Wedding Tree Guestbook

This weekend two of our friends from college tied the knot. The wedding was at the Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and every detail of their wedding was as creatively planned out as their venue. It was incredibly personalized and impressive. And I wish I had 1) explored the museum and 2) taken more pictures. I was not on my game.

Instead of a traditional guestbook, the couple wanted their guests to fingerprint a tree. I love this idea! Yet another reason why I'm sad Pinterest was not around when I got married.  Etsy has a number of artists selling these tree guestbooks. Lots of variations on this idea. You can even ask your guests to fingerprint balloons. People are so clever.

When I was asked if I could draw a tree for this I, of course, said yes. I didn't guarantee it would be awesome. But I would definitely try it. This was my first serious ink/marker drawing and I was slightly nervous. Ink is so... permanent. You can't erase or paint over mess-ups. Mess-ups require starting over.

After getting over my fear of failure, this ended up being a fun little project. Naturally, I first lightly sketched things out with (erasable) pencil to make sure I liked where I was headed. I did a lot of Googling for images of trees. Since Hurricane Sandy gave me the gift of time I was able to finish this rather quickly. In a matter of days! That almost never happens.

This was my sneak peak during the hurricane...

I was able to finish just before the winds got scary that night and before the heavy light flickering. I was pleased with the results.

Luckily my friends were also pleased and my drawing made it to the wedding. I even got to see it in action.

I particularly like how people made sure to space out their prints appropriately. Well done people. Well done.

It was awesome to have been able to contribute something to this special wedding. I celebrated by having another glass of wine and making my way to the dance floor.

Congrats again to the newlyweds!

Election Day

Only less than 24 hours left until the campaign ads are over. We can do this people.

Hunkering Down

If you've watched any of the Hurricane Sandy coverage you know that the number one thing you should have been doing to prepare for the storm was hunker down. And, indeed, that is what I did.

Sandy resulted in two days off of work for me. While I spent a majority of my time watching storm coverage, watching the lights flicker, checking the basement for leaks, and just, overall, being on edge, I found lots of time to catch up on stuff around the house. Aside from the hurricane going on outside, it was actually quite pleasant.

In addition to washing all of our dirty laundry, I worked through some art projects that I've accumulated. Eventually I'll share the finished result of each. But both are for other people, so I want to make sure each reaches their respective person first. :)

I also came to the realization mid-day yesterday that my hobbies are so... shall we say, "traditional"... that I could actually do them without electricity. And without other people. I'm not sure what this says about me.

We never did lose power. I'll have to pull the plug on my bathtub full of water. But I'm okay with that!

Doors for Charity

I was asked to paint some doors for a local charity gala. I wish I could say that my contribution for this  event would directly be raising money. But it's not. This is more of an aesthetic donation... a sitting-in-the-background-and-being-pretty donation. Decorations are important too :)

The doors I was working with were these old closet doors. Their purpose is to hide some unsightly items.

I was asked to paint them in a Japanese theme. Things that come to mind are: bamboo, cherry trees, and other nature-like things. Like this:

Source

Source

  

Selfishly, I didn't want to spend more than a few hours on this project, so I went with a simple cherry tree theme. Here's the little sketch I drafted up. Yes, there are all sorts of copyrighted images. I get it. But this is for charity. It's cool.

First step was to paint the doors black. Luckily we had plenty of black paint left over from the garage project. And it was glossy. It was pretty much made for this project.

Before starting I debated with myself if it would be easier to start with a black canvas, or sketch out my image and then paint around it in black. The black canvas won. However, I knew I was going to be in for a couple layers of the white paint. Luckily they make paint for that purpose. It's called primer. And we have lots of that too!

And so i started painting away. It's actually quite fun to paint on such a large canvas. I need to do this more often. After one coat, my painting was looking as expected: streaky.

But a few coats later: success.

Step two was to add a bit of color. I rummaged through my paint box and found some paints to do the job.

Oh, wait. Backup. I did go back and prime out some flowers. This helped the red color pop more than it was doing directly on the black. And here we have it. All done.

PicMonkey: Halloween Edition

Two back-to-back posts. How unlike me!

I often use the free photo editing capabilities of PicMonkey. I especially like them to create simple photo collages, which is something that's more tedious to do in Photoshop. Anyhow, they have some Halloween filters available to get you in the holiday spirit.

Introducing.... Meatsie the Vampire. No need to turn myself into a vampire when I have a dog readily available.

Seriously, hours of fun.