If I were expecting, I would call it nesting

But since I'm not expecting, I am not sure what to call it.  Lately I just want to make things.  Cookies, paintings, clothes, stories - The desire to create something worthwhile is nipping at me like an insistent dog.

Perhaps it is because my littlest bird is almost ready to hop over to kindergarten soon.  Perhaps it is my oldest bird getting ready for middle school.  Maybe it is boredom.  Or the winter blahs.

Whatever it is, I've got it.

At Christmas I asked for a paint set and although Santa didn't bring me one, my mother kitted me out with some old supplies that were my grandmothers.  She also got me some paint to start with.  As a result I have churned out a few really bad paintings and a few that I find not too bad.  Here are the paintings I've kept (although I don't know what to do with most them just yet):

This was the first painting I tried.  It was actually an old canvas that my grandmother had sketched out.  I kind of did a paint by numbers thing and filled it in.  She had a couple of things drawn in that I wasn't able to make look right so I did my own thing instead.  For some reason all of these photographed a little off in the colors, probably because of the angle and lighting.  

This painting started out as a picture of Josh and Carly...but then went down a totally unexpected path as I sketched.  I am really happy with the overall result though.

This is a painting of a church near where my two aunts live up by Santa Fe.  The community itself dates back 100s of years (think 1600s at least) and the church is quite old.  I wasn't happy with the fence AT ALL and getting structural features right is not my forte but this little painting has grown on me (at first I hated how it came out).  When my mom saw it she knew what church it was without asking so it can't be THAT far off.

This is (I hope obviously) a picture of the Carly girl.  I learned a few things with this one....eyes are HARD.  And lips.  I worked on this one for quite a while (comparitively) but at the end I thought it came out really well.  Plus Carly loved it.  Her exact words: "Mom painted me beautiful!"  It's hard to argue with myself after that.  Eventually I am going to have this one framed out.  I tried to make a companion piece of Josh's profile and it was really not good - another lesson learned: black skin is easier to paint and photographs help.

This one isn't anything spectacular, just a fun little fantasy painting that I tried to do for Carly's room.  I love the mushroom and snail, hate the fairy and the flower isn't quite right but it was a good jumping off point for next time.

This scene is sort of a rip off of a picture we have hanging in our family room.  I liked the mesa shapes and wanted to play around with the sky and such.  I was going to have something else in the foreground but nothing felt quite right.  There was a lot of wiping things off and repainting in this one.  I also used a stiffer canvas that was backed with a board and didn't really like painting on that.  I like loose canvas much more.  I really like the prickly pear and the way the colors and shadows blend in this one.  Long term it will probably get painted over again.  Or tossed like the other rejects.

I've considered throwing a few of these up on Etsy just to see if there is any interest but it seems rather pretentious ... so for now they are just stacked up on top of the china cabinet.

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.” - George Bernard Shaw

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