Here is my latest work in progress.  The idea behind this one is that I rarely see African American women portrayed as fairies or in fantasy settings in art so I decided to create some of this type of art myself.  Here it is at the beginning stage which I think I posted a pic of before:

And this is what it looks like now:

As you can see I've added a couple of larger flowers beside her and added a bit more interest to the background and added some branches to the tree.  I'm intending to add some more flowers to her dress but I don't think they will be so close together all the way down. 

I hope this painting turns out ok. I'm a little nervous!!

I've been busy the last few days getting back onto my creativity bandwagon.  I had two weeks recently when I didn't paint anything and didn't feel like it either.  So I decided to forget about perfection and selling and focus on trying new methods and techniques and of course having fun! 

I cleared my desk area and that helped to motivate me and then I revisited some ideas I had about trying different creative projects.  I even ordered some books on collage and mixed media to further motivate me.  So I took the plunge and decided to play with some ideas just for creativity's sake.

Here are two bookmarks I made by glueing watercolour paper onto brown Kraft card and then painting on the watercolour side. I glued the watercolour paper because the brown card is quite thin on its own and also because I wanted a familiar surface to paint on.

For the black and white bookmark, I glued some decorative paper onto each end of the brown Kraft card and then drew the illustration onto the watercolour paper in the middle using black watersoluble ink.  For the skin of her face and neck I used a wet brush and pushed the ink around gently to colour it in. 

The tree bookmark is completely in watercolour paint.

They could both be used on their own or in their plastic pouches like the one shown. The plastic pouch is actually quite a bit longer than the bookmarks but I distorted the image when I tried to get it to fit on the page!  I added the red ribbon.

I also tried experimenting with negative painting in watercolour and this is what I came up with.  It turned into a mixed media piece as well when I decided to cut out the shape of a butterfly (well I hope it looks like one!) on green card and stick it in the middle.

All of these projects were fun and I'll try and keep up with experimenting like this so I don't get into a slump again.