“Can you paint a car on a garage door?” Sure I can! “How long will it take?”,… at this point I should have thougt;… garage doors,….. don’t these doors always have an odd surface, like: bumps,.. a lot of bumps,…?
After two and half day of work, while I actually said it would take me two days of work, I will never forget I have to calculate, at least, a half a day more, only for the bumpy surface. But: it’s done!
Nope, I’m not trying to enter van Gogh’s footsteps. This is a work in progress. I’m just creating the first layer of paint for a picture of a pink plastered wall.
This wall has a lot of texture, which I am recreating by several layers of paint. One of these layers is this pointillism-like thing.
Lovely, right? I love pointillism. Stay tuned for the end result.
If you’re drawing a portrait, it’s the most marvellous feeling in the world to see your lines turn into a face, and not just a face: THE face. You want to capture the characteristics of your model. You don’t just want the drawing to look like the model, you want it to BE the model. It’s creating magic. Everytime this occurs I amaze myself. I just can’t stop looking at what I did: it’s beyond words, for I simply can not explain how I managed to capture these characteristics that make the person real and unmistakenly recognizable.
But sometimes it just won’t work. And when that happens it drives me mad. Because as I can’t explain why the model secretly sneaks up in the drawing and makes it alive, I neither can explain why it doesn’t. Like with this drawing,…
It drove me mad: Is it the nose? Is it wide enough? Is the tip of the nose round enough? The nostrils flat enough?
Yeah,.. the nose is okay,..
The lips then? Small enough? Does she smiles the way the model does?
Yeah, nothing weird here.
Then it must be the eyes, but what’s wrong with them? The shape is correct,..
So, .. what to do? He’re some things for starters:
Hope this worked! I managed to correct the eyes of the example in this post. Much better! This is the end result:
Carnations: done with watercolor, marker, fineliner, and gelpen.
Watercolor. Background done with coloring pencils.
Watercolor and fineliner.
Watercolor and marker (I made the lines crisp with a 0.2 fineliner).
Watercolor and fineliner.
Sounds cool, right? My painting in a museum. It’s something a lot of artists will be very excited about, but in my case it’s not such a big deal.
Here’s how: I work at the Westfries museum in Hoorn, the Netherlands, as an educator. So I’m the museum’s host when schools visit and I design the holiday’s programs for children.
For this summer holiday I chose “color” as a theme for all of the activities in the museum. And in one of the museum’s rooms we got a lot of Delfts blauw, or Delfts blue art, so I wanted to design an activity on different shades of blue.
And it came out to become very simple: we are going to display a painting, created in different shades of blue, placed on a magnetic board, with magnets in different shades of blue, provided next to it. The blue magnets are to be placed (nu the kids) somewhere in the painting on the same shade of blue.
Only: where to get such a painting? Well,.. I can create it myself, of course! Within a few hours I painted Hoorn’s most famous ship in blue, while I usually prefer to spend months on one painting.
The result is for educational purposes only, there need’nt to be anything aesthetic about it, so I guess I can say I mainly fulfilled my job as educator, while the artist in me had some fun too! And:.. it’ll be my first painting in a museum! Funny, right?
I promised myself to get more creative and try new art techniques, and I hope I slightly got to this, when I created wall art this weekend.
I usually paint with oil paint, but for a wall painting this would be inconvenient: it is too expensive and dries too slow. So I bought the most cheap-ass acrylic paint I could find along with the most inexpensive plastic brushes, and gave it a try. Turned out that the paint wasn’t that bad and the brushes actually were quite good (for the Dutch readers: I got the brushes at the Hema and the paint at the action). It was just very strange to use a paint wich is quick-drying, I had to get used to that. I also am not used to trying to finish a big painting in one day, so I didn’t succeed in that, but a few hours work the other day made me do the job. Here are some pictures!
Do you like it? 😁
My son will have his 13th birthday this Thursday. Even though he’s a big boy now, he still wanted a real children’s birthday party,.. a Star wars birthday party of course. But, how to throw a Star wars birthday party? The internet is full of tips and tricks; from a Star wars BINGO to a Star wars galaxy Obleek, (don’t ask me,..) and from a death star piñata to edible TIE-fighters.
(if you’re interested in any of these ideas: here are the links: BINGO, Obleek, Piñata and TIE-fighters)
But, since my son’s autistic, and all of his friends are too,… the piñata had to be crossed off the list,.. the TIE-fighters were a good idea, but there’s no way you are able to buy hexagon-shaped cookies in the Netherlands, I didn’t know what to do with the obleek, and for bingo I needed a bunch of presents, wherefore I did not have enough money nor ideas.
So, it was time to throw in some art! I decided to let them paint T-shirts. With star wars templates of course. Both the templates and the paint were homemade. Because: do you know where to buy Star wars templates? And textile paint is waaaaaay to expensive to buy. Googling on the internet I found out that you can turn gouache into textile paint (you can also use acrylic paint), all you have to do is buy a bottle of textile medium! Textile medium isn’t very expensive, and neither is gouache; so you’ll have plenty of textile paint for a minimum amount of money! I used Creall tex mix; but the T-shirts haven’t been 
washed yet, so I can’t assure you it works,… yet,..
The templates were made from pizza boxes. I spend a whole evening drawing them and cutting them out of the cardboard. I used a small scissor and a sharp knife. I was afraid the cardboard would be too weak to be used by children. Especially since some of the templates had very small strips, which were easy to break, but luckily the kids were very cautious, and there were enough adults to assist them during painting. The results were amazing!
If you’re planning to do this, make sure you have enough time to cut out the templates and,.. (something that totally slipped my mind) make sure to give the kids aprons! The textile paint is meant to stay on textile,.. so it surely can ruin the shirt they’re wearing!
Being creative on a party is great, but it wouldn’t be a party without snacks and presents. So I designed a game for this. It was a ‘board-game’ covering two kitchen table tops. +/- 50 colored paper sheets, laid down in a circle, represented about 50 different tiles. 20 of the tiles offered a snack for the visiting player. 2 of the tiles asked the player to sing a birthday song, 2 tiles made them skip turns, and 4 tiles bid the player to throw the dice a second time. 
All of the kids had presents for my son. Instead of just giving him the presents, they had to hide them. The hiding was part of this board game. During the game they could visit a tile that said them to hide their present. My son had to leave the room for a moment, and after the present was hid, he was to search for it. I also bought little presents for my son’s friends. These presents also were hid and found during the game.
If you like to use this game for your party, this is the ‘board-game’s plan:
Some instructions:
The art-part of the game were the pawns. To stick to the theme, all of the kids had a Star wars pawn. I had cut six pieces of wood, primed them with GESSO, and painted 6 different Star wars figures on them. My son also had collected 6 plastic Star wars cups, so the cups matched the pawns, which I thought was quite nice.
I did not have time to paint the pawns with oil-paint. I don’t have acrylic paint, so I used marker pens. The funny thing is; when you’re drawing with marker pens on a primed object, the ink dries slower, so you can mix and blend the ink while drawing. The result is much like a painting. I was surprised! It was hard to recreate the images in the short amount of time I had (I started painting 2 hours before the party,…. ai,…) But I’m happy with the results nevertheless.
