I realized I spend most of the week teaching/assisting others in making art, and I really need to set a date for myself to make some art of my own.  The last few weekends I have been so busy with the new venture into doing Craft Shows (and in fact I am doing the Long Beach Patchwork November 6th, so save the date!)

Friday night I set a date with myself to paint and it was wonderful.  It’s nice to have an activity that you feel completely at home in.  Like a good, good friend.  And I realized it’s the mystery and the puzzle I like just as much as the moments that seem to congeal and flow.  I like a challenge, especially a mental one.  And it’s not just a to-do list and crossing things off.  It’s an open activity where nothing is certain and options are aplenty.  I realized it’s like a dance, an unchoreographed one.   And I listen to music while I’m painting so it is pretty much exactly a dance.  My arms are just wielding an oily substance at the end of sticks that translates my movements into a language built out of color.

On another note…here are some images from one of my recent classes where we drew and painted haunted houses!

Speaking of Haunted Houses, our website for our annual Haunted House in Murrieta (Brian’s brother’s house), which we have titled Evil Haunt, has now come online.  Brian also made a teaser trailer for the event, and I wrote the bios.  So if you aren’t too scared, click on over!  Bwa hahaha…

My classes at the HBAC are in full swing and I’m not the best about taking pics but I did manage to snap some from the little balloon project I did in my Parent & Me class.  Here is a tutorial for our Paper Mache Hot Air Balloon:

Materials needed:

balloon
tissue paper
white glue
brush
paper cup
string
tempera paint and glitter
pipe cleaners
hole punch

Instructions:

Blow up your balloon about half way. In a bowl, dilute your glue with water, equal portions. Begin to cover your balloon with strips of tissue paper, covering each piece with glue mixture. Start with white tissue paper for the first couple of layers. Cover the entire balloon with at least 5 layers of tissue paper for strong tissue paper mache cast. Let dry overnight or longer until bone dry.

When fully dry, pop the balloon and carefully take it out. Cut a circle in the dried paper mache where the balloon comes out, large enough to be able to fit your hand inside the cast. Pop out any spots that caved in. Poke a hole on the opposite side of the balloon, to which you feed the pipe cleaner through. Tie a loop on the other end of the pipe cleaner so it does not fall all the way through the balloon. This will be how you hang your balloon. Punch three holes on the bottom of the balloon to which you tie your paper cup basket to. Punch three holes in your paper cup. Paint the cup and balloon with tempera paint and glitter. Connect your cup to your balloon with string, tying each hole to each other. Now you’re done!

Wow, it’s been a month!  I’ve been running around like crazy, and right now, I am sitting my butt at my computer and yes, this is going to be a looooong post.  So, where have I been?  Mostly the usual culprits, although….last weekend at a moment’s notice we had couples Big Bear and stayed at our favorite place, Sleepy Forest.  It was our friend’s anniversary, and Brian and I just kind of said, well it’s our half anniversary!  So now we have to celebrate that too.  Any excuse to get away right?  We went jet skiing, hiking and ate good food, so it was a nice little adventure.  I got sunburned, and was extra sore because I helped my mom move Saturday morning, but our cabin had a jacuzzi tub!  Oh yea, we also got a speeding ticket on the 91!  Beware of the fasttrack.  I guess no trip is free of law enforcement.

Since the hike was like right after the jet ski, and I was all sore and tired from moving the day before, I started feeling like it was bootcamp!  But luckily, once we got to almost the top, we stopped for a break to enjoy the view.

One thing I’ve been working on is snapping some shots of my student’s work before they take them home!  It’s hard to pull out the camera at clean-up time, but there were a few days I managed to remember.  I’m teaching all summer long, four days a week, at several different places.  My 4-week round of classes just finished and next week, another round of 4-week classes begin at the Huntington Beach Art Center and El Salvador Center.  Here are some snapshots of some of the lessons we did…I wish I could remember to have my camera out every day, but clean-up time can be hectic and paint and iphones don’t exactly go together.

This project, we learned about color mixing, the color wheel, and working with warm and cool colors. We drew abstract circle shapes and then painted with acrylics.

Outer Space drawings, oil pastel and pencil on black construction paper.  I also taught them how to shade the planets to make them look 3-dimensional, and also showed how to make pattern with colors and mixing colors.

And then we also drew and painted Personal Pirate Ships! Kids always like this project, because they can customize it.  Every student has a story and something happening on their ship or something lurking in the sea…..We drew in pencil, traced with Sharpie, then colored with oil pastels and watercolor over.  Oil pastel resist.

I think it would be so cool to start getting myself to write regularly and have it be something like “A week in review” so I can kind of reflect on the days that seem to slip by so fast. Isn’t it crazy? It’s so weird that like yesterday, for better or worse, will never happen again. It’s nice to reflect, and quite necessary for someone to be situated in their life. Actually I had such a weird dream that was about that. Without going into specifics, when I asked myself what was that like, I answered (and mind you I was asleep when I analyzed my dream, which often happens and it becomes a sort of new dream) but I answered, “It’s like that person doesn’t fully engage in their own life” And that was making me upset, or riled up, because I want people to be engaged. I, myself, want to be engaged. Being involved in the nuts and bolts of your life, is a way to take charge, but also a way to take responsibility, so if things don’t turn out the way you like, you have a responsibility to find a solution (rather than play victim, or play dumb), or you can realize when it’s just out of your hands, and to embrace that collapse is a part of life. (I think anyone that knows me, knows my history…..that it’s not all rainbows, which is of course, the irony of me painting a rainbow) This is way more reflective that I intended to be. Really I just wanted to do a little, measly rundown of the week. But this week hasn’t been measly!

Ok well one amazing thing this week, well there were a few, but one amazing thing? After my teeth cleaning in Anaheim, I decided to drive around and look for some thrift stores. And found one. And then found a Chagall lithograph! Yea I went from someone scraping and poking in my mouth (possibly the worst feeling) to finding what might be a valuable piece of art! ( a pretty damn good feeling) Good thing I had my iphone (which I just got for my bday) and I could gather information on it. My first instinct of course was to go to Vegas for Pawn Stars, as of course any rational person would do, but now it’s kind of grown on me. I might hang it up! I’m not even sure if it’s signed.

What else happened this week? Of course there was my Heartsy sale and I got something on the FP of etsy, which is always exciting. That has been keeping me busy, busy. I think years of membership coordination and all that HBAC computer stuff prepared me well for having my own business. Today, I’m ordering supplies for my classes. I’m planning some fun projects and hopefully this time I will take pictures and I would love to have a tutorial section on my site with all the projects I do, since I do like 5-10 projects a week! It’s just hard to teach and clean up after 15 kids AND remember to take pictures of projects. It is usually such chaos by the time we’re finishing up….my goal this summer is to document, document, document!

Today I made a treasury too….just love all of these things….

I want to give a special thank you to everyone who supported me over at Heartsy (the deal is extended thru today!!) and also thru my etsy shop!  It’s exciting to fill orders, and write hand-written little notes, and include extra goodies.  It makes me think I need a new office chair.  All this productivity leads to more productivity and I’m overflowing with ideas of what to do next.  So thank YOU for making me WANT to do this.

Also, I checked in on my classes, and the Huntington Beach Art Center classes are rapidly filling up!  I will be also teaching in Santa Ana for the first time this summer, and those classes are open for enrollment.  All classes start the week of June 20th.