Holiday Craziness and Work in Progress

The winter holidays are quickly closing in...are you ready?  It is only the first week of December, and already you can feel the rush and bustle in the air!

Things here at the house are getting pretty hectic, too...I have lists everywhere and calendars are filling up with schedules, activities for the kids and Christmas parties all over the place.  No wonder it's hard to keep up with it all :)  That's not to mention the cleaning and shopping.  I love cyber Monday :)

My youngest son, Ethan did his solo in his Christmas concert beautifully...we were all so proud!






They also enjoyed the Christmas parade :)







Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Google Plus, Etsy, Fine Art America...Anybody else find it hard to keep up with it all?  As an artist, I think it's important to be on at least some of these social media sites.  It's a  way of getting your work out there and seen and also see and enjoy other artists's work.  I like to start my day by checking my email and putter around with all these different social media sites.

Here's my problem...I get on all these sites, and it's fun...meeting other artists and chatting and having a look at all the amazing artwork out there.  The next things you know, hours have gone by and I haven't painted a darn thing! Anybody else experience this?   I'd love to hear how other artists and bloggers balance it all. (Yes, I know I have been slow updating my blog here!)

So that being said, in spite of all the craziness going on around here, I have got a bit of painting in:) Here is a sneak peek of my latest work!  It's a work in progress, still a bit more work to be done.

I plan on adding some collage elements to it.  It's based on a photo of my grandfather when he first came to Canada from Poland.  I collaged in some letters from his mother in Poland, some pay stubs and some receipts of money he sent back to the mother country.  A lot of these got painted over, so I will print these off on rice paper and collage them back in, distress it a bit, too.  Any thoughts?

Thanks for stopping by!

Not Sour Grapes

Remember way back when  I mentioned that I was participating in a fundraiser to raise money for mental health?  Here's the link in case you missed it:  Here's a Great Cause

This week, I finished two of the 6x6 inch tiles, and today I got them both packed up and mailed off to Halifax.  Yay!  

Here's a peek:

Not Sour Grapes 1

 They are both painting using acrylic paint and are both on 6x6 masonite tiles.

Not Sour Grapes 2

Thanks for stopping by!

Ancient Shells and Building on what we Already Know

One of my favorite places my family and I went to on our recent vacation was the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.  It was the first of the Smithsonian museums that we were able to see, and I was in absolute awe the minute I walked in the door with my husband and my two kids.


I was so excited, I started taking pictures right away.   I was taking as much in as my little brain could handle, reading all the little information cards and doing my best to commit the information to memory.  

"Look, kids...this is a blah, blah, blah!  And look at this, isn't that interesting?"

My husband, who had been to the Museum of Natural History before was shaking his head.  "Ah, Jo-Ann...this is just the small stuff, are you sure you don't want to move along and see some of the bigger stuff?

But I didn't want to miss anything and I was determined to take it all in!  I loved these ancient fossilized shells!  They were so beautiful!  










The artist in my was creating mixed media collages in my head.  Here is a mixed media painting that I created this week.  It is 8 x 8 x 1.5 inches on gallery wrapped canvas.  

 These ancient shells are call ammonites.  They look very much like shelled nautiloids but are actually more closely related to octopus, squid and cuttlefish.   Very similar to a nautilus, however, they grow and move into a larger chamber which has grown ahead of it.  It adds newer and larger chambers to the open end of the coil and grows like this until it has reached maturity. 


I love how David Weber of Thou relates the nautilus shell to life

And therein is the story of everything else. A baby is born with an infant’s consciousness: everything, beginning with Mom, is an extension of itself. As a 1 to 2 year, the toddler begins to understand the distinct nature of itself. The second level of consciousness supercedes the first, even as it is wholly built upon it. Cognitive abilities continue to increase as the child grows older: from the manipulation of its environment to the complete separation of its personality from parents and others, to an always heightening understanding of cause and effect, then adopting a social self, a critical self, a self-critical self. Each point in the process is built upon the previous one, and is always a part of the previous state of consciousness and understanding

The whole is a result of previous and lesser sized parts, one built upon the other. No part loses its significance, even as its specific usefulness ha been transcended.

An acorn becomes a shoot, becomes a sapling, becomes a young tree, becomes a mature oak. Everything about the acorn is still a part of the great oak tree, but has been transformed and functions as a much larger and much more complex part of the tree’s wholeness.

Get Your Vitamin C Here...

What an awesome week it's been...The kids have been off school for March break, the mountains of snow have been melting like crazy, the sun has been shining and little plants have been poking their little heads out of the ground.  And I've been painting like mad.

For those that follow me on Facebook, you would have seen my status earlier this week...

My son and his friend were so disappointed yesterday. They were in the kitchen with me chatting and watching me cut up oranges. I put them on the kitchen table, artfully arranged them and started to draw..."Heyyyyy...we thought you were giving us a snack!" LOL I think they were hungry :-)
I've been creating loads of paintings of oranges!


This is one of my first paintings:

Watercolor on Paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

This is another...

Watercolor on Paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

The following two paintings are ACEOs.  For those that don't know what ACEO, it stands for Art Cards, Editions and Originals. They are miniature works of art, 2 ½ X 3 ½ inches that can be matted and framed to hang on the wall.

They are small enough to fit inside standard card-collector pockets, sleeves or sheets if you choose.

ACEOs can even be put into a greeting card as an extra surprise for a birthday, anniversary, or just as a special surprise.

Watercolor on Paper ACEO

Watercolor on Paper ACEO

I started posting Creativity Tips this week on Facebook.  If you are an artist or just love to create, click on the "Like" at the top of my Facebook page to receive updates on my artwork or my Creativity Tips.  Here is my page: www.facebook.com/jdmstudios Or, just click "Like" on the right hand side of this page.  One of the tips I suggested this week was to use crayon or wax as a resist. 

I used wax on the following two paintings as a resist.  Check out the highlight on these oranges.  After drawing these oranges, I used a white crayon and colored in where the light was hitting them. When I added my washes of orange color the area where I colored with crayon remained white.  Looks just like orange peel skin.

Watercolor on Paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches

 I used a white crayon on this painting, too but didn't quite turn out as well as the first one, unfortunately!   Too much paint and not enough wax. I ended up lifting color to create the highlights but didn't quite have the same texture as the painting above.

Watercolor on Paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/2

This last painting is an acrylic.  My youngest son kept raving about how juicy these oranges are especially if you peeled them and bit right into it!  Hopefully some of that came across in the following painting:

"Juicy" Acrylic on paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/2

These are fresh of the press!  Well, not off the press, really, but fresh off my brush, if that makes sense. 

This first painting here I have been fussing and playing with for some time.  Might have gotten a little busy and I struggled a bit with which way to take it.   I took a photo in January on our trip to Petersfield Park (see blog post How to Remember Summer in January  I was playing with my new camera, and taking some closeups of leaves.  They were brown and broken, no longer the flashy reds and golds of autumn, but elegant all the same.

I find that I can get a little carried away when I am painting, and I am not very patient.  It drives me crazy waiting for a wash to dry, and I sometimes risk going back to work on an area too soon.  If its too wet, it's mud.  I usually like to have several paintings on the go at once, that keeps me busy while I am waiting for a wash to dry!  I started this abstract here:  Fun to do, it is painted on watercolor paper with watercolor paint.  I used some stamping from random objects and collaged some found material (can you guess what it is?)










And last but not least, I just finished this piece yesterday.  I had two paintings on the go...one was a complete disaster! lol  but I learned loads about working with my booboos.  I tried to fix it with gesso, acrylic paint, collage, and even gold spray paint.  It just got worse and I think it's time I let it go.  I might be able to save part for collage later....hmmm...Anyhoo... back to the painting that actually worked out:

It is a mixed media painting.  I drew the pears from life and added this quote:
"One day we will realize that the battle we are fighting is not outside ourselves, but within."

I am not sure if I made that up or heard it somewhere, but if anyone out there knows where it came from, could you let me know so I can reference them :-)



Thanks for stopping by and don't be shy...say HI!

Latest Painting, Mixed Media Abstract

Yesterday, I said to my oldest son, "watch this..."  I brought my newly completed painting to my yountest son, who is 6 and a half.  "What do you think of this, Ethan?" I asked, expecting for certain that he would make a screwed up face and say something like, "weird" or just simply shake his head at me.

What I got was the complete opposite...His eyes popped, his arms flew up in the air with the exclamation, "I LOVE IT!!!!  That is soooooo beautiful, Mom!  I can't believe you made that, WOW!!!!"   Kids never cease to amaze me, and as I learned for myself, you just never know what reaction you are going to get!

You can click on the image to see more views of this painting on my Artfire site.

Gorgeous fall day...

The leaves are changing here in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and what a glorious day it is here!   The air carries the pungent aroma of damp leaves and earth, still wet from the gentle rain we had this morning.  The sun is shining and it is unusually warm for this time of year.  It makes the red and yellow leaves stand out even more against the dark bark of their trees.

I am so close to finishing my fall leaves painting.  I can't wait to get back to my paints.  Stay tuned...