Pattern Dakota in Red & Yellow

I recently created another set of three 5x7" patterned watercolor paintings to put together in a three-opening multi-frame - or rather, I painted two more watercolors to go with a third that I'd already painted two years ago.

The first new painting has a red and yellow color scheme, and uses Pattern Dakota, a design I created in Adobe Illustrator (like all of my pattern designs) and then traced onto watercolor paper. (The second new painting has a green and yellow color scheme - and is the subject of a future post.)

Here is Pattern Dakota, finished but still taped to my gatorboard while I'm waiting for it to dry. In the first picture, you can also see the pencil outline of the second watercolor I planned to work on next.

It's hard to show step-by-step photos of this type of painting, where the positive space of the pattern (rather than the negative space I usually do) is what is being painted. There aren't clear borders where I can stop, pick up my brush, and take a quick photo, because it's all connected. I have to work fast and keep the water flowing into the next part of the pattern, or potentially see water marks on the finished product where wet met dry during the drying process. So I wasn't able to take any "in progress" photos this time - but my next painting will have a couple. Check back soon for my next post!

Holiday Gift Ideas

The Holiday Art Market at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, Michigan is in full swing! They have several of my original artworks for sale, as well as stacks and stacks of my notecards - available as individual cards or as packs of 4, 6, or 10.

Here are some pictures I took as I prepared the notecards to take over there in late October (a process which includes updating my inventory sheets, packaging the sets in plastic boxes and the individual cards in plastic sleeves, and adding price tags/SKUs to the packaging).

Don't live in the metro-Detroit area? All of these notecards are also available for sale at my Etsy shop!! If you want something but can't find it on Etsy (i.e. a 10-pack of cards where Etsy only has a 6-pack listed) just let me know. You can make a comment to this blog, or send me an email at afrownfe[at]gmail.com.

The flower sets and Michigan-themed sets are especially popular to give as small gift items. My new "White Poinsettia" holiday cards are also available for the first time this year. The blank insides are just waiting for your personalized holiday messages!

The PCCA Art Market and my Etsy shop also both have several original pieces of artwork for sale, including large scale colored pencil drawings and watercolors, framed watercolor sets, and acrylic paintings.

And don't forget one of my most popular Etsy listings - custom watercolor bouquet paintings! Just supply me with a photograph of a flower bouquet and I'll turn it into an 8x10" watercolor painting. (If you want to get these in time for the holidays, place your orders ASAP - they can take up to 1-2 weeks to complete, plus up to a week of shipping time. A limited number of rush 5-day orders are also available.)

Happy shopping!

"Still Life Spices" Colored Pencil Drawing

This blog is always about a month (or more) behind "real time." It takes time for me to finish a piece of artwork, photograph it, upload those photos to my computer, add watermarks, upload them to this blog, and write about them. I also tend to schedule posts a couple to a few weeks in advance, so I always know that there's something going up on the blog soon. All of this is to say - though this post is going live in mid-November, I wrote and edited this content in late October, and created the drawing itself even earlier.

September and October were slow art months for me this year. I had grand plans to create several 5"x7" sized drawings with holiday themes, which I would then scan, resize, and print on notecards in time to give to my local community art center (Paint Creek in Rochester, MI) for their 2018 holiday market. Items for the holiday market are due by late October; my art schedule then had these drawings planned for completion in September. But then I got pregnant. And had a miscarriage. And I'll be honest - for several weeks in August, September, and October, I was not in the mood to work on anything creative, let alone festive holiday-themed drawings that were looking forward to the future.

Some people find art therapeutic, but I'm not usually one of those people. (Instead, I often use writing as my therapy-of-choice.) To me, creating art is more a point of pride, a way to produce nice things for other people, and a way to try to make some extra money. I would love to allow myself to experiment more and also create art just for myself, or just for fun - but my time is limited and more often than not I focus on art that I can share, market, and sell. The standards are high, then - it can't just be a hot mess, it has to be well-executed. And when I am depressed, when I'm grieving, when I'm lacking self-confidence, it's really hard to believe I should or can create good artwork. I had the time, but I procrastinated. I had no motivation.

I finally produced one small, simple colored pencil drawing - one of the several designs I had originally planned. I started it sometime in September and finished it in early October. I didn't particularly like the way it turned out (no surprise, really, as my heart wasn't in making it), and I didn't move forward with my plans to make any others. Maybe next year will finally be the year I make a "variety pack" set of holiday notecards; in any case, it is not going to be 2018.

The 5"x7" drawing features two glass mugs of apple cider, complete with cinnamon sticks and apple slices, surrounded by a few red berries, apple slices, and a twine-wrapped bundle of more cinnamon sticks in a make-believe still life arrangement. The atmosphere is undefined, with no clear tabletop or any perspective lines and a few bokeh-style circles in the upper right reminiscent of holiday lights or glitter. I used Prismacolor pencils on toned tan Strathmore paper.

I did at least make holiday cards out of my "White Poinsettia" drawing from a couple years ago - so if you're looking for holiday cards, don't worry, I still got you covered. :) They're available now in packs of ten at the aforementioned PCCA holiday market in downtown Rochester, MI, and will also be featured in my next blog post.

Yellow Nursery Stripes

One of the things I was most looking forward to as I planned for expanding our family was painting yellow "ombre" stripes on the walls of the room that would become the nursery. I wanted to do five or six stripes (we decided on five), with the lightest yellow for the top stripe and a medium-dark yellow for the bottom stripe, and gradual shades of yellow slowly getting darker in between.

The room was originally being used as an extra storage room, so earlier in the summer my husband and I went through and moved everything out, throwing old useless items out (or recycling them when possible) and finding new places in the house to keep other items. We also took down the closet doors because I wanted to have an open closet for the nursery, and got rid of the old floorboards and closet door trim, which were falling apart and/or had paint drips all over them. I wasn't pregnant yet when we started our organization/remodeling project, but we were planning to start trying and were hoping I would be soon.

I was pregnant before the room was ready to paint. I'd been looking forward to painting it - but I was also concerned, now that I was in the first trimester of pregnancy, about inhaling paint fumes. I read probably a dozen articles online, most of which said the types of painting used for interior walls today is harmless and fine to use during pregnancy. But there were a few that cautioned against painting too much during the first trimester, when all of the baby's important organs were forming, and being overly cautious I decided to wait until I was past my twelfth week. We put our painting project on hold.

Then I had a miscarriage (which I discussed at length in this earlier post). I tried to "do everything right" and avoided inhaling paint fumes - but I still miscarried anyway. I didn't think much about that nursery for a couple weeks as I went through the initial emotions and stress and went forward with getting a D&C procedure. But once I was feeling physically recovered, I realized I still really wanted to paint that future nursery. It was late September. I wanted to paint it before the weather got too cold, so I could paint with the window open. I wanted to paint it before I got pregnant again, so I didn't have to worry again about inhaling the fumes during the first trimester. Most importantly though, I wanted to paint it as part of my healing process.

Maybe it seems weird to plan and paint a nursery when I wasn't pregnant anymore, but to me it felt meaningful. (And I only cried a little while I was doing it...) It was a conscious decision to look toward the future, to embrace my dreams of parenthood, and try to believe that I would get pregnant again and we would have children someday. I don't know when we'll have a baby sleeping in that room - but whenever it happens, the walls are already painted and ready.

My husband helped with the measurements. It turned out our floor wasn't totally level, so we made all the measurements from the same corner of the room, and then used a long level to draw straight lines out from there around the perimeter. I selected five colors of yellow - two from one swatch and three from another swatch. The names were (from lightest/top stripe to darkest/bottom stripe): Lemon White, Meringue, Storm Lightning, Solar Energy, and Radiant Sun. We bought a quart of each color.

Once we had our stripes measured and marked in pencil, we used painter's tape to get straight lines. I planned to paint the top, middle, and bottom stripes first.

We had already painted the ceiling white and had a ceiling fan/light installed several weeks earlier. We put a line of tape on the edge of the ceiling, and then on the bottom of the topmost pencil line. For the middle stripe, the painters tape went above the higher stripe outline and below the lower stripe outline. For the bottom stripe, the tape went above the stripe outline. We also covered the outlets, light switch, and the edges of the door and window frames with tape. Finally, I threw diagonal strips of tape up on the second and fourth stripes - the stripes I was NOT painting during this first step, so that I wouldn't accidentally start painting those and waste paint on the wrong stripe.

I painted the top stripe first, followed by the middle stripe (which was closest in color to the yellow the walls were already painted), and then the bottom stripe. That was painting day #1.

Then next morning, I pulled off all the tape (except the ones covering the outlets, light switch, and window and door frames) and put up new tape. (My dog Ginny was upset to see that I was still working on this project instead of paying attention to her.)

This time the painters tape marked the top and bottom edges of the second and fourth stripes. I again put diagonal pieces on the stripes I was NOT going to paint that day (the three stripes I had already completed) so that I wouldn't accidentally start painting one of those instead. Because I was now painting against stripes I'd already finished, I also put two layers of painters tape up, so I would be less likely to accidentally spill paint over the tape and onto the finished stripes.

I painted the second stripe from the top, and then the fourth stripe from the top. That was painting day #2.

On painting day #3, I pulled all of the tape off and went around by hand making touch-ups in the few spots where a little bit of paint leaked through/under the tape and onto another stripe. (Ginny was once again upset to see that I was STILL painting instead of paying attention to her.)

When all the paint was dry, my husband installed a new light switch and light switch cover, and new outlets and baby-proof sliding outlet covers. (The old ones were all cream-colored, and I wanted white.) We also had new white baseboards and white trim around the closet doorway installed by a handyman.

Here's the finished product!

Obviously there's still a lot to do before it'll be a nursery (not least of which is - get pregnant again). Right now there's only an area rug and two wooden bookcases in there. But I love, love, LOVE how the yellow ombre stripes turned out. They're just what I wanted for our future nursery.