Monday 20 June 2011

Finding Treasures

Monday is our day off here, the only day we close the shop and do other things.  My Beautiful (nearly nineteen years old) baby girl has been here with us this weekend with her friend Kasey, which was lovely as they helped in the shop and I not only got time to spend with my lovely girl, but i got to spend time in my art room too.  The plan was to tidy it up as with all the recent work i've been doing on my assemblages it's got into a bit of a mess, anyway, needless to say the tidying up didn't happen!!! 

This is a page in my sketchbook, birds, i draw and colour so i can experiment with blending colours, which i code.  These were done with Caran D'ache water colour pencils and it's great for practicing.
The weather here is beautiful today, gav and i had a lovely lunch at the Castle Kitchen, we sat in the garden in beautiful sunshine and later took Lizzie for a long walk over to Offas Dyke where, again, she managed to find a dirty muddy puddle to lie down and roll over in!!!!!

Yesterday we popped over to Churchstoke to the Sunday market, and i ended up in the pound shop looking for treasures for my assemblages.  I found some really nice odds and ends in the jewellery section but these were an amazing find. 
They're little wooden hangers for keys etc with a cute little wooden keyring to go with them, all packaged up.  My plan was to take the image off the front and do a nice little mixed media art painting on them.  The keyring part i'll use for brooches.  I got five of them to try out...


 ....and Voila...This is my first one and it's sold already!!!!
 
This is another idea!  Gav and i purchased these little pictures from one of our suppliers, but when they arrived they were of quite poor quality, print wise, but the frames were amazing, so they ended up in my art studio.
This is the back and you can see that they're nice deep box frames that i can use for assemblages too!
This is what i did with the first one and already someone has their eye on it!  I have four more to use up.


Ha! hang on there's more... this was a small metal notice which said "a spoilt rotten dog lives here" and even though thats true. i still thought it would be great to paint on.
So i'm back off to the pound shop tomorrow to get more supplies!  This is another Moleskine notebook painting, i've done two so far,and if i can stop Nicole from nicking the blank ones I have, i can't wait to do more and display in the shop, i know they'll sell really well.



These photos were taken about ten minutes ago when the rain started here in Montgomery.  It got very dark and ominous and then the heavens opened, a real downpour and after a mad dash outside to get my washing in and getting soaked in the process, i took these from our middle floor window looking out across Broad Street gardens.




"The best gift your children can receive from you
is your presence (HK).
In your eyes, and your heart your children should be, special, beautiful, amazing, clever and wonderful in their own individual way.  As parents you should have no favourites amongst them and the capacity to look beyond words and actions to understand them, to give freely and bountifully and what's not in your hand, will be in your heart.  A closed parental heart can never really know their child, it's an open heart that invites them to stay in your life, without it they will be strangers and forever lost to you in a personal way.