Painting Elephants

Last week I attended a two hour acrylic painting class at Pinot's Pallete in St. Matthews with my friend Brooke and her sister-in-law.  They do classes almost every night and have a bar where you can buy beer, wine or mixed cocktails to sip on while you paint.

We painted an elephant and it was a lot of fun!  I went in there anticipating a canvas with an outline of the elephant already there, but much to our surprise, we all sat down to a blank, white canvas.  At first we were extremely intimidated, but our instructor was awesome and did a great job of showing us how to do the outline of the elephant ourselves. We started with a grid on the canvas and she instructed us where on the grid to place dots of paint and then which dots to connect until we had our basic outline.

Once we had the basic outline, we filled in the grey for the elephant, which looked like this:

After that we filled in the background before adding detail to the elephant:

After adding details step by step to the background and the elephant, we ended up with a final painting!  They all looked a bit different, but yet very similar.  Here was my end result:

And here is a group shot from the whole class:

It was a lot of fun and I definitely want to do it again soon!

Dragonfly Zentangle - 25/365

This is another Zentangle inspired piece I did for my Aunt Cindy as a thank you for finding and obtaining decorative whiskey barrels that we've been looking for to use as decoration accent pieces on our back deck.  She loves dragonflies so...voila!

Horse & Jockey Zentangle

I've recently started playing with Zentangles after a Facebook friend introduced me to this type of doodling art.  Technically, zentangles shouldn't have any realistic shape or form, just patterns, but I find these to be more fun and can display a specific theme.  This one of a jockey on a horse I did for friends of ours that throw great Derby parties every year and have a Derby themed living room in their house.  This is the first one I've done with a theme, so I'm happy with how it turned out.  I hope to do many more to add to my collection! I'd like to play around some more with themed tangles and also try some in color.

To learn more about Zentangle and Zentangle patterns, check out Zentangle.com and Tangle Patterns.  Or check out some really cool Zentangle galleries from Flickr's Zentangle Mania Group or my Zentangle PInterest board.

 

The Hens Got Their Coop Sign Hung Today

This is a craft grade bread board I bought from Michael's crafts. I painted a chicken on the front, eggs in the grass on the top with acrylic paints and used my Cuttlebug to cut out the letters and decoupaged them onto the board.  After a coat of exterior sealant made for wood, it was good to go!  So now the girls have their own sign above the egg hatch door of the chicken coop.

Da Bear

I bought this bear statue at Goodwill for $4 all chipped and mostly one color. I repainted him using acrylic paints and sealed with an exterior sealant. Now he's good as new and he will live on the back porch. (This picture is before he was sealed - he is now nice and shiny!)