Ever since I took the photo of my dog, Bella, in our backyard the year we adopted her I had a vision of drawing a graphic style image of her cute dog head and making a repetitive, colorful, Warhol style picture of her. I finally completed my vision in late August 2026. My sweet Bella laid by my side on the green carpet in our dining room a large part of the time when I was working on this painting. I particularly like the picture I took of her sitting behind the single yellow Bella artwork. 🙂
I’m not used to drawing large scale images so tackling drawing the back of my house with a portion of our backyard was not the kind of drawing I usually do and was a challenge for me. I really like how this image came out. I did many different thumbnail sized trials before coloring in my picture in my sketchbook. I was satisfied with the end result.
When I teach art to kids I always make sure to tell them that there are no mistakes in art. This drawing is an example of that. It was originally just the one large flower in the middle of the sketchbook but I hated how plain and boring the flower looked especially as the color of the flower was primarily white. Many times when you hate an outcome of something that is when real creativity kicks in and a “what do I have to lose attitude” sets in that enables amazing art to emerge. I knew this drawing needed something to make it pop so I took and chance and went wild with my imagination of repeating the flower image and adding vibrant colors to the piece to brighten it up. What was once a hated drawing in my sketchbook is now one of my favorites.
Here is the flower in which the drawing was inspired.
While visiting my parents in Cincinnati Mom and I got to do art together. We each did a version of this plant that was out on her deck. I love how you can take the same subject and have such different results – each beautiful expressions from the individuals who created them.
Today I wanted to play around with some new micro pens that I got. The flowers a friend recently gave me proved to be an excellent subject 🙂
I’d been wanting to do more art again but have been feeling out of practice. That lack of practice has been preventing me from doing any art. (Stupid vicious cycle!) Yesterday I said, “Screw it” to the stupid cycle and to being afraid of looking bad. I picked up a permanent black pen (not erasable pencil) and dove right in. Looking at my wooden figure I decided that was as good as anything to draw in my sketchbook. This is what came from it…
What I love about art is that you always get something out of it and you often learn from your work. What I learned from this piece was:
I made this around Valentine’s Day after prepping for an art lesson about Andy Warhol. I love the repeated imagery and vibrant colors Andy Warhol used in his artwork. For my repeated stamp I chose to draw a heart with “Love” written in it since I figured we can all use a bit more love these days 🙂
My Dad recently gave me his stamp collection from childhood with permission to do what I want with it. I’ve been fun making various designs with them. He had a whole bunch of various Queen Elizabeth stamps and after her recent passing I thought it would be fun to make various art pieces out of them.
I recently started sending international postcards to random people through a website called postcrossing.com. It’s a way for people to connect with others in a more personal way through postcards. Some people enjoy getting homemade cards or enjoy cards with stamps on it so here are cards I made for them.
