Tag: Painting

Easter!

I interrupt the backpack journal for a message: HAPPY EASTER!!

As known (here and here), I celebrate Easter by having my parents hide painted and chocolate eggs in the yard. Yesterday I painted the eggs, this year, 6 eggs were chosen  (since we were only with three). Only one egg split, so that had to have some alternative colouring. I had fun, even though it took a while for my water based paints to dry between coats. Hereby, I present to you: Easter Eggs 2014!

To start, welcome Ladybug/Turtle into your heart. She is half ladybug (red with black spots and a black head) and half turtle (green with brown stripes). She’s a bit ambivalent about living quarters. Sometimes she just wants to fly while at other times that is a bit too fast. Most of the time she manages to find a spot that is *just right*

Ladybird Turtle

Next up: Deep in the Sea! Blue with fish (some have run a bit, but I still love her). Deep in the Sea prefers the more aquatic of environments. Its occupants like to show off and don’t mind some water pressure one little bit.

Fish 2 Fish 1

Followed by: Garden (flowers, grass, butterfly and the sun) and its good friend: Stripes! Stripes often joins garden when they lay around in the grass absorbing the sun’s rays and generally enjoying life.

Garden 3 Garden 2 Garden 1  Stripes

The split one: The Man! He was created with a permanent smile in his face, a pretty bow tie, blue hair and dotty clothes! He’ll never be unhappy but might be a little mischievous.

The man The man

Last but not least: Dotty Beachball! Quartered up into different colours with dots in the previous colour. She likes to sunbathe and smell some sea every now and again.

Spotty beachball Spotty beachball

Here they are all together. They would like to wish you a happy Easter too!

All

 

Easter!

So it’s easter again, which means, of course, easter eggs! This involves painting (for the tradition, see here)!

Well, this year it’s all going to go a little differently from the last gazillion years. For one, my parents are still on holiday and I have to pick them up around 10:30, so it’s not going to be early Sunday morning. For two (is that a legal expression?), I had to babysit the whole of Saturday, from 12 to 22, so it left me very little time for painting. For three (I’m going to say it is), I found a ‘make your easter egg shiny and stuff’ paint set in the supermarket and of course wanted to use.

The plan was as follows, or actually, there was an a plan and a b plan. The a plan was wait until you get home again and paint some eggs. The b plan was hope that the babysit child wants to paint some eggs too, and do it there. Plan b was successful! When we went to my house to walk my dog, we also brought back some eggs and egg painting things. The process was weird. Boil eggs, drip strange shiny sticky paint on a glove and rub the (hot) egg in it. Then apply silver shiny stuff and hope it sticks, which it often doesn’t. However, we had fun throughout and that’s what counts. Since we are only with three tomorrow, I only boiled and ‘painted’ six eggs. I hope it will be enough. Here they are.

Eggs Eggs

Eggs Cat

You may also be surprised by the last picture. Meet Pluis, Pluis’ face doesn’t look like that, but he moved before my shutter had closed again. Pluis has been living in my house for a couple of months now, but a couple of nights ago it was the first time I determined that all those sewingbloggers-with-cats are right. Cats seem to prefer work area for laying on. This case it was an enormous pattern piece for a dress I’m working on. He also decided to try to lay on my crumply plastic bag with pattern pieces and pattern magazines in it. Stinking cat, but cute, oh so cute, I tend to forgive him almost anything. I’m a bad cat parent. Maybe you’ll see more of Pluis in the future. Who knows, I’ve got enough creativity left in me, I hope!

Painting!

Okay, ‘painting’ might be a somewhat.. enthousiastic description of this last finished project, I really didn’t do any painting.  This is the story. A couple of months ago, my parents celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary by taking us (the kids and associated lovers) to Paint Creations. A company based in Woerden, the Netherlands, that let’s you “Gooi – Spetter – Spuit – Druppel – Mik – Giet” (“Throw – Splash – Spray – Drip – Aim – Pour”) paint onto a canvas (or a table or sheep statue). Basically you choose 3-6 colours to dump on the canvas. When it’s completely covered, you use a brush to smooth out the background. Then you start splashing, spraying, throwing and pouring paint on/at your canvas to create a very interesting painting. It has to dry for weeks, literally.

So, we recently got our paintings back. Then it was time to wait for my dad to hang them up. My parents paintings and the great communal one are hanging in the living room. Mine is in my room. I’m really enjoying it actually, it’s nice and colourful.

We started a ‘practice’ paper version:

 
1. splatter, 2. cover the background and smooth it out, splatter some more, 3. Finished practice version!

 
1. Splatter and smooth the background, splatter some more, 2. Splatter even more and make some lines, 3. Finished!

And here it is in its natural habitat, my bedroom:

If you look carefully, you might notice that the black line in the right bottom corner, when drawn further, connects with the black line on the wallpaper. This was intentional, I liked the idea that they went together. It might not be very obvious, but it’s my little quirk.
I’m off to enjoy my fancy painting in my wonderful room.

No such thing as Easter without eggs

Therefore, I insist on having an egg search in our front garden every year. I make my mother get up ‘early’ on Easter Sunday and hide some painted boiled eggs and small chocolate eggs in the front garden. However, in order to do this, one first needs… painted eggs! So that’s what we did just now, me and my mom painted some eggs.

I assume many will find this a childish habit, as I am almost 22 and still want to paint and search for eggs, but it’s tradition, and I really enjoy it. By the way, so do our neighbours from across the street. They generally come and watch us search and my mother hide the eggs (in opposite order of course).

Anyways here’s this year’s batch:

Eggies My eggies

I shall describe what you see. On the first picture are all our eggs, we planned to do 10, but one broke during boiling. The ones on the right are my mum’s (the blue, green, red, orange and another blue squiggly ones). I generally paint with a plan, a bad plan usually but a plan. So the top one is a ladybug-egg, its black face is a little more visible in the right picture. The one beneath that is the night sky with the moon. It’s blue I know, but black also didn’t really work, and I wanted blue. The one next to that is called “Nature”, it has a red flower on the one side, grass on the bottom, a tree on the other side (see the right picture, where I turned it, just for your viewing pleasure) and the sun at the top. The bottom one was less planned, it’s basically an egg with semi-geometrical shapes on it, a star, an 8ish thing (I had no more ideas), a circle, a triangle and a bow tie. Well at least we had fun painting right.

My brother said he didn’t want to go search for eggs unless my mum was wearing a bunny suit, so I plan on making her a set of ears in a minute, that would be fine too, he said. Also to give the neighbours even more fun on their Easter Sunday morning.

Wish me luck, I hope to find all this year.. last year we lost 2 chocolate ones.