Hello world! I've been up to an intense week of painting and crafting. I'm not usually one who does much crafting, but earlier this week, I took to doing a few DIY projects with a close friend of mine. We started the day off with decorating glass bottles with some colored gems. These bottles can be used as containers or for decoration or in my case, a little holders for a tea light. Somehow, I managed to squeeze a tiny little tea light into my glass bottle. My friend and I hot-glued the colored gems onto the glass (Note: This is easier said than done). It looks great in my opinion and that's what matters! The next project we embarked on was taking an old and very large T-shirt and redoing it so it A) fit and B) looked nicer. Basically, we cut the side seams of the shirt and, then trimmed it so it won't be so "boxy." Once the side seams were gone, we cut several thin, little strips on each side of the shirt, and then took the strips and knotted them together to hold the shirt back together. Just so you know, if you can sew, it would be certainly easier to do that than knot every little strip of fabric. The knotting process took us approximately two hours...and that's with us both working on a single shirt. Anyhow, we cut off the sleeves to make it a tank top and we also clipped off the extra fabric at the bottom of the shirt (since the shirt was way too long). The shirt fit and it looked pretty good in our opinions! I took on my own little crafty project by making a picture to hang in my dorm room. To make this, I took old sheet music and stained it with tea to give it an old look. I also took a quote about music, wrote it out on a piece of copy paper, and then tea stained that. I pieced various pieces of music to make a collage and then placed the quotation on an area of the background that I figured was kind of bare. Once I had that, I decided to paint a violin on a piece of copy paper. For me, painting on copy paper was significantly more difficult than painting on canvas. I used my own violin as a model and painted it the way that I wanted it to look. Finally when the paint dried, I cut out the violin, pasted it on the background, and framed the entire piece of artwork! Crafty? My final art project for the summer will not be finished until either tomorrow or Monday. This is literally the LARGEST painting project I've ever undertaken on my own. Stay tuned to my blog posts to hear about this enormous painting project. In the last few days, I've made significant progress in my painting! It's more than halfway done, but still, I anticipate the completion of my painting by Saturday. That leaves me enough time to finish every detail and also find an appropriate frame for it. When I've completed the painting, I'll post a picture here for you all to see. Meanwhile, I'm still working on the painting...or better to say, waiting for the paint to dry so I can continue work.
Today, I'm starting on a painting that I should have gotten around to perhaps a year or two ago. Back when I started painting, a friend of mother's asked me to make her a painting, so she'd have an original before I got famous. Ha, the famous part isn't going to happen, but still, I promised her I'd paint her something sometime when I had a little bit of free time.
The landscape I'm painting this time will be of the Gem Lakes, her favorite place in the Aiken area. It'll be a calm and beautiful painting when it's completed. Meanwhile, the canvas is barely coated in paint. I started off with a blank canvas today, and God, that's intimidating. Sometimes, I have trouble starting a painting because I don't know how to begin or how to not make a mistake from the very start. From previous experiences, I know the painting process gets easier as I go along. Meanwhile, I had to make some mark on the canvas to actually make some form of progress. So far, I've generally sketched out the picture and I've laid in the background of lake water, sky, and ground. It's rough, but I'm confident that this painting will be finished eventually. Key word: eventually. Don't rush me. Hello to all! It's seems that I've been slacking with the blog writing. For that, I apologize, and I also propose a "creative" solution to remedy this problem. For the two months, I'll be blogging about my artistic/creative endeavors. For two solid months, I want to fill every moment I can with something creative and exciting. It'll be a summer long adventure of creative writing, playing music, composing music, painting, and much more! Already, I've been busy doing artistic jobs, but starting now, I'll start writing about my latest projects. So why exactly did I want to take on this challenge? Before the summer began, I vowed I wanted to enjoy the summer to relax. In my definition of relax, I take my completely blank calendar and fill it with all the activities I want to do. Happiness for me comes with doing anything productive and not mindless. So far, I've had a summer of absolute bliss! It's absolutely splendid to get a chance to enjoy things that you normally don't have time for! Check back tomorrow for my next blog about my summer "internship" adventures! Just a few days ago, I finished up my submission for a little contest called "Aiken's Retrospective" and I'm happy to say that after several hours of hard work slaving over a canvas with paint-coated fingers, my painting is ready to hang in the Aiken Center for the Arts. Many people wonder what kind of steps go into creating a work of art. Shall I demostrate? A picture says a thousand words, so let me present the gradual step-by-step evolution of my painting. |
AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
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