I'm alive! After months of not writing anything I am back and can finally share some of what I've been working on. It didn't help that I also had to wait to give everyone their Christmas gifts. The pieces I'm featuring in this post have been given to the people I made them. These are one off pieces and the originals will not be available for purchase.
The Raccoon Babies - To My Grandma
The first painting I did for a Christmas gift for my grandmother. I decided to do something different for her after she had a very rough end to last year due to some health issues and a broken hip (I will not being going into that here but she is mostly okay and is healing). It has been hard on my entire family and it's not entirely my story so out of respect for everyone involved.
One thing I do have to say is, I'm so grateful to have my fiance in my life during this time. He has been able to help me process a lot of what has been going on. This painting was actually something he suggested that I do for my grandmother. My grandmother has always been one of my biggest supporters in everything but especially my art.
One thing has always been true when it comes to my grandmother, she loves raccoons. She absolutely adores them.
Due to that, I started looking out for inspiration to fit. I knew I wanted to do a painting for her that could decorate her room and cheer her up. I found this wonderful natural wood panel at the craft store and new I had to do something with it. For a few days I debated between raccoons and cardinals. Raccoons clearly won and I'm so happy they did because I just adore how they came out. They are just so cute! It took me a little while to get it to my grandmother thanks to me getting sick shortly before Christmas, but she absolutely loved it.
Naughty Ghost Play Time - To My Best Friend... you know who you are.
This, this piece....what can I say about it. This masterpiece was a very last minute gift to one of my closest friends. I painted it while she was visiting last week. I had been intending to make her a ghost painting for while. My day job (well, it's mostly overnight shifts but you get it) schedule is chaotic and makes it hard to work on personal projects.
It definitely did help that when I had gotten sick back in December, it hung on for well over a month. In January, I actually went and got help for it. Some antibiotics, an inhaler and another couple of weeks finally got it out of my system. I spent a lot of time either sleeping or reading during that time because I didn't have much energy to do anything else. Even though I don't know exactly what I had, we do know it wasn't covid and I will be forever thankful for that.
Thankfully when my friend came to visit she was very understanding, but it also meant that this chaos was
what was created. My fiance heard us talking about me making her ghost painting and suggested a ghost in a dungeon. She liked the idea and even commented about how she would be slightly disappointed if she didn't see it.
After a few hours of trying to figure out how I was even going to do that especially with what pieces I had to paint on. We chose the anatomical heart wood panel to work on and got to work. It was so much fun to work on. I wanted the ghost to be semi-translucent so the Saint Andrew's cross. Hanging near the ghost was a selection of impact implements. The impact implements I just hand to use more fun pastel and vibrant colors to go with my friends personality.
I love this piece. It was such a wild ride coming up with this piece. It was nothing like what I was originally thinking of making for her, that's for sure. I was thinking of something more like a ghost in the woods or something moody but this....this was way more fun to do and is definitely a lot more interesting to look.