Lazure walls and Fantasy Mural Enhance Girls Bedroom

This is a mural for two young girls who share a room. The theme was an enchanted land, a light watercolor version of a medieval forest background, blended from the edges to the rest of the room painted beautifully in a bend of peach, pinks and lavender Lazure. It is a blend of loosely painted background and carefully painted recognizable details on particular endeared pet portraits within a gentle euphoric scene that inspired a feeling of joy.

The paint was diluted with satin acrylic mediums and varnish in order to apply it securely in very minimal paint pigment density in most areas. It is a playful balance of details and dream, that shares the quality of the lovely LAzure painted walls done by Judy Turnbull, from Oakland, CA

For more information:

on my murals: MagnificentMurals.com

erin@tajime.com

650 424-9363

on Judy's Lazure walls:

Please contact Judy directly at 510 601-5227

email: lazurebyjudy@pacbell.net

Designing a Portable Arched Door

To provide some privacy to a renter in my lovely living room...
I needed to produce a door for an arched opening that connects to the dining room.

1) Must be able to work with no holes in or damage to the walls

2) lightweight and easily removable, easy to insert

3) provides a bit of sound insulation

4) cost around a hundred dollars or less.

Materials:

Two 4' X 8' 2" thick rigid Styrofoam panels from Home Depot $37

One 96" X 24" roll of 1/2 inch foam rubber - cut into 2" strips to pad the edges of each panel

One Large roll of Industrial mounting tape

5 yards of felt from the fabric store

Four 8 oz containers of Aleene's Quick Dry Tacky Glue from Joann's Fabrics

Tools needed:

Fine toothed Shark Pull saw.

Manual hand held jig saw

scissors

tongue depressors

gloves

220 sand paper and sanding block

sharpie marker

Know the size of the arch before you go to the store...

so you know exactly what you need and what materials will work.

If you have a pull saw already, bring it to the store...

I had to buy a few saws in a package to trim off a foot, and the corners so the panels fit in my Honda Pilot. I already knew I could fit a 4 X 8 piece of plywood, but with the panels being two inches thick each... I had to trim them to fit them in my car. Because I knew I could spare a foot, and the corners, I cut that much off.

One of the First Benefits I Gained From Street Painting

Of course this will not be the long version or the whole story, just a teaser...

Street Painting gave me a vacation from my inner critic for two whole days in a row.

Has that ever happened to you? Do you have any idea how incredibly good that felt?

It felt so good I would do nearly anything to experience that again and again. That was the first perk Street painting gave me and the repeated dose of it improved my enjoyment of life, my creativity, and all the projects I have created since then.

This relief from the hidden lambasting of my inner voice happened due to a swarm of people, the buzz of appreciation that consistently erupted out of the crowd, "Wow!" "That's incredible!" "Fantastic!" "Great job!"

I am sure you can imagine that is not what most of us have going on in our heads through out the day, and especially when we are working on something and doing our best to do it well.

The voice inside me pouted and took a back seat to the beautiful tone and energy of the crowd of people who upstaged all the doubt and criticism I had not even known had previously swirled inside my head.

In the past if anyone saw a project I had been working on, or finished, and they loved it and said so, it was too hard for me to join them in their joy. I was so filled with funk about what was not quite right that I blurted out the struggle I had about what had not worked so well, or the parts I felt still needed improvement. The kind of thinking I had been accustomed to often prevented me from ever feeling complete and good about the art I created, and it certainly stole most of the enjoyment.

The added credit and positive praise from the crowd became the fuel that turned my experience and thinking around to an ecstatic delight in creating. Which if you can imagine really helped me create more, which naturally leads to one getting better faster.

Wooo Hooo! Want to learn about art and your own process? Sign up to chalk up the street at a street painting festival, you will be amazed!

wind and Crows

A while back, I finally finished Wind and Crows...

A gift.

I had to repair the hole in the canvas

where my daughter tossed her cell phone through it.

Art restoration... I love fixing things so they are back in order to be enjoyed.

Makes me smile.