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The Lost Paintings….

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The Lost Paintings via lilblueboo.comThe Lost Paintings 2 via lilblueboo.comThe Lost Paintings 3 via lilblueboo.comAs an artist I love looking back on work I’ve done to see how my style has changed and progressed over the years. I’ve always been diligent about taking pictures and documenting paintings and projects but there are a few that got away. I refer to them as my “lost paintings.” I know other artists probably go through the same thing. My friend Shari sold her first painting at age 19 and in her exact words it was her “absolute favorite painting” that she ever painted and she doesn’t have a picture of it.

There are two “lost paintings” that I wish I had photos of:
One was my first “real” painting as an art minor in college.  A distant acquaintance of my husband’s family bought it in 1999 for a few hundred dollars. It is one of a pair of paintings I did…..the unsold half of the pair “Ephemeral” hangs in our house today. I don’t even think I signed the painting I sold.
The other painting is a reproduction of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” that I painted as a mural in our first house. It was almost 9 feet tall and 4 feet wide on a wall as you climbed the stairs to the 2nd floor. The finished mural had a gold dusting I did over it to make it shimmer just slightly. The photos to the left were taken of the mural in its beginning stages. Almost to the day I finished the mural the house next to my childhood home came up for sale and we jumped on it. The mural helped sell our townhouse but because I was finishing my MBA, starting a new job, packing a house, renovating a new house…..I never got a photo of the finished product. I’ve wondered many times if it is still there or if it has been painted over. I never signed it. No owner will ever know who painted it.
Update:  My mother read this blog post today and says she is going to visit and knock on the door of my old townhouse when she is back in NC to ask if the mural is still there 🙂

Ten Dollar DIY Hand-print Plaque

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You have probably seen all the DIY hand-print plaque kits in the craft stores…. they don’t always look that great…. or turn out that great.   I wanted to get a professional one done for Sienna but I couldn’t find a place that creates them closer than 100 miles from Palm Desert (plus they can get pretty pricey).

Ten Dollar DIY Hand-print Plaque via lilblueboo.com
I bought a Lil’ Hands kit from JoAnn’s.  It comes with non-toxic paper clay  to cast your child’s hand which doesn’t dry fast so if you mess up you can retry before you pour the plaster into the mold. The set also comes with paint and ribbon to decorate but I didn’t think these did the plaque justice.  I used green and pink Folk Art acrylic paint to add polka dots, paint the handprint, and paint the lettering “Sienna” and “1 1/2 Years.”
To make the handprint plaque look more like ceramic than plaster I used Krylon Triple-Thick Crystal Clear Glaze as a finish.  It is a glaze that you don’t need a kiln for!  It also protects the plaster from denting or cracking.
Once the plaque was dry, I cut a large piece of 2 inch pink polka dot ribbon to hang it from.  Hand-print preserved! Memories on a budget: kit was $9.99 but I used a 40% off coupon, paint runs less than a dollar for 2 oz, already had the glaze and ribbon!

Mac Photo Books

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I love my Mac. I really, really love my Mac. I love iPhoto. I love Photo Booth. I love iWeb. It makes everything so easy because all the different programs “talk” to each other. Today I realized that I probably need a memory upgrade. I guess having over 4,000 photos and a couple hundred hours of home movies has started to slow down my trusty little computer. That 4,000 doesn’t even include anything from 2007. I already archived those on DVD and sent them to my husband’s office in case the house burns down!

Sorry, this post is starting to sound like a Mac commercial.
Now the real reason for this post….Mac photo books. I love how easy these books are to make and the quality is unbelievable. Once I set the book up by clicking and dragging photos and adding some text, I hit the button “Buy Book” and the published photo book magically shows up on my doorstep a few days later. (Okay, so I had to enter some credit card and shipping information when I first set up my Mac two years ago.) I use iPhoto to make a memory book for Sienna’s grandparents each Christmas. I include all my favorite photos, Sienna’s scanned artwork, and excerpts from my journal.
If you don’t know me then you don’t know that I am obsessively organized. I save everything, label everything, file everything, write down lists of everything….I have notebooks, upon notebooks of stuff. I just have this “thing” about preserving a story, a legacy….it is super-crazy-OCD-nostalgia (read my 2003 artist statement and you’ll see how out of hand it gets at times). When it comes time to put the photo book together each year I have a really hard time narrowing down what to include….I almost have a nervous breakdown when doing it because I just want to include every memory, minute-by-minute. In a perfect world my yearly photo book would be 10,000 pages long (and would probably cost $10,000).
Below are some excerpts from the 2008 book. I couldn’t post the whole thing because it was just too large a file. I hope it will give you some ideas for your own book.
Excerpts From Sienna 2008 Book 

Excerpts From Sienna 2008 Booklilblueboo

If you don’t have a Mac you can download software products such as My Publisher or Kodak Gallery to make a similar photo book. There are so many different things you can do with these programs. Here are just a few ideas….please share more if you have them!

Child’s Art Portfolio: Scan all your children’s drawings and artwork. Add titles, dates and descriptions.
Family Recipe Book: Take pictures of all your favorite dishes and include the recipes.
Story Book: Let your child draw the pictures and dictate the story to you.
Memorial Book: When my grandfather died I took all the best pictures of his infectious smile, the ones with his funny hat, with his roses etc and made huge displays for his wake so that everyone could remember him that way. My next project is to make all of those into a book with the beautiful eulogy quoted throughout.

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