Super Green Garden

I'm rather proud of this artsy kind of shot. It's from above and it shows a collection of glass bottles, chopped off and finished with a crusty rim of gold paint. Together with some glass marbles and stones, potting soil and a plant, it's a little garden. The glass echoes terrarium but it's also like a planter. I spend time and anxiety worrying about the variety of glass colors, heights, thicknesses just to make sure that the bottles are all slightly different; that each brings its own piece to the overall puzzle. I'm liking how this collection is going. (I have my own little garden of bottles on my window sill.)

And here's me holding the smallest of jars. It's tiny. I'm hard-pressed finding a plant that will fit inside this little guy, but I'm working on it! And in the background you can see the plastic container of marbles, stones, and sea glass pieces that I've collected to be the water-draining portion of the planter. Oh and you can see the mixing bowl that has been repurposed to house plants as they await their final planting in a jar. And, for kicks, you can see that this whole operation is currently going down atop my stove. Like I said a week ago, there are little projects everywhere! As long as I stay sane, I'm happy to let the crafts take over. It's not like I could put the plants under a cabinet or anything anyway.

Finally, the plants in all their glory, with some glitteratti frogs chillin' in the open space. I don't know exactly why I decided that I needed to glitterize a set of plastic frogs, but I enjoy them living among the plants.

Sacred House of Blues?

With a West Coast baseball trip for my beloved if not beleaguered boys of summer and a bit of a bout of insomnia (must stop with the drinking of the diet dr pepper so late at night!), I find myself glued to the MLB HDTV (my favorite kind of acronym soup, honestly) with nothing to do but watch the Sox fail miserably and, well, present some new crafts to my loyal readers.
Here is a new painting. It's the first time I've ever left the majority of the canvas (a 12x12 square of glass) even partially unpainted. In fact, I had every intention of making a giant picture with all kinds of zigzag layers, but when I got to this point, I knew that I needed to stop and relish the simplicity. And I feel like the result looks like a cross between Mexican-inspired renditions of Catholic symbolism like the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the somewhat corporate, irreverent House of Blues logo. Anyways, I'm pleased with punch by it and I like how I've arranged trinkets around it, especially the fact that I can actually place things behind it and still see them, like the antique Maine postcard. When I started the drawing for this painting, I had intended to channel Indian patterns (as in subcontinental Asia, not Native American ones, though they are quite nice, too). The paisleys were supposed to set that spicy, exotic tone. It would have been fine and Indian looking had I not decided to paint with a bright, Latin pallet. As soon as the pink was layered atop the yellow, I knew that it was headed in a different direction than my original intention, not that I mind.

What's that I hear, did Don Orsillo say "ballgame over?" Long yawn and I think I'm ready to hit the hay. Amazing how awake I am when there's a live game, even if it was a bit of slaughterfest in the yuck direction for this little fan.

Brr-Rrrr, Heavy Traffic

When I was a child back in the days of "C:/" instead of today's visually intuitive computers, my daddy bought me (or maybe he bought it for himself, fuzzy memory) SimCity. I'm not going to say it was the very first ever edition of SimCity, because I really don't know. Alls I do know is that I loved that game. LOVED. It was so fascinating. I could build a whole town. And then destroy their power plant and see how long they'd live without electricity. In many ways, SimCity might just be what started it all. From there I graduated to home design software (I'd try to fit all the essentials -- stove, fridge, toilet, shower, bed, door -- into 100 square feet or less. I think the best I ever did was 80 square feet, in a house where the bed was stacked above the fridge and stove, which, obviously, would be a really pleasant place to live). And from that software, I started to read interior decorating magazines, study art history and ultimately become a craft blogger. Wow, what a progression...
And you may wonder why I am mentioning SimCity in conjunction with a picture of my kitchen. I'll tell you: in the SimCity of my youth, when you had traffic congestion, a radio helicopter-esque voice would say, "Brr-rrr-rrr-heavy traffic." Or at least that's how my dad and I interpreted what the guy said. And it joined the Henry family lore as a family phrase -- brr-rr heavy traffic. It's right up there with "tit-titilly-boo," "teeka-teeka," or "fiffffty." And if you know much about we Henrys, you may well have heard these phrases. Well, when I was painting this piece of glass (detail shown below), I could only think of one phrase, "Brr-heavy traffic." I don't know why it reminded me of a busy SimCity, but it just does somehow.
I painted this 1 square foot piece of glass over the weekend. I thought I'd tuck it in behind my kitchen CD player and radio to create a little vignette right there under my canned goods cabinet. It's about three layers of paint deep, so it's pretty busy. Good thing it is nice and small. The color palette is a range of colors of the rainbow between orange and blue -- all my yellows, greens. It's like Mediterranean citrus colors, the palette of a bottle of Orangina (seriously consider clicking on this link, if nothing else than for the cute little Vespa graphic). All the swirls, curls and zigzags are very tightly wrought. And there are dots on top of dots. Plus I used lots of shimmery and glittery paints so that the whole thing really sparkles, much like the fizziness of a bottle of Orangina sipped in Italy... (cue some Dean Martin and daydream with me).
Frankly, its been a long, long time since I last presented a painting. This is partly because I didn't bother to post my last three paintings and partly because I thought ran out of glass and keep forgetting to order more. But over the weekend I found this pristine little piece and pulled out the paint trough. It felt so good to get back into the paint-covered swing of things. I found three other plates of glass -- all so well organized that I just forgot how neatly tucked away they were -- so I have lots to work on. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

This May Look A Little Odd

This looks odd. For one thing, it's not a craft that photographs well. For another thing, well, it's not that great to start out with. But this is a dream of mine and this is my first crack at that dream and I'm pretty excited about it. So what you are looking at is a wine bottle that has been sawed in half and has two little holes drilled in it to thread wire through, then filled with little rocks, sand, and a pot with seeds in it. I'm going to hang the whole contraption in front of my window so that the little seeds will grow and plants will live in an old wine bottle. I'm going to make a series of these and hang them in my window. It's going to be some kind of recycled hanging gardens. Yeah, that sounds about right. Who wouldn't want a hanging wine bottle garden? Right now I've only got a small cache of empties to saw through. But I've got a bunch of full bottles. From now on, my place is always on tap! And I'm going to start bugging you about not throwing away your empties so I can get better at this glass cutting business. Do you see the roughness of those edges? It's pretty rudimentary. Let's not even mention the pair of cracks in the glass near the wire holes. Yikes. Hope the whole thing doesn't bust. Fingers crossed.

More details -- this is my first Drimmel project. My Nana gave me the Drimmel for Christmas. And it took me a while to locate the perfect bit -- I needed a round diamond tip. I visited a few hardware stores before the man at Elliots had just what I needed (which, of course, reminds me that I shouldn't ever try to find hardware somewhere before I have hit up Elliots). However, using a rotating diamond wheel on a piece of glass kinda terrified me. I had to pull out the old safety goggles from chemistry class (sometimes its good to be a partial packrat) and wear some dish gloves before I'd try this out. I practically had 911 on speed dial before I first placed the whirling, buzzing, Drimmel bit against the wine bottle. I was sure it would split into sharp splinters, flying at high speeds at my face, neck, arms, hands, priceless porcelain figurines, antique dishware, you name it (Ok, those last two don't exist, but still, a flying shard of glass is a pain where ever it goes). Of course, nothing of the sort took place. It did create a very grating sound -- like a million pieces of chalk squeaking on a chalk board -- and a cloud of fine powder filled the air. Holding the Drimmel steady is kinda tough and that's why the lines on my first try weren't very good. That plus I was too scared of getting hurt to do a good job. I think most of my fears were unfounded but I'm going to keep up the caution around the Drimmel. It's a little more risky than say, paper and glue (the subject of tomorrow's post). Anyways, I'm going to find that happy medium -- the Taoist wu wei -- between caution and precision, chaos and order for my next cut bottles. It shouldn't take me too many cases of Riesling to get one that is chiseled properly.

And finally, about the letter "e". There's no relevance. It can stand for anything under the sun -- eggplants, Ethiopia, energy... I bought a bunch of letters at Curiosities (on Abrams) and I thought it would be neat to attach one letter to each wine bottle/plant. Perhaps I'll spell out something when I'm all said and done. Starting with "e" is a good idea, since it's in like, every word.

Pool Envy, a new painting style.

Above is the new painting style I'm trying out. Like Daisuke's Gyro-Ball* or Zoolander's Magnum, I feel like I've been promoting the "I've got a new paint style coming up!" for quite some time and I'm happy to finally be revealing a finished product. What do you think?
The picture doesn't do it too much justice, to be honest. I'm really a fan of this style and those that have seen it in person seem to like it a lot too. Well, everyone but my mom. She doesn't like it much at all. Oh well. You can't please everyone.
I'm tentatively calling the new style "pool envy" because it reflects a few facets of my life. One, I recently had surgery and wasn't supposed to go swimming so as I painted each little blue circle, in my mind I was splashing around in some perfectly situated pool, with tin bucket of girly tropical drinks right next to the stack of plush, soft beach towels. Two, I live in an apartment building that doesn't come complete with a pool. So I suffer from a bit of pool envy, even when I'm given doc's clearance to splish splash to my heart's content. Thankfully casa de mom y dad offers me a lovely place to swim and reconnect with their gaggle of pets (conveniently located just across the Park Cities from my apartment). And three, there's a point in the Texas summer when even the pool water gets too hot to really cool you down. At that point, your mental vision of a refreshing dip in the cool waters is, in reality, a chance to wade around in tepid water. As Dallas has experienced quite a few days in the 100s, I expect that this "pool too hot" syndrome will set in very soon, if it hasn't already. At the very least, I can look at this painting and dream about the refreshment that a chilly dip would bring about. And that's the inspiration behind these pools of blue.

I wanted to include a few pictures of the process by which this piece was created. Above is the picture of the painting with all the blue bubbles filled in but without the shimmering silver background color applied. Obviously, the piece of glass is resting on a work towel, which looks pretty dirty. Hope you can get past that. Below is the original sketch for the painting. I planned to make a few "colonies" of circles and then add in a few "families" in the white space. I really like the shapes that can be created from the little circles, especially the biggest "colony" of circles. I thought that one turned out particularly well.

* I've been kinda aching for a few days to throw in some Red Sox references when I post stuff. I mean, it's a pivotal point in the AL East and then there's all the Manny drama. But alas, I am not writing a baseball blog. But I don't see why I can't occasionally add a Sox reference. Right?

Lion Swirl

I'm a little pretentious in comparing my glass art paintings to those by the, as some critics would argue, father of the 19th century Romanticism movement, Eugene Delacroix. Yet that's just what I'm about to do! As I started to sketch this design and choose the colors I would use to color the glass, I was immediately reminded of the Delacroix painting, Arab Attacked By Lion. I've copied a picture of the work (below this paragraph) for those who don't remember Art History 201: 19th century European Art, though honestly I don't know how you could forget it, the effects of those genius artists still resound throughout modern design and shape much of what we envision when we think of museum art. Anyhow, I never start writing these things with the intention of sounding like a huge art history snob, but I think my affection for the subject can come across as a bit snooty. Sorry folks. I'll give that subject a break, but not before I tell you why I think that my glass painting, which I've named Lion Swirl, recalls the aforementioned Delacroix piece. One of the tenants of Romanticism is the movement captured by the artist. The piece is a shot of action, and a dramatic moment in the action, at that. In its own time, it was revolutionary to convey so much energy, dynamic movement--even the weather in the background calls to mind a turbulent storm at its breaking point. The eye is guided through the painting in a circular motion. One glances from the fierce lion to the Arab with his sword ready to strike and continues back around the canvas in a swirl. And in my painting, the colors and the shapes cause the eye to follow a similar swirl. The red and gold pallet is broken up with a smattering of purple and white dots.
I hope you like it. It's the last of this type of painting that I will be presenting for a while. I've run out of glass!

At the top is a shot of the whole piece. Again, as with all the glass paintings, it's really hard to take a good picture without the flash on the camera messing the whole thing up. One of these days I'll figure out a good way of taking pictures of these paintings. And below, I show you a close up of the picture so that you can see it from a different angle. Perhaps with this picture below you get a better idea of the swirly nature of the lines. I don't really know because, of course, I know what the real thing looks like. And finally, I unveil a silly picture of the painting propped up against a zebra print cloth (that's my shower curtain to be exact!). I just wanted to show how transparent the glass is. Sometimes you see the various backgrounds and start to think that the painting isn't see through, but it is.

Banks of the Guadalupe

So this is my second painted glass work of art (well, that I'm posting on my craft blog). This time the lines, colors, texture reminded me of my childhood summer camp days on the Guadalupe River. Specifically, for those Camp Mystic readers out there, I am reminded of the way the river seemed when you arrived for first period classes, early in the morning, before hours of splashing and kicking had driven all the river muck far from eyesight. This reminds me of the way the river looks first thing in the morning, undisturbed, peaceful, completely natural.

Below you'll see the same work as it is leaned in my new West Elm chair. I purposefully gave you a chance to see how dramatically different the work looks when it has differently colored backgrounds. It's much busier with the brown, but the colors seem to come alive. However, I like it better with the turquoise behind it. For now though I'm leaving the glass alone.

I really welcome any feedback regarding my painted plates of glass.... Let me know what you think!

Turkish Delight 2

Alas, a masterpiece! Enjoy a pair of pictures of my latest work of art, Turkish Delight 2. I'm still waiting on someone (who lives in Nashville, Tennessee and whose name rhymes with Pason Juccio...) to send me pictures of Turkish Delight 1. And now I'm going to wax art history on you, so watch out... This work is an exploration of shape, negative space and the delightful interplay of color. The shapes are inspired by patterns, lines, and figurative shapes that appear frequently in Islamic or Mediterranean art. The bright and fresh blue recalls the sea and the acorn and sunflower yellow-orange colors echo the warmth of the summer sun, the richness of earthy dirt, brick, grains.

Below you can see the piece as it leans on my kitchen counter next to some painted Diet Dr Pepper bottles. It is acrylic on glass. I'm in the process of painting two more slabs of glass. One is a swirly (this one is a spikier one than the next piece will be) blue/green piece that is, at the moment, reminding me of summers spent on the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. The second picture is a circular work rendered in pink, red and gold. It is distinctively more girly than the first two glass paintings I have worked on.

I've been driving around with glass in the trunk of my car for a whole week

Hi everybody! I feel like the doctor on the Simpsons every time I type that. I just realized that I have been driving around with a trunk full of glass sheets for about a week now. That thought led me to this next thought--I never blogged about the new glass tabletop for my dining room table. It's a pretty odd choice of tables, I'll give you that. I bought it off craigslist on a day that can only be described as serendipity. I was planning to drive out to Ikea and buy a completely run of the mill dining room table (oh goodness gracious it was boring but ever so cheap!) and I thought, hey, why not look on craigslist just once? So I saw this thing and emailed the guy and before I knew it, my father and I were piled into his big ole' Texas Edition pickup truck, driving to halfway-to-Oklahoma suburbs for this table. It's an antique German drafting table, the kind that architects used (before CAD) to do all their work. It's wrought iron and hardwood. It has all kinds of industrial knobs and wheels so that the architect could raise and lower the table and adjust the angle of the table, too.

Unfortunately for this piece, it was separated from the drafting table top and instead, a white piece of Formica was put on it instead, which really messed up the style. No wonder the guy couldn't find anyone besides me to buy the thing. I finally ordered a piece of cut glass to go on top of the table from the friendliest people over at Alamo Glass on Henderson (they subsequently supplied me with the glass that's in the trunk of my car, which I plan on painting and then blogging about). And, well, above (and below) you'll see some artsy shots of my new table centerpiece. I'm calling the thing in the middle of the display a terrarium as it has a couple kinds of dirt and a couple plants, too. And some shells, though the shells don't really add too much to the whole thing. I clearly got camera happy when taking pictures for this post. I can't even explain what happened. I had no pictures stored on the camera's memory drive and suddenly, there were dozens of pictures of these little jars and ceramic flowers. No explanation at all.

A great thing about these plants is that they are basically really hard to kill, so they require almost no work at all on my part, which is good because I'm prone to planticide. Though I do have one complaint about the succulents--those little green beady things fall off really easily. More than one stem is now a mere stump. Too bad. I think I was multitasking a bit too much the day I bought the plant or you'd be seeing a better looking succulent on display. Also the use of a succulent in a terrarium officially makes me "green." So there, I'm green.

(And I can't seem to fix the amount of space between the end of the text and the start of the photos. I'm sorry. Believe me, it bothers me more than it bothers you. I used to work as a page designer and I'm predisposed to abhor the poor layout options provided to me by Blogger. I'm only asking for one little pica of space here!!)