Sharpie Art & A Quiet Rainy Saturday

It's a quiet day. The last several days have been sunny & warm, but today is overcast & chilly. There's even a light rain coming down.


It's a good day to stay in & enjoy the peace. Vino fell asleep on the love seat, and there are no sounds except the quiet piano music of Linford Detweiler. It's our favorite relaxing music. I've just been dinking around the kitchen today, making coffee, washing produce.


Taking photos.


Speaking of taking photos, I finally got around to taking some of a project I did almost a year ago. So easy, so cheap! Not as cheap as free, but they can't all be. In the building where we live, there is a commons area just outside our apartment door. We needed some art for the dining area, so I purchased a blank pre-stretched canvas and some tan-ish colored paint. I painted the entire canvas tan & let it dry (which took a long time because it was oil paint, which I don't like very much because it's stinky, inconvenient to clean up...and takes a long time to dry). Next I planned out something to draw on the canvas. I got the idea for the flower style from this image:


I found it online somewhere, but don't rememer where. Anyways, I did a mock-up in Photoshop of how I wanted the flowers to look on the canvas, then printed it out on regular letter size paper. I did some scientific eye-balling to transfer the design from paper to canvas. Basically, I just looked at the paper & drew it freehand with a pencil on the canvas. By the way, pencil doesn't erase well on oil painted canvas, so it's good to get it right the first time! When I was happy with the design, I traced over the pencil with a fabulous artist's tool...the Sharpie. I think Sharpies are underrated. There are a gazillion things you can do with them! I am not ashamed to admit that I have given my hair ghetto "auburn" low-lights with a red Sharpie. It works, and it stays in. It's probably not really good for your hair, though, so I wouldn't recommend trying this at home (although I probably will do it again). Anyways, back to the artwork. Here's the finished product with close up and extreme close up so you can see that it really is a Sharpie drawing and that I didn't do it perfectly:


My intent was to fill it in with white paint, but I never got around to it. Lazy crafter. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. Especially when our friend Noelle, a Nebraska friend who visted us last year, said, "Hey, that looks like something I'd pay a lot of money for at Urban Outfitters."

AND, my day was made.