Sketches of the Month

I made a new resolution.



I wanted to create more art. But time is hard to find around here. So I bought myself a small sketchbook and a travel pack of drawing pencil. So now when I'm sitting on the couch watching tv I can multitask.

And so far it seems to be working.

Baby M passed out on my chest

 

A toy marble

 

Baby M in her toy glasses

This last one if my favorite <3 It took me a bit longer than planned. (But people are hard to draw!) But I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

Three drawings in the last three weeks ain't bad. Although funny story... I first titled this post "Sketches of the Week" before realizing my mistake. Ha ha ha...

My true goal would be to get back to painting more. So if someone knows how to make oil painting more portable, please share!

 

A Portrait of Toy Cars

I finally finished up M's painting!

Completed 2015
24"x48"
Oil on Canvas

I had no shame hanging it unfinished in his room, but it is nice to finally finish. All that's been lingering was the window for the bus. I first posted about his painting back in September. I think ultimately it took me about three months. For some reason I initially thought things would go much faster. But let's be honest... they never do. I can remember making fun of my mother for projects that would seemingly last her forever. Now I completely understand :)

I guess next up I'll owe a painting to the baby girl. But I figure I have at least two years before I need to worry about that :)

I'm on a bit of a streak here finishing up projects, and even have another painting that I've finally finished and signed. (That will be three for the year!) Pictures of that one will be coming sometime soon.

Baby Girl's Argyle Nursery

Continuing with the room decorating....

I think I'm about done with the nursery. Like everything else, it's been a work in progress. This weekend we bought replacement hardware for the crib hardware that we lost. So from a functional standpoint, the nursery is now ready to go! And tonight my butterflies arrived. Mike rolled his eyes. I however was super excited and hung them immediately :)

I

I do have a couple details to clean up still. Like finding some art for the picture frames on the ledge. Not a big rush though. The pictures of Baby M are still cute :)



I didn't really have any plans going into this project. All I knew was that I wanted to keep the original argyle pattern but change out the colors.

Here's a little before and after:

 

I also decided to get rid of the accent wall:

From there I found the hot air balloon idea on Pinterest (of course). Then saw the world map print on Etsy and thought it was a good match. You know... hot air balloons... travel... maps...

So that's that.
I have at least one fan...

A New Room for the Big Boy

I finally finished the car painting!! But I haven't taken pictures yet so instead I'll share pictures of M's big boy room.

It feels like I just finished decorating the nursery for him. It's hard to believe it has been more than two years! And now we have moved our little guy into a big boy room. <tears>

With the impending arrival of baby #2 we decided to move M out of the nursery and into the former guest room. And luckily we had already painted the guest room a blue color, so the move didn't involve much painting :) (I'm patting myself on the back for that one.) I did end up painting a white border along the ceiling of the room. The room doesn't get much sun during the day so I thought this would lighten things up a bit.

 

As you can see I've already hung the car painting. It's actually not quite complete in these pictures but I was using it as a place holder.

 

It seems like this transition took a couple months. Between moving out the guest room furniture, painting, acquiring a bed, and adding some accessories it took me awhile. I'm moving slowly these days...

 

The dresser was recycled from me. It's actually a piece that I bought second hand about two years ago. We decided that rather than buying the kid new furniture we would finally buy ourselves some adult bedroom furniture :) Actually a lot of things in this room are recycled. The dresser. The bed we got from M's cousin. The orange side tables are recycled and painted Ikea tables. And the little desk and rocking chair came from M's grandparents. Pretty much the only thing we moved out of the nursery was the rug.

And what's a room without a tribute to our favorite dog breed? 

I bought the print from Etsy and had it printed. The only thing missing is a blue eye ;)

Up next is the new nursery. Then I can take a break from redecorating!

New Painting for the Kid

Back before M was born I had false expectations of how much free time I'd have after he was born. When I was working on his nursery I left a blank wall for a future painting. Silly me. That wall is still bare two years later.

Luckily things have calmed down a bit since the newborn stage and even since he turned one. And I'm managing to do some painting again. I'm finally working on a painting for M. I'm actually kind of happy that I waited. Instead of painting him something that I thought he might like, I'm painting something that I know he likes: cars. Or as he calls them, "trucks."



This is a portrait of four of his toy cars. They are all different sizes in real life but I've scaled them so they are roughly the same size in the painting.

Here are a few more progress shots:



Things aren't feeling quite as daunting now that I've made some headway on the police car. I may actually finish this year :) Of course this will probably never hang in M's actual nursery. We'll be switching him to a new "big boy" room in the next couple of months.



If you're interested in more frequent updates, I've been posting them to my new Instagram account.

Silhouettes

Oh hey there. I'm a month shy of it being a year since my last post. Yikes! I don't care what anyone says... life gets super busy after having a kid. Projects are far and few between but I do manage to work on some things occasionally.

And I managed to do a painting! That will be the next post.

For now, my silhouettes of the kids...

I actually finished these a few months ago but hadn't gotten them printed. My initial plan was to do the whole family. But... well... 2 out of 4 isn't bad. I think I'll just keep them as the kids. Nobody cares about the parents anymore anyways!

The exciting part about these is that I actually had them printed on art paper which is something new for me. Obviously you can't tell this through the screen. I uploaded my images to fineartamerica.com and ordered prints through the website. They turned out pretty good actually. I'll have to keep them in mind in the future.

Baptism Cake

This post has been sitting as a draft for a couple of months now. We had a baptism for Baby G in February so yes, its been that long.

Much like this post, it took us a while to get things squared away for the baptism. At 6 months old, Baby G was looking sharp in his 12-18 month baptism outfit. Yes, that's right.... 12-18 month.

We invited mostly family to the baptism and I tried keeping the food pretty simple. Chicken salad sandwiches and pulled pork... from Costco, of course. However I really wanted to make the cake. I'm determined to get back into doing little crafty projects here and there. So I tasked myself with making a cake.



As usual Pinterest had some good pictures for inspiration. Apparently baptism cakes can get pretty extravagant. Obviously, that's not what I was looking for. But here are some ideas I did like: here, here, and here. Basically anything that looked like it involved just placing a cross on the cake I was all about.

Since hours in the day seem pretty tight these days, I spaced out the cake making during one week. I baked and froze the cakes early in the week. And then made the fondant a couple days before I needed it. And actually, like the monkey cake I made, I saved some time by also buying a container of fondant. I bought some Fondarific fondant from Amazon and I must say, I'm a fan! So basically all the parts were prepared ahead of time and assembly happened the night before the baptism.



My cake making skills are still far from perfect. But luckily more layers can be used to hide things.

Dang. There's still a thumb print.

The white fondant covering the cake is my homemade stuff. And the blue is the store-bought.  I must say the store bought stuff rolls out much smoother. The consistency is very close to that of Play-doh. So its very fun to work with :)

Decorating basically involved three steps:

1) Wrapping a ribbon around the cake. I found this handy little tool in my toolbox.

2) Adding a cross on top.

3) Adding candy pearls around the cross and ribbon.

 

Step 3 was definitely the most tedious. Every couple of minutes one or two of little pearls would fall on the floor and bounce around for a bit. But in the end it got done. And I even got to bed at a reasonable hour!

Memory Box for Baby

So I had a baby..... almost 6 months ago. I just want to confirm that not much gets done when you have a baby. Okay, let me clarify. Not much gets done except for feeding the baby, taking care of the baby, playing with the baby, and loving the baby. You know... taking care of another human being. In my spare time now I'm generally running around the house like a mad woman trying to pick stuff up, throw in a load of laundry, or cook some sort of meal. I'm not complaining though. Really! But it's true what they say, that your life really changes after the baby comes. And it's really hard to comprehend until it actually happens! Before Baby G arrived I really worried that I wouldn't have the patience to take care of someone else. I really enjoyed my free time. But honestly, giving up most of my free time has been easy. Totally worth it :)

I do occasionally find some time for a little project. That painting I planned for the nursery? It's still a blank canvas. I might finish before Baby G is 18. But smaller projects happen here and there.

One of the first projects I did after Baby G's birth was create a memory box with all of his birth items. I got the idea from Pinterest. I obviously wanted to hold on to all of these things, so why not display them? I started by ordering a shadow box off of Amazon. (So much easier than taking a 2-month old to the store.)

The shadow box arrived. It sat for awhile. And then one day during nap time I gathered everything I wanted to use. I am most proud that I managed to hold on to all 3 of our hospital bands. Go me.

Ugh. I just realized I misspelled "hospital" not once, but twice. Ignore, please! I'm not fixing it.

Then came assembly. Basically I used the hospital blanket as a backdrop for everything else. This was my first go at it.

It looks a little cramped, doesn't it? It hung on the wall like this for awhile until finally one day I cut the blanket up. Why I tried to stuff an entire blanket in that frame, I don't know. Here's how it ended up.

Not bad.

Okay, off I go to start the day!

The Nursery

The nursery is done. All we need is the baby.

You may recall the argyle walls that were done a couple months ago. Aside from the argyle, I didn't really want any particular theme for the room. With no theme we'd be free to decorate with just about anything that was fun and/or cute.

Like this crazy thing...

This was actually a Christmastime white elephant gift that came from Colombia. It's pretty entertaining. You can't see it in this picture but there is a toilet on the back, which makes it even better.








Clearly I still have some work to do. One day there will be a painting on that blue wall.

Some of my favorite things:

The book wall, featuring books we've received as gifts. This kid better love to read.

 

The mobile I made here:

Meatball's twin:

Baby soccer cleats. They aren't meant to be decor but somehow they've become a prominent display on the dresser:



So sure, the baby might not be sleeping here immediately. But that's okay. In the meantime Meatball will continue hunting around looking for toys on the floor.