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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

New Art and Cute Kids

Here is my latest piece.  I know I said I was enjoying working without collage elements, but I sort of wanted to do a more personal piece about my family right now.  So I included the bunnies to represent each member, then wrote words around the "path", detailing some of the things I want to remember about this time.

I think I really like the piece.  I loved choosing the colors for the little triangles, coming up with the perfect balance of cools, warms, lights, darks.  But I can't decide if the piece is too busy as a result.  There's a lot going on, but maybe it all just works.  I don't know- I'll have to let it sit for a few days and see what I think then...

( The reason the one bunny is on top of the smaller house is because Noah loves climbing on top of our little playhouse in the backyard!)


I realized I haven't shown that many photos of the kids recently.  Partially because stupid Blogger still downloads all my vertical photos sideways.   I take 90% of my photos vertically, but I was able to find some good horizontal ones to show so that I don't have to go through and manually save each one as a JPEG!

Someone turned 4!

As you can see, Avery gets lots of extra help (and rides!) from her big brothers.  We're all really enjoying our weather here lately.  It's GORGEOUS out in Florida right now, and we're taking full advantage, before the hot summer comes!

Hope you're all enjoying the beginnings of Spring as well!

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The Boys' New Shared Room

As I've mentioned before, when Riley turned five (October), we moved the two boys into a shared room and turned Riley's old room into a playroom.  Which meant I had some re-decorating to do in both "new" rooms. Here is the reveal of their new bedroom!

The color scheme of the room is inspired by the painting above.  I found it a couple years ago at Goodwill (for only $12!), and couldn't pass it up!  It's an original painting depicting two boys flying kites in a field-perfect for their room! We got navy blue bunk beds, and I chose orange and green colors from the painting for the walls.

This is the view of the room as you walk through the door.


And here's the left-hand wall and the bed.

A closer shot of the wall. As you can see in the previous photo, it's pretty tight next to the bed, and there are drawers over there, so everything on the wall had to be pretty shallow.  But it turned out to be the perfect place to put a book sling!   There are tutorials for these all over the web, but I just sort of made up my own version, and it turned out great!

 
The beds again...

This chalkboard was another fantastic thrift find.  It's wonderfully aged, and has the chalk ledge attached.   I found it while I was in the midst of doing the room, and it was the perfect addition!  You can see a couple of our chore charts up there!

And wouldn't you know it, but probably a week after finding the first chalkboard, I found a second, identical one in half the size!  I had to get it.  For right now, I propped it behind their little table, but it will probably end up in the playroom soon...  As you can see, I also made a valance to match the book sling.

 
Here is their shared dresser.  I considered repainting it (it's had the same finish through four different room re-dos!), but I'm kind of too lazy, and it actually matches pretty well!  The large letters are just repainted from their old rooms, and then I display their current scrapbooks/journals up there as well.
 
Wrapping back around the room...

Then, we end up back at the door.  I repainted the little shelves from Riley's old room, and have various little mementoes displayed there.  You can see the shoe hanger from a while ago- it's still in use, although their shoes barely fit into the pockets anymore!

These last two photos just show the boys' individual spaces.  Riley's on the top bunk, since he's oldest. 

And Noah's on the bottom bunk.  I got them each the little wall pockets (from Ikea), so they can store various things in their own space.  It's funny what sort of things show up in the pockets!  Their bedspreads are both secondhand.  I found Noah's at a thrift store, and found Riley's on Ebay to "match".   I loved the idea of vintage bedspreads that didn't match (like in Danielle Thompson's sons' room), so this was my version.  At some point, I may make quilts for them, but for now, this works great!

And that's it!  We're all really enjoying their new room.  It's grown-up enough, yet still fun for them.  And having most of the toys out of their bedroom makes it so much more peaceful in there as well.

Hope you liked it!

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Get Your Paint On- Week 5

I'm a couple weeks late getting my final painting done for my class, but I have good reason.  Jason and I were in Hawaii!  Luckily, we missed all the tsunami drama by a few days...  But anyway, here's my final painting:

We didn't really have an assignment for this one, other than to use some of the things we've learned in the class.  As I stated in a previous post, one of the biggest things I've taken away is the idea of mixing all my own colors.  So for this piece, I think I only used one color straight from the tube- I mixed the rest of them.  As hard as I try, my paintings all seem to come out with a similar palette, but I definitely think this one looks just a bit more sophisticated, color-wise, as a result.

The other thing I experimented with in this piece is the balance of geometric designs and organic shapes.  I am enjoying the introduction of harder-edged elements into my work.  It's something I hadn't tried before this class.

If nothing else, this class renewed my excitement about painting without collage elements.  I've had a lot of fun just painting.  Unfortunately, I think I enjoy it more than doing the scrapbooks for my kids, so I'm going to have to find a balance during my limited art time!