons, and Bun liked to sit on it, too. When it died in 2009, I assumed it would be easy to find a replacement. But that was not the case--the ones we've tried since then can't handle subtle color changes or things like pastel colors outlined in black pen.

Last month Jeff did some research (and great things happen when Jeff does some research). He found a used Epson Perfection V30 for only $30. A watercolor artist had blogged about this scanner and showed how to configure the settings to work for watercolors. It seemed like such a great deal, especially when you consider that I tend to pay $12-$15 per big scan at FedEx. The only problem was that the vendor was in Hawaii, and the scanner had to endure a month-long boat odyssey and cross-country road trip before it reached us.

We set it up and scanned my painting (which was too big to fit) in two sections. Photoshop miraculously pieced them together--seamless! We were impressed at how the scanner even managed to pick up on the texture (or tooth) of my watercolor paper. Terrific!

And you can find prints of this new painting if you click here!

Imagekind has finally gotten its act together, and now my other new-ish floral paintings are available as prints, too!

Click here for Wilting Parrot Tulip.

Click here for Passion Flower.

I STRONGLY URGE YOU TO BUY ALL THREE! :)

Like me on Facebook, yo!

SnowBun!

For the first time in two years, a medium-sized snowstorm hit our town yesterday, and today as Jeff and I wolfed down our lunch, I mentioned that I wanted to make a snowman. Surprisingly, Jeff was into the idea--"Let's do it now!" Of course, we couldn't do the same old played-out normal snowman. We made a snowBun.

It took us a little while to get on the same page as to how this snowBun would come together, but soon enough we established the Garfield-ish main form and began fine tuning it.

I messed around with the photo settings on this one to make the profile more visible.

We took turns making the face--I roughed in the main shape and eye sockets while Jeff refined the ears and added the features. He was charmingly businesslike while I emerged as the project's cheerleader.

It's my belief that if Bun had existed during Biblical times, people would have created golden idols in her image. So it was all too appropriate for Jeff and me to make a snow sculpture of a creature that we basically worship every day.

That face cracks me up.

This is the view of our snowBun from the house. She's not long for this world--this weekend we'll have highs in the fifties with a good chance of rain.

But this was so much fun, and for about an hour we felt like a couple of kids. We came inside soggy and gleeful. Bun groggily hopped downstairs, glanced at her giant likeness out in the yard, and demanded some wet food.

Treasure

I can sum up February in two words: antibiotics and Treasure.

Antibiotics: Bun is urinary infection-free after we struggled to find antibiotics that didn't make her sick. The first was a brutal regime of 56 pills that made her sick every time we successfully got them in her. We switched to a second type--28 doses of a pink liquid in a rather hilarious cherry flavor (because everyone knows cats love stuff that is cherry flavored). This delightful concoction caused Bun to drool and foam uncontrollably for ten to fifteen minutes after Jeff squirted some down her throat, during which time I followed her around with a billowing handful of paper towels, sopping up the drool as she hustled from one room to another. Thanks to all who donated to Bun's medical fund and even sent her valentines. Jeff and I were blown away by your kindness and generosity.

Between my drool cleanup sessions, I painted and painted. This was the main reason why I haven't updated the blog in a while. I became obsessed with my unusual and challenging still life. It's another cluster of jewelry along with other items including an old photo of me as a baby. My mom put it in my birthday card back in late Janurary. I whimsically added the photo to my still life setup and loved the idea of painting a tiny girl surrounded by objects she would eventually own. I spent the first couple of days painting my baby self. My head is about the size of a nickel. I'm in my parents' dining room holding one of Dad's college books. I had trouble sleeping during this first week of painting--I found myself repeatedly waking up at 4:00 aching to get back to work on it.

Next I added most of my turquoise bracelet (I wore it everyday during my early teaching years), some coral beads, and an antique dragon that might be made of ivory, but I'm not sure. I like how the orange-red beads resemble fire shooting from its mouth. In real life the dragon is about an inch and a half tall. The painted version is about five times larger in this 20"x26" watercolor.

During one productive week, I finished the dragon and a lot of fussy jewelry in the lower left corner, including an antique orange bead necklace that was nothing but trouble! On our first Christmas together, Jeff gave me the swirly silver charm on the right.

I selected the jewelry pieces mainly because I liked the way they looked together, and the setup came together shockingly quickly. Some of the stories behind the jewelry are meaningful, and some are not. For example, one morning I was on my way to school when I noticed the beginnings of a wardrobe malfunction and needed something to pin myself together. I popped into a drugstore and bought the above purple pin for $4.95. It may have been cheap, but it took an entire day to complete. The orange beads run through the bottom half of the painting. They had many diamond-shaped facets and were difficult but fascinating to paint. I loved producing every bead in this painting, but the many connecty things here were a chore.

Not wishing to annoy my Facebook friends with daily in-progress photos where I had covered maybe a couple of square inches, I limited myself to Friday-only updates. The above photo shows some new objects: a sparkly gold charm that is the focal point of a statement necklace, most of a turquoise ring that is too heavy to wear while painting, and a perfume compact of a leaf with a dragonfly on it. Because the gold charm was so impossible, I couldn't make myself work on it all day, so during the afternoons I painted fun stuff. The dragonfly/leaf and the circular gold compact in the lower-left corner were gifts from my friend David, who is a makeup artist at Estee Lauder in Bergdorff Goodman, NYC. I bought the ring in Santa Fe, and the gold necklace is from some catalog or other.

The next week I finished the turquoise ring and dragonfly/leaf compact (that took a lot longer than I thought it would). Then I worked on the space above those two things. I referred to this area as "the little garbage."

Finally I painted the silver Eddington necklace, which I thought acted as a kind of fun signature, a pearl, and some more beads. Note the tiny chain draped over that red bead. Why didn't I think to hide it when I put this still life together? Those links were so impossibly small, even on a large-ish painting.

Last week I took care of the little items in the lower right corner, including a raspberry-shaped earring composed of small garnets. Most of the items here are resting on foil, except for those on the right side. You can see where the foil ends and the table begins. (If you click on the picture above, you can see the details more easily.)

I adore Venice and was happy to find the above matchbox at a local antique store. It shows the Ca' d'Oro ("Golden House") and was painted in a jazzy style that I had fun mimicking. The lettering and skinny black lines made me so nervous that I kissed my right hand after I finished them. I devoted the last day of painting to the turquoise chunks in the top right corner and tightening up the gold floral piece in the center.

For a while the working title of this painting was Treasure Chest, awesomely suggested by Jeff. A couple of weeks ago we decided to shorten it to Treasure. I liked that idea because it can be a noun and a verb. I'm so happy with the painting and think this could be a great new way for me to create portraits--a photograph of the subject surrounded by beloved objects--and I want to do more.

Prints of this brand new painting can be found here!

And I've put Treasure on tons of merchandise...

...and you can find it here!

More Bun Drama

It's been a lousy few weeks for Bunny. The story is so convoluted and boring--I'll try not to ramble.

Bun takes a miracle drug twice a day to keep her regular. The University of Illinois' small animal clinic gets it from India, but the supply recently ran out (for good? conflicting stories!), and all animals on the drug needed to come in so their doctors could talk about alternatives. So Jeff and I brought Bun in.

During the exam, the doctor suspected that she had a urinary infection. She gets these about once a year, and after further tests, we learned that yes, that was the case. The antibiotics she had to take: 56 Clavamox pills over the next four weeks, which seems incredible. Bun hates pills, so this would be a twice-daily power struggle. I drew 56 erasable Bun faces on our kitchen chalkboard for motivational purposes. Fine.

Yesterday morning when we opened our bedroom door, Bun was not there to greet us and boss us around. This was highly irregular, so we started calling for her. She emerged from the living room and limped up to us. She didn't want to put much pressure on her back left foot, and as a result she was moving slightly sideways.The foot in question:

Jeff once had a little dog that had a stroke who moved the same way, so he immediately thought, stroke. Maybe it was a side-effect from the pills? He scooped her up in a towel and we both started crying and holding Bun like a baby. Our poor girl!

She seemed alert in every other way, though, and was not yowling in pain, but we knew we needed to get her to her local vet as soon as possible. Jeff held it together long enough to make the necessary call, we threw on some clothes, and we rushed her up to the vet just as it was opening.

Bun's kind of a big deal up there. Her file is one of the thickest they have, so everyone knows her little face. She is incredibly docile and sweet to all humans, and she also has this way of giving her doctors and other vet people homemade cookies "just 'cause." I took one look at the always-sympathetic C., working the desk as we blew in, and got hideously weepy as Jeff explained our situation. We were hustled into an exam room.

The first available doctor looked in Bun's eyes and did the usual exam, saying she wasn't showing any stroke symptoms. She suspected that Bun had injured her leg in some way and wanted to take some X-rays.

[fast forward through stressful waiting period where they kept Bun for a couple of hours]

The X-rays showed no signs of breakage. We were able to see that she was a bit constipated. ALL of Bun's doctors had looked at her and all concluded that she had not had a stroke. Consensus was that she had a soft tissue/tendon injury. They gave us something to treat her pain and we went home. I came up later with some cookies from Bun.

What could have caused the injury?

Theory A: Bun's kinda-pal Quixote likes to engage in grab-ass (see video below, and now I feel like such a jerk for chuckling)...

 

...and occasionally those two get into some knock-down, drag-outs during the wee hours.

Theory B: As Bun has aged, her ability to jump has declined. Last week I watched in horror as she attempted to jump from our dining room table to a window sill and missed, falling to the floor. Maybe something like that happened overnight.

But Bun has been frightened of Quixote since yesterday morning and actively hides from him now. So I'm leaning toward Theory A.

Attempts to give Bun her pain medication were met with a frothy, spitty, puking girl who was having none of it. She refused food for the rest of the day and hid in Jeff's office. Her eyes were dilated and I know she must have been in pain. We ended up sleeping on the floor beside her last night.

In the morning (5 a.m.) we all woke up. Happily, I was able to coax Bun into eating some of her dry food and drinking some water. She used her litter box a little--she had to have been almost totally dried out. Standing in the box seemed uncomfortable for her and I feel that's a top reason why she's avoiding it. Jeff managed to get her various meds in her. She's spent most of today in Jeff's office, eating and drinking a bit but not much. Jeff has become worried that she's not passing the stool we saw in her X-ray yesterday and, with the advice of her U of I doctor, he has upped her laxative dosage. We don't want this to turn into a repeat of two summers ago.

SO we are hoping that between now and 2 p.m. tomorrow, Bun will have had a successful litter box trip to Town #2. If not, she has another date with her U of I doctor. I really hope it doesn't come to that.

If you would like to donate some money toward Bun's hefty medical bills, I have a PayPal button on the right. Or please consider buying a print here, stuff here, or originals here. Thanks!

EDIT! It's late Friday morning, and I am pleased to announce that Bun gave birth (basically) to a bouncing baby boom-boom, as we call them. Actually, it was more like octuplet boom-booms. Crisis averted! Even though she's still got that sideways walk that will hopefully heal over time, Bun's feeling a lot perkier today. AND she gets to nap the afternoon away in her sunny basket, narrowly avoiding a scary, expensive trip to see her U of I doctors. GO BUN.

I mean, seriously, there was cheering going on in this house. People were dragged away from desks to gape at things in litter boxes.

And I would like to sincerely thank everyone who wished our cat well and donated some money to her cause. You almost completely paid her surprise expenses this week. Thank you very much for helping us. Bun loves you and wants to give you cookies, just 'cause. I was genuinely surprised that anyone had even bothered to read to the bottom of yesterday's post. I propose a toast to you, my dear readers. You made a little cat happy.

(I made it clear that Bun pooped today, right? She did not have a litter of kittens. I was trying to make a little joke and am saying this preemptively in case people didn't get it.)

Emily and Cupcake

Tomorrow is my sister Emily's birthday, and due to travel and scheduling issues, I had to give her this painting on Christmas. Emily (a.k.a. Poof) is used to this kind of thing, as is anyone born on or around December 25, but I felt bad about not being with her on her actual birthday. So to make up for it, I decided to give her something extra special.

I took the reference photo about a year and a half ago when Poof and I traveled to New York City together (she met Mally Roncal, one of her makeup heroes, and you can read all about that here, and there's even a video). In the photo, Poof is saying goodbye to Cupcake, her goofy and adorable little cat. When she's not asleep, Cupcake has that hyper-alert expression at all times. I thought about using the entire photo for the painting, but I loved my sister's face so much that I wanted it to be the focus.

Unfortunately for this blog, I accidentally deleted the three in-progress photos I took of the painting. I painted Poof's face, arms, and part of Cupcake's face on the first day, finished Cupcake on the second day, and completed Poof's hair and dress on the third. The painting is smallish at 11x14 inches, so I knew it would go quickly. I found a terrific half-price frame that I bought with an additional 40% discount--always great when something like that happens. Here's a photo of the framed painting (Poof quickly Instagrammed it).

Poof had no idea I was painting her, so when I presented her with the painting yesterday, she was surprised and quickly became teary-eyed. As usual, no one tops my sister when it comes to reacting to my paintings, or any gift, really. You want to have this kid at your Christmas party, bottom line. Here's a short video of part of her reaction--the first 15 seconds or so were cut off when Jeff realized he was shooting it vertically.

 

Happy birthday, Poof! <3

PS I turned this painting into some products on my CafePress store, including cups, bags, cards, and a 2013 one-page calendar print. You can find it along with my multi-page calendars, including the one with Mabel (above) here. Make sure you indicate that you want a 2013 calendar, not 2012. This new painting will be on my 2014 calendar.

And you can also buy art prints on paper or canvas (above) by going here. Thanks as always for your support this year!

Thanksgiving

Last weekend Jeff and I hosted our family's Thanksgiving for the second year in a row. My parents, my brother Ryan, my sister Emily/Poof and her husband Tyler, Jeff's parents, and his daughter Melissa were all there, and everyone on my side of the family stayed overnight.

We had a great time with lots of laughs, and Poof put together a video for her second YouTube channel, Beauty Vlogcast. Since I was too busy cooking to take lots of photos, some of what you'll see here are screen-grabs from that video. Jeff also took some photos of the food moments before we destroyed it. So thank you, Jeff and Poof!

Mom, Dad, Poof, Tyler, and Ryan arrived in the morning, and I made sure they had plenty to snack on. We planned to eat the big meal at around 5:00, so the above spread, along with a massive pot of chili, kept everyone happy until then.

I've already blogged about everything you see above. It's great to have some recipes that I know people will like, and they included pumpkin cookies, seasonally spiced nuts, li'l smokies, a roasted red pepper cheesecake, the heavyset cheeseball, various crackers, cheese, and vegetables, and tiny peach and raspberry star-topped pies (I changed that recipe, using the same crust but filling the pies with peach preserves and raspberry jam). Mom kindly made one of her spectacular apple pies.

I loved seeing my family, and we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon laughing, snacking, and telling stories.

Ryan, Tyler, Poof, and Dad entertained our cats in the living room. Tyler's holding one of the festive mimosas that he and Poof made for everyone.

Mom helped Jeff and me while we puttered around the kitchen. Jeff wanted try something different with the turkey this year, and he did a great job preparing Tom Colicchio's butter-and-herb recipe here. He started working on it at around noon, taking it out of the oven to baste it every half-hour or so.

A couple of hours before the turkey was supposed to be finished, Jeff took its temperature just for the heck of it, and to our great alarm we discovered that our turkey was done! Upon further examination of the recipe, we learned that Tom had called for a 14 to 16 pound turkey, and ours was only 12 pounds. So that made a big difference, and suddenly I was scrambling to get the sides together for our meal, which had just been moved up two hours.

I made Parmesan smashed potatoes, which usually take about 45 minutes from start to finish, and put the stuffing and sweet potatoes into the oven. Luckily I had prepared those ahead of time, along with cranberry sauce, and the rolls were a heat-and-eat situation. Meanwhile, Jeff carved the turkey breast and Mom got as much meat as she could from the rest of the bird. Jeff's folks arrived with their extra table, and soon all we were waiting for was Melissa and her ratatouille. And Melissa was running pretty late, so we stuffed almost the entire feast into our oven's warming drawer and hoped for the best. When she arrived, I hope I didn't appear too exasperated.

Me: [I can't remember if I even said hi to her, sorry Mel!] What temperature?

Mel: I don't know.

Me: How long?

Mel: Until it's done?

I popped it in the already-hot oven, set it for 20 minutes, and figured that would work (it did). The warming drawer did its job too, and I relaxed and got the buffet organized.

That turkey was so good, by the way! We were lucky to have caught it at just the right time.

That's Melissa's ratatouille in the foreground. It was nice and light, and it contrasted nicely with the carb- and butter-tastic dishes that made up the rest of the meal.

Everyone was stuffed to the gills, as we say in Illinois, but certain people who were in New York City last month demanded dessert immediately after the meal, so Jeff and I broke out a couple of our lethal candy bar pies (pictured above with our creepy sumo gnome) along with Mom's apple pie. Readers of this blog may recall our trip to the Momofuku Milk Bar in New York and the little dessert we began referring to as the meth pie. Melissa bought the Milk Bar's cookbook for me a few weeks ago--and it is just the greatest thing--so Jeff and I could make the meth pie for Thanksgiving.

Which we did! This pie was INSANE. Even the pie's creator Christina Tosi describes her pie version of a Take 5 candy bar as "a little bit of a bitch to make," and indeed it was. It's four recipes in one, and one of those recipes contains a sub-recipe. The instructions go on for eight pages. It took two people two days to make these pies, and the recipes involved four dangerous experiences with boiling sugar water. You guys, we made nougat. Nougat is apparently something people can make!

Just to break it down for you: it's a chocolate cookie crust topped with a thick layer of not-runny-but-not-solid caramel that is a little bit of a bitch to make, peanut butter nougat made with crushed peanut brittle that you of course have to create yourself, and a toasted pretzel trapped between a mixture of white and dark chocolate (melted together to form a super-chocolate).

I'm not going to copy eight pages of recipe for you. As far as I can tell, only a few people on the Internet have attempted to make this pie. If you want to give it a try, you're just going to have to buy the book, and I wish you good luck in your baking endeavors.

And make no mistake: we're totally making this pie again sometime. I'm thinking this would be a fine activity for when we're snowed in and bored out of our minds. The next time a blizzard hits, I'll be the one in the store stocking up on butter, chocolate, and peanuts while everyone else is buying flashlights and snow shovels and salt and stuff.

BACK TO THANKSGIVING.

The next morning I had apple dumplings for everyone. My family had made it through the night with our cats afoot. Poof had a migraine headache before she went to bed, and she said she had trouble sleeping, but luckily she felt better by morning.

Poof loves these apple dumplings, and I received the best reaction of my cooking life when she tried them for the first time last year, so I had to make them again. You can find the recipe here. They're a teeny tiny bit of a bitch to make, but they're worth the hassle because things like this happen:

SHE IS SO CUTE. And the following is my favorite frame from Poof's video:

I love when Poof gets that glimmer of ramping-up-craziness in her eyes. You want Poof at every meal you serve, trust me.

And here is Poof's video of Thanksgiving! Look at my family moving around doing things and talking to you!

 

I seriously do not know why I do that thing with my mouth when I talk or how I can ever stop. It disturbs me as much as it disturbs you, it's all I can see, and I apologize for any emotional distress it may have caused you and your family.

Thanks to you, my dear readers, for getting all the way down here to the bottom of this post, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, too.

Papier-mâché Floor

We have a new dining room floor, and it's made out of papier-mâché!

(Or, if you prefer words without fun marks and unamerican spellings: paper mache. Either way, that term means "chewed paper." Delicious.)

Ingredients: paper, Elmer's glue, water, polyurethane, two participants game enough to spend a couple of weeks on their hands and knees. Total cost of this floor: around $150.

What was wrong with our dining room floor? It was covered with a greige carpet that had seen one too many special-needs cats named Bun, and believe us, it had to go. We've hated it so much that we avoided photographing it at all costs, and we've spent over a year trying to figure out what to do with it. One option: tiles, but that would have been very expensive and time-consuming on such a big area.

We were stumped until Jeff came across this blog written by a woman who had given her craft room floor a makeover using glue, dye, water, and paper bags. Please click that link and take a look at her amazing floor--it looks like leather! We wanted to do something similar with our 300 square foot dining room.

So we did a test run on a scrap board following her instructions. Instead of paper bags, we used a roll of something called builder's paper, which has a similar texture and color. I spotted it at Walmart when we were looking for brown liquid Rit dye (which they had) and glue (which they had in small bottles but not gallons). You can see the paper here.

Jeff tore a few irregular pieces, wadded them up, and dipped them in a 50-50 mixture of glue and water and a small amount of brown dye.

The mixture looked purple when the dye was added--the blog assured us that it would dry brown.

Here's a close-up of the veining action.

Since the dye was only a couple of dollars per bottle, we experimented with black, too.

We stripped the floor of its carpet, and Jeff patched the cracks between the floor boards with Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty. Looking back, he wishes that he would have put down luan for a smoother result, but I still think our end product looks fantastic and very natural.

After thinking it over for a few days, Jeff and I decided to go with the brown dye option, and we spent over an hour tearing the builder's paper into irregular shapes, each about a foot across. We sorted them out and wadded them up: some had straight edges, which we would use for the perimeter of the floor, and others were 100 percent irregular, which we'd use for the middle.

The cats were, of course, intrigued by the piles of paper, and Quixote dove into them with gusto.

We began working the next morning. I handled the perimeter, and Jeff took on the heavy traffic area near the kitchen. It was certainly looking purple and a lot darker/sloppier than we thought, but we soldiered on into the early afternoon. Realizing that we needed more paper, latex gloves, and perhaps a couple more gallons of glue (which we found at Lowe's), we did a quick supply run. Once home, we worked for a few more hours before calling it a day.

(Photo explanation: do you watch Gold Rush on the Discovery Channel? We're crazy about the show, and I like to call it "But There's A Problem" because those poor guys are always hitting snags. Apparently mining for gold is not as easy as you might think!

Jeff has this to say: Yes, gold mining is hard, but, ack, these guys need someone with project management experience. If once again I have to watch Todd--shown above--force them to make a choice between option A and option B when both options could be done in parallel, I'm gonna 'splode!)

Back to our floor. BUT THERE WAS A PROBLEM. The border between the morning stuff and the afternoon stuff was majorly noticeable thanks to overlapping dye. The blog we had read dealt with a tiny floor that could be covered within a few hours. We needed at least a few days. I could just barely live with the line of demarcation, but Jeff didn't like it, and we went to bed feeling kind of bad. How to solve this?

Knowing that the dye was the problem, we tried a test patch using just paper, glue, and water. And we concluded--joyfully--that it looked a lot better than the dyed areas and worked beautifully with our walls. It was also easier to do and wouldn't stain our hands and clothing! We started over.

This is Jeff's traffic area. As he covered the original purple-brown layer, he loved the way it was shaping up. Those veins and little capillaries made the paper resemble stone. Here's Jeff demonstrating the process.

 

As you can see, a certain amount of wringing-out happens after the paper is dipped in the water-glue. Each new piece overlaps the previous ones by at least a half-inch. Then, using the side of his hand, Jeff attempts to smooth out the paper as much as possible, eliminating any air pockets. Then he takes a paper towel and gently blots the excess glue.

A certain amount of creativity and problem-solving is also involved. What kind of shape will work best in the space? Jeff and I even attempted to create follow-throughs with the paper, where one edge would blend into another, or corners would meet in a pleasing way, but this isn't necessary. No matter what you do, this will look inexplicably random and natural, and you will feel like you deserve an honorary M.F.A. degree in papier-mâché.

We allowed the floor to dry for a few days--probably longer than was necessary, but we didn't want to take any chances. Our cats were confused: why was half of the house inaccessible? Why was the giant screen blocking the dining room entrance? UNFAIR.

Finally, to protect and seal the floor, we applied six coats of water-based polyurethane using paint brushes, one coat per day. This became increasingly easy and fast with each new layer of poly, and by the time the final one was dry, we felt like we could roller-skate on it. Then we moved all of our furniture back once we were certain that it was completely dry (that dining room table is no joke). Once again, here's the finished papier-mâché floor!

Exciting News!

You can now buy my paintings on all kinds of things!

See, here's the problem: my original paintings are expensive. They've got to be--some of them take over a month to create. I can't afford them, either! But this year I've had reasonably good luck selling them on Imagekind as prints in a variety of formats and sizes. However, even those can be a little pricey when you factor in a mat and a frame, and maybe you want something more functional...? That's the vibe I'm getting from you, anyway.

So last week I put together a store on CafePress. They reproduce my watercolors on fun and useful items hand-picked by me from their massive selection of over 250 products. There's something for everyone, with a variety items for sale for under $20, including gorgeous mirror compacts that are already my best sellers.

And that bag is more expensive, but it makes me want to die it's so cute.

T-shirts are available for people of all ages, shapes, and sizes, and they come in a range of colors. Making this happen took a whole day. It was hard, you guys!

I've also got a slew of greeting cards, note cards, and blank journals, including Abandoned Knowledge, above.

And come on: you need at least one calendar. We all do. I agonize over that decision every year. I'm so happy to finally present my first-ever calendars featuring my own paintings: normal-sized, oversized, vertical, and single image.

Get in on this and help support your friendly neighborhood artist/blogger/butter-consumption-enabler! And I know, CafePress is kind of a behemoth that's probably only marginally less evil than Walmart, and I'm certainly not going to make a fortune here, but maybe it will help me buy Bun's medicine every month...?

She's such a good girl!

Click here to look at my little shop. The URL is

http://www.cafepress.com/kellyeddingtonwatercolors.

Thanks in advance--I can't tell you how much your support means to this little painting operation I've got going.

And for the half-dozen of you who read my blog because I'm the nutjob who paints U2 all the time for @U2.com, I have fun news for you, uh, too.

For the first time ever, 37 of my best U2 paintings are available as prints on Imagekind! Click this thing!

I sifted through my heaving U2 digital folders today and put together a selection of images that includes personal favorites such as the always-game Pop Edge, Adam and Bono painted on blue construction paper, and a citrus-y Screaming Green Bono. Because most of my originals were only 5-10 inches tall, lot of these prints are small, but you'll see a handful that can be majorly enlarged.

You'll also find pretentious concept art inspired by their videos, U2 reimagined as punk rockers on the planet Venus, and my controversial portrait of Adam Clayton made from pasta and birdseed. You can also buy prints of the following, which I think is probably my favorite U2 painting ever.

You'll see all of those along with more straightforward and normal-seeming pictures of this promising little rock 'n' roll outfit from across the sea here. URL is:

http://KellyEddington.imagekind.com/U2.

Thanks so much, and please share this post with anyone you think might be interested!

New York City Part 4

Sorry for the long wait between posts! Among other things, Jeff and I were busy with a flooring project during the past couple of weeks, and it ate up my afternoons. But it's finished, it looks amazing, and it is one of something like five blogs I need to write.

So! Back to New York City with Jeff, Mel, and me. As you can tell from the photo above, we spent our last vacation day at the Museum of Modern Art, where Mel caught me interacting with a man painted on a mirror. My expression probably explains why I had to wait until age 39 to get married.

But first we needed to try the best bagels in New York at a place called Ess-A-Bagel. So much time has passed since we ate these, but boy did my brain imprint a taste-memory that will make every bagel I eat in the future seem inferior. Because they will be inferior. These were perfection: not rubbery at all, but yielding and warm with a perfectly crisp exterior. Once again we ate them while standing on the sidewalk like a buncha hobos.

I also discovered that several years of walking on Dr. Scholl's gel insoles will cause them to disintegrate, so I bought some more and, and to be even more of a hobo, I did this whole boot-takeoff-insole-switcheroo bit while squatting in the entrance of a drugstore.

It was an unseasonably warm and humid morning, and as we walked toward MoMA, I took off my jacket. The dress I wore came in a fuzzy mystery fabric that seemed to promote active sweating. My ponytail became its usual awful black frizz pom-pom. So I was miserable but attempted to take on the devil-may-care attitude of the female sculptures we saw frolicking in the middle of a busy intersection.

Once we arrived at MoMA, we were disappointed to discover a giant line of people waiting to enter. We joined their ranks and prepared ourselves for boredom. Museum workers patrolled the line and said that some of the blockbuster paintings were not on display, and also people who downloaded the MoMA app and used it to pay online would get to skip the line and go inside. Jeff didn't have to be told twice--he got to work downloading and paying, and whoooooosh, we swooped inside like a trio of VIPs.

That museum worker was right about some of the museum's pieces being unavailable. It seemed like 75% of the things I wanted to see (1900-1950) were gone, but their gallery tags were still in place as if to mock me. This was a shame because those paintings are in my art teacher wheelhouse, and I was all set to bombard young Mel with interesting painting tidbits all morning long. Unfortunately we were treated to a mere handful of masterpieces (such as the fantastic Rousseau and Starry Night, above) followed by a dollop of Pop, a whole lot of Minimalism, and some Abstract Expressionism. I bemoaned this, but Mel had a grand time anyway.

Andy Warhol's Gold Marilyn, a woman by Willem de Kooning, and my tribute to my sister Poof. :)

I told Mel about Rodin's portrait of Balzac--she said it was one of her favorite things in the museum. And I love the photo she took of a Jackson Pollock painting viewed from the side.

We had lunch at Tina's Cuban Cuisine, which was relatively nearby, and Jeff took this photo of the straightest leg in the city.

The place was packed, and we sat in a kind of so-what dining room with what seemed like fluorescent lighting--it made me feel like I was back in a school cafeteria (PTSD!). We shared everything, including a Cuban sandwich and some ham croquettes. Jeff and I were hoping that these would match the ones we had in Spain, and while they were crispy-creamy-tasty...yeah, sorry.

These little guys were fun: empanadas with chicken filling, a Twinkie-looking item that I can't remember, and a red ball of mashed potatoes surrounding some kind of ground beef situation. I'm pretty sure I had a mango (?) shake. Sorry so vague--it's been over a month!

After lunch we headed to the Hirschl and Adler gallery on 5th Avenue. Sara, a friend of mine from grad school, told me that her husband Peter had a small show there, and I was curious to study his exquisite oil paintings in person--I'd only seen them online. The above photo doesn't do them justice--here's an example of his work.

Gorgeous and Hopperesque! Peter is my age, and I couldn't help feeling like I was so far behind him in terms of art production. He was fortunate to have been born into an artistic family and has painted professionally for his entire adult life, whereas I've only been at it for two and a half years. But this is nothing new: I feel insecure pretty much every time I walk into any gallery at all. I'm such a newbie!

And then in an adjoining room: enormous watercolors by Alexander Creswell. This artist counts among his patrons THE QUEEN OF FREAKING ENGLAND. He is so good, you guys! Included in his show was a series of giant (4 feet across, maybe?) paintings of Venice at night with fireworks, and they were color-drenched and masterful, with a sort of effortlessness that only supremely confident painters can pull off.

I was in awe, intimidated, and in love with these, and I wanted to go home and paint paint paint. I walked back into Pete's room, and yes, please just let me go home and paint. I start to feel not right if I go too long without painting. It's kind of like my need for chocolate. Speaking of...

We bought some fancy-ass desserts and hot chocolate at the Francois Payard Bakery (ground floor of The Plaza hotel).

We were feeling glamorous (at least I was) as we sat at a tall table and savored macarons and other gorgeous creations. A woman of a certain age stopped by as Jeff and I were digging into that shiny chocolate dome, and she exclaimed, "What is THAT?" We told her where she could find one. It was almost as fabulous as it looks--there was something hazelnutty going on inside, if I remember correctly.

And then Jeff's phone buzzed. A text from Southwest Airlines told us that our flight home had been canceled. Whut.

Jeff was a hero as per usual and got on the phone with the airline, and after about a half hour, we were booked on a new, slightly earlier flight. GO JEFF. He said that Southwest did everything right and were actually surprisingly soothing about the whole thing.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around, working our way back to the hotel. Along the way Mel took some photos of Bergdorf Goodman's windows--they were a purple tribute to fashion over the past 111 years.

Above and beyond, Bergdorf Goodman!

Our last meal in New York was at a Cambodian sandwich shop called Num Pang. It was close to our hotel and, like all of the restaurants we visited on our trip, vetted by Jeff weeks in advance. Mel and I shared a meatball sandwich while Jeff abstained, claiming he was still full from lunch. Num Pang was decorated with fun graffiti, and we stood at a little bar and inhaled the sandwich and a couple of refreshing tea concoctions.

Soon enough we were on our way back to Laguardia, where the Southwest chaos meant that we had nowhere to sit once we reached our gate. Actually I found one seat, which Jeff and Mel insisted I take while they sat on the floor, during which time Mel took the above self-portrait. As you can see, she was still full of energy and happiness.

I'll spare you the description of the flight home, our hotel shuttle that decided to not pick us up because our flight was cancelled but then after an angry call from Jeff and an hour of waiting, they came to get us after all, and then the two-hour drive home through the absolute middle of nowhere and the bag of Tato Skins I ate to stay awake and didn't exactly share.

If you wanted Tato Skins so much maybe you should have bought some for yourself, Jeffray.

We dropped Mel off and were reunited with our confused cats at around 1:30 a.m. Everyone was fed, watered, and adored. Cat boxes were cleaned out, and my wonderful husband and I fell into deep, dark comas for the rest of the night.

In conclusion, New York is awesome. You should go.

Bunderwoman!

For months I've been thinking about dressing Bun up as Bunderwoman for Halloween, and today it all came together. It was as simple as finding a costume for Bun (a bib for newborns that you can buy here). It fastened in the back with velcro.

Today we took it to the next level, though: we thought it would be great if Bun could somehow be flying her invisible jet. I drew a stubby, more Bunlike version of this on a couple of pieces of large craft paper.

Jeff held Bun aloft as I snapped as many photos as I could. She was grumpy about the bib, so the photo session lasted no longer than 30 seconds, during which time I managed to take these pictures.

Not lovin' it.

How come the other kitties don't have to be Bunderwoman?

Plotting vengeance, ala Mike. FULL MEASURES;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

 

EXTRA BEST HAPPY HALLOWEENIES EVERYBODIES;;;;;;;;;;