Gearing Up for Encaustic

It's been too long since I've taken any studio art classes. All my focus has been on developing my print and pattern designs (see my progress at my new website.) But next week I'm taking a class on Encaustic with Caryl St. Ama at Glendale Community College sponsored by R & F Handmade Paints.




The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in. Encaustic paint is wax-based using beeswax, resin and pigment. It's kept in a liquid state on a heated palette. After it's applied to an absorbent surface it's reheated so that the paint fuses (hence the use of the Greek word.) Not to be confused with the term ‘caustic,’ which refers to a corrosive chemical reaction - not at all what happens with encaustic.

Caryl St. Ama, "Home Turf", Encaustic and photo transfer on wood panel, 12" x 9", 2014

Caryl's work is inspiring me to gather bits of textiles and paper to embed in the wax. I'm really interested in the concept of using textiles to create art that I can then turn into textile prints.

TEXTILE>ART>TEXTILE

Maybe then I'll use the printed textile in a new encaustic. Sort of like looking at a mirror with a mirror, goes on forever.

My next challenge is to come up with new materials. Fortunately the paints are included in the cost of the workshop, so the most important thing I'll need are the supports. For this class I think I'll try a few different sizes and thicknesses to see what I like best (linking to the Amazon page so I can find them again...)

Ampersand Art Encausticbord - Cradled - 1.5" Profile - 12"x12"

Ampersand Encausticbord 11 in. x 14 in. 1 1/2 in. each

I'll also need natural bristle brushes, and don't want to ruin any good ones, so think I'll try Loew-Cornell 2-Inch Wood Handle Natural Bristle Gesso Brush or maybe this set of three Royal & Langnickel Large Area Artist Brush Set- Three Brown Camel Hair Brushes which would give me 1", 2" and 3".

That should get me started.....

Collaged Photo Display Box

As usual, I was stumped on the thought of a Christmas gift for my mom. Let's face it, when you get to a certain age you pretty much have every object you want, need or desire. I figured I could somehow use the photos I had from our summer travels. Having done endless photo albums, calendars, mouse pads etc. etc. etc., I wanted to find something new to do.

In the days before digital cameras, when you took a roll of film to the drive-thru photo processing shop, Mom always had a bowl on the coffee table where she'd toss all the photos. It was an un-edited, un-retouched, un-Photoshoped collection of life as it had happened. With that in mind, I decided to gather up all the ephemera I'd collected from our trip and collage it onto a box that I'd fill with photos. I did have to pick and choose the photos. By the time everyone added their pictures to the Flickr page there were over 3000. I cut back to 180, which fit nicely into the box I found.

Finished Photo Collage Box

I started out with an appropriately sized box that I found on Amazon:

 

I put a thin coat of gesso onto the outside of the box. (In retrospect, I would have painted the inside of the box black at this point. I think it would have been easier than doing it at the end.) I was really happy with the quality of the box. I didn't need to do any sanding either before or after the gesso coat. I used my standard go to cheap gesso -  Windsor & Newton Acrylic White Gesso. 

Box after priming with gesso

I decided to cover the whole box in maps to have a uniform background to glue all the little bits and pieces I'd collected on our travels. I used a map of Prague for the top, and Berlin for the bottom. This gave me a sort of "neutral" ground to work on and provided continuity. If I weren't such a pack rat, and hadn't collected such a large pile of ephemera I could have stopped here and been quite happy. I picked sections of the maps that had the location of where we stayed and the neighborhoods where we spent the most time. I used Mod Podge to glue it down. I didn't do a coat over the top of the maps - just used the Mod Podge like glue. (Acrylic gel would work fine as well, but it's more expensive, so I usually keep Mod Podge around for these crafty projects.)

Maps

Then I gathered my bits and pieces together and started to sort through them. I picked bits from our favorite restaurants, museums and gallery exhibits and added in train tickets and menu images. Obviously, I carry a big bag when I travel and constantly stuff it with the throwaways that cross my path. Anything that has any sort of interesting imagery I keep. (Like the sheet from the Czech Mucha postage stamps.)

travel ephemera

I cut everything up, glued it down and using a watered down acrylic painted little house symbols on the map to show where we stayed.

work in progress

back of the collaged box

one side of the box - Prague memorabilia on top, Berlin on the bottom

box with photos inside

side of the box

top of the box - memories of Prague

List of Paper Sizes (in inches and millimeters)

Size	Height x Width (mm)	Height x Width (in)
4A0	2378 x 1682 mm	93.6 x 66.2 in
2A0	1682 x 1189 mm	66.2 x 46.8 in
A0	1189 x 841 mm	46.8 x 33.1 in
A1	841 x 594 mm	33.1 x 23.4 in
A2	594 x 420 mm	23.4 x 16.5 in
A3	420 x 297 mm	16.5 x 11.7 in
A4	297 x 210 mm	11.7 x 8.3 in
A5	210 x 148 mm	8.3 x 5.8 in
A6	148 x 105 mm	5.8 x 4.1 in
A7	105 x 74 mm	4.1 x. 2.9 in
A8	74 x 52 mm	2.9 x 2.0 in
A9	52 x 37 mm	2.0 x 1.5 in
A10	37 x 26 mm	1.5 x 1.0 in

How to Create a Grid in Photoshop

I wanted to make a grid to lay up 32 cm (1.25") squares with a space of 1 cm between each square. The Photoshop Help was no help, so here's what I figured out to do in Photoshop (this assumes you know the basics about Photoshop as I haven't gone into complete detail):

1. After much trial and error, and being decidedly mathematically challenged, I created a new document 35 mm by 35 mm. (to get about 1 cm of space betweeen the squares)
    
2. I went to: Select » All
    
3. I chose Edit » Stroke. For Stroke, I entered a value of 1 px; in the Color box I chose black, because I wanted to be able to easily see the gridlines. For Location I chose Center, then clicked OK. I then created a second line using the rectangular marquee tool to create a marquee 1 cm inside the edge & again Edit » Stroke (using all the same selections in the dialog box.)
    
4. I chose Edit » Define Pattern and named it 35 cm grid, then clicked OK.
    
5. I created another file that's 8 1/2 x 11 and 300 dpi.
    
6. I created a New Layer.
    
7. I went to Edit » Fill, chose Pattern, then chose my pattern. (Under Blending the Mode is Normal and Opacity is 100%)
    
8. I then manually centered the image on the page.
    
9. Choose File » Print. I got a notice that the image is larger than the paper, but it doesn't matter how it crops since the image is centered on the page.

If you'd like to just use the grid I made, here's a .pdf file of the 8 1/2 x 11 sheet.

Free e-book on Copyright Issues for Artists

Interweave Press has recently posted a free e-book titled "Know Your Rights: Copyright 101 for Artists".

image is from the Interweave Press website

(According to my reading of the book I can use the photo above, from their website, since I credited them, plus I don't profit in any way from using it. Hopefully, I'm interpreting it correctly....)

The relatively short (11 pages) pdf file uses a q & a format and covers, an an understandable and not-too-legalese way, the issues around copyright as it applies to artists, knitters and designers. Seems like a good thing to have on your computer to refer to when questions arise.

Quotations By and About Artists

Random quotes about art. They may or may not be exact.. When I can, I'll note the source.

“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.” Ad Reinhardt

“The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” Pablo Picasso

"My art becomes a way of telling myself the questions I am dealing with in my life, a means of self-reflection... That is a big issue in art--the issue of content versus not necessarily the form, but something to do with the realization of a self-fulfilled form which conveys aesthetic feeling." Barbara T. Smith, in Nancy Buchanan, "Barbara Smith:Communication/Communion, the Portrait Review," Monogram 5 (June 1976)


"We are always innocent, unless, from laziness or for convenience, we decide to overlook the novelty of the moment, this particular now." Brian Eno, May 1987 (printed in "Opal Information #5)

“No great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be a great artist.” Oscar Wilde

“In art as in love, instinct is enough. ” Anatole France

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”  René Magritte

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”  Edmond De Goncourt

“All artists are willing to suffer for their work. But why are so few prepared to learn to draw?”  Banksy
  
"Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight. " Auguste Rodin

“I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”  Marcel Duchamp

“The business of art lies just in this, -- to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible.”  Leo Tolstoy in What is Art? 

"Painting is stronger than I am. It makes me do what it wants." Pablo Picasso

“Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.”  Robert Henri

“What you see is what you see.”  Frank Stella

“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.”  E.M. Forster

“To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.” Akira Kurosawa

"I love black, but the best blacks with the most meaning can only be done in full light of day--noontime blacks. Dark vision demands its own clarity. I am never agitated in executing forms, but travel rather as if the terrain of the paper was land-mined. When this journey is completed, a drawing is born." Rico Lebrun, "Notes on Drawing," in Rico Lebrun: Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), p. 23

“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”  Frida Kahlo

“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.” Oscar Wilde

“The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.” Robert Henri

“Art is science made clear.”  Jean Cocteau

"With Vishnu and Brahma, Shiva is part of the trinity of the Hindu universe and represents the male principle. While he is essentially a passive, self-contained figure, Shiva also embodies the processes of destruction and regeneration; his title as lord of the lingam is but one indication of his potency and capacity for creation and rebirth. Shakti, his consort is female and active. She represents desire, movement, and change and upholds the cosmos through "vibration". Julian Cox, "Intimate Visions," in Spirit into Matter: The Photographs of Edmund Teske (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004), p. 24.

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”  Edward Hopper

“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” Willa Cather

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.”  Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead

“An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.”  Andy Warhol

“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual. ” Vladimir Nabokov

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. ”  Ray Bradbury

" I feel I'm finished when I get the impression I'm working on somebody else's painting." Lucien Freud, Gayford, Martin (2007, Sept. 22). "Lucian Freud: marathon man". Telegraph.co.uk. 

“One eye sees, the other feels.”  Paul Klee

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”  Arthur Rimbaud in Illuminations

“The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out of the heart.”  Charles Bukowski

“Art is either revolution or plagiarism.”  Paul Gauguin

"Ms. Gilot clearly was a competent painter, but whereas, with Picasso, it seems that every painting is an adventure, every mark or stroke the registration of a thought or impulse in real time, her works resemble dutifully completed assignments for a class in how to paint like Picasso." Johnson, Ken (2012, May 11) "A Portrait of the Artist As an Old Man in Love", The New York Times, p. C29

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.”  Stephen King in On Writing

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”  Pablo Picasso

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” Leonardo da Vinci

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”  Thomas Merton in  No Man Is an Island

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”  Edgar Degas

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”  W. Somerset Maugham in The Painted Veil

“Art is not a thing; it is a way. ”  Elbert Hubbard

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”  C.G. Jung

“We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”  Henry James in The Middle Years

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.”  Henri Cartier-Bresson

“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.”  Edward Weston

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”  Émile Zola

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.”  Pablo Picasso

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”  C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

“You don’t make art out of good intentions.”  Gustave Flaubert

“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”  Pablo Picasso

"The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”  Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country

“Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and torment.” Claude Monet

“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Oscar Wilde

“Creativity takes courage. ”  Henri Matisse

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.”  Pablo Picasso

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.”  Henry James

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”  Banksy

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”  Jean Cocteau

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”  Orson Welles

“Art is the proper task of life. ”  Friedrich Nietzsche

“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.”  Pablo Picasso

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”  Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray

"To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art." Charles Bukowski

“Imagination rules the world.”  Napoleon Bonaparte

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”  Mark Rothko

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  Pope John Paul II

“God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.”  Pablo Picasso

“Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”  Toni Morrison

“Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”  Pierre Auguste Renoir

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Aristotle

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.”  Pablo Picasso

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.” Joan Miró

“Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction." Pablo Picasso

“A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”  Albert Camus

“A line is a dot that went for a walk.” Paul Klee

“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”  Pablo Picasso

“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t squeak.”  Tom Robbins in Skinny Legs and All

“I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.” Jasper Johns

“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”  James Baldwin

“Without atmosphere a painting is nothing.” Rembrandt Van Rijn

“The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” Woody Allen

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  Michelangelo Buonarroti

“I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” Marcel Duchamp

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”  Anton Chekhov

“Art is everywhere you look for it, hail the twinkling stars for they are God's careless splatters”  El Greco

“He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” St. Francis of Assisi

Free Online Tools to Enlarge Photos

I'm working on an etching project and wanted to incorporate imagery that I found on the web. Unfortunately after I cropped it down to the small part of the image I actually wanted to use it was too small to be visible. Enlarging it required more time & Photoshop expertise than I have, so I searched around for online solutions and came up with the following:

Reshade is a  quick and easy online resizer. You can choose to use files from your computer or from the web. Without an account you can upload up to 3 images a day, and you can't crop them. It's quick, easy & had not downsides that I could find.

I also found PhotoZoomPro 4, a program that seems to do the same thing, but at  $219 is more than I want to spend for just an occasional need.

I also read about SmillaEnlarger. The author's website was down when I tried to look into it, but I read so many things about it online that I decided to try it and found a free download here http://smillaenlarger.en.softonic.com/. (Just be careful to read all the messages when you download it here, they try to get you to add a bunch of extra stuff that probably makes money for somebody but I didn't want cluttering up my desktop.) So far it's been amazing. You just drag an image from your computer & decide how big you want it to be based on a percentage zoom factor, specified height or width,  or other options to stretch or fit within boundaries. I haven't used it much, but what I've done as been surprisingly easy and straightforward for a free program. I highly recommend it!

image before enlarging

Quick Tip: Get the Wrinkles Out of a Stretched Artist's Canvas

I discovered a quick way to get wrinkles out of an artist's canvas that has been stretched, gessoed and even had light layer of paint applied.

I'd bought a bunch of canvases at the 1 cent sale at Aaron Brothers that had been sitting around for a while. I pulled a 12" x 36" canvas out to paint today and noticed it had some wrinkles and sags in one of the corners. I hoped they'd work themselves out, but after putting on a light undercoat of paint they became even more visible.

Fortunately it's a warm sunny day today so I took the canvas outside, turned it so that the stretcher bars were facing up & sprayed the whole thing with a light mist of water. It was well saturated, but not dripping. I laid it on a table, again with the stretcher bars facing up, and within about 10 minutes the wrinkles were gone. I was afraid the gesso & paint might prevent the canvas from shrinking to fit, but it wasn't a problem.

Easy fix. For a change....

Art and Craft Products Suggestions

I'm putting all the products I like to use in one place so it's easier to see where to buy the art and craft supplies I use most.

In my opinion the best one-stop shop for art supplies. I find their prices to consistently be the best around.


I always check Amazon's prices since I've found they're often the lowest.








**Disclosure: Some of these links are through affiliate programs, for which I get a small referral fee. But that in no way affects what I use or list here.

ATC Background Technique: Oil Pastel Resist

purple oil pastel with blue acrylic paint

 I happened upon a new technique for ATC backgrounds using gesso, oil pastels & acrylic paint.

orange oil pastel with purple acrylic paint

 As I make more I'll take photos of each step.

Supplies: ATC (needs to be pretty sturdy stock - junk mail postcards are a good free possibility); Gesso, Oil Pastels, Acrylic Paint, Paper bigger than ATC

Tools: Pallet knife or gift card, paint brush, brayer


1. Cover card with gesso. It should be unevenly spread, leaving ridges and valleys. I generally use either a pallet knife or credit/gift card to spread the gesso on. Let gesso dry completely.


2. Draw over card with oil pastel. Make it sort of uneven with some areas heavier than others.


3. Paint over card with acrylic paint. I use a pretty dry brush and paint unevenly over the whole card. Have the brayer & paper right at hand before you start painting.


4. As soon as you've finished painting, quickly lay the paper over the card & roll the brayer over the entire card. Lift paper to see what's happened. If you like it, you're done. If not you can lay the same paper over again & roll it with the brayer, which may deposit some of the paint from the paper back onto ATC. Or, you can use a clean piece of paper and remove more paint from the ATC. The images on the paper can be interesting as well. And you can reuse the same paper on different ATC's/colors to have layers of contrasting colors.

Swap-Bot's 100,000th Swap

I've been swapping on Swap-Bot since February of 2008. I've completed 105 swaps & Swap-bot has just celebrated their 100,000th swap, with 653 people swapping any piece of Swap-Bot themed snail mail. My assigned recipient listed Miss Kitty as her top favorite thing so I gave a stab at a Miss Kitty themed ATC. Miss Kitty's sense of style most certainly doesn't come naturally to me, but here's what I came up with:

I used a new (to me at least) oil pastel resist technique that I describe here.

ATC Background Technique: Tissue Overlay on Chalk Pastel

I came up with this technique while working on a Sentence-A-Day Art Journal, and have started using it as an ATC background as well. I wanted to be able to write on top of chalk pastel without having it smear.

Finished Page

Materials & Tools:

Paper (this is a medium weight watercolor paper), Gesso, Chalk Pastels, Tissue, Mod Podge

Steps:
1. Apply gesso unevenly to paper with palette knife or gift card, leaving ridges. Let gesso dry completely.

2. Color randomly over the gessoed surface. It's a messy, chalky process.

3. Add a second color of chalk pastel, being mindful that it's easy to smudge what you're working on.

4. Cut tissue a bit larger than the paper. Carefully apply Mod Podge (matte used here) to one side of tissue, bieng very gentle as tissue tears easily. Carefully lay tissue onto paper. If you move it around as you lay it down it will smudge the pastel. Rub over the tissue to make sure it's completely attached. Apply a coat of Mod Podge over the whole surface. I rubbed a bit in some areas to tear away the tissue and reveal the pastel layers below. The Mod Podge will seal these spots.

Free ATC Templates and Artwork in jpg Format

Go to ATC Templates and Artwork, a set on Flickr, to download jpg files of ATC templates and artwork if you'd like to be able to work on the files in a photo editing program.

To download .pdf files of these free ATC templates click here. 

Click on the captions of the images below to go directly to that individual image file on Flickr:

ATC Blank Template with Grid Lines

ATC Backs

Blank ATC Template

Birthday Bird ATC Background

Free ATC Templates and Artwork for ATC's

After searching fruitlessly on the web for a template for blank ATC cards, I've created one in Photoshop that I'm sharing here as a .pdf file. It's got 6 cards on an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet. 

Download the free template for blank ATC cards.

My favorite books to inspire my ATC'ing:

Download the template for ATC's with upper case letters & punctuation.  Each letter is in a different style type. Print the .pdf file onto 110# card stock and decorate the Artist Trading Cards in any way that inspires you.Cut them out, label them and they're ready for trading.

Download this template for Artist Trading Card backs. They can be printed on 8 1/2 x 11" card stock, plain paper or full sheet sticker and completed with your information.

Download the template for different type letter f ATC blanks.

Blank ATC's with Grid Lines

Since I began Zentangling on ATC's I've realized that my work is much neater and easier to execute if I have a grid to follow. I went into my blank ATC sheet and added grid lines at 1/4", 1/2" and 1" (with a 1/4" border). I also did a card with a 1/4" border, one divided into 4 equal rectangles and one divided into eight equal rectangles. To use the cards I either place them under a blank card on a light table and trace them, or go over the lines by hand with a pen that's slightly larger than the line. Download a .pdf of the Blank ATC's with Grid Lines.

I recently broke down and purchased a small light box and have been really happy that I did. I've used it even more than I expected I would. I checked prices at local arts stores and online, and found t this one on Amazon, which with free shipping and no sales tax was the best deal. 

Originally a watercolor of a bird with the handwritten inscription of Happy Birthday, I scanned this image and have used it to make ATC's for birthday wishes. And for those who don't collect ATC's I've attached it to the front of a plain card. The image can be downloaded here.

Or you can order the card, Birthday Bird by crafting_with_style on Zazzle.
See more Watercolor Cards

How to Make Your Own Hand Painted Shoes

The retro style of Dr. Scholl's sandals somehow never goes out of style. The wood base provides a perfect base for easy DIY painting. Designs can be retro, modern, streamlined, simple or intricate. Pick a favorite dress from your closet and paint shoes to match. Scroll through our designs for inspiration and see the step by step instructions on how to paint your shoes at the end of the post.

Pucci inspired paisley in hot colors

Just a little bit country

Inspired by a bandana, but in a modern color.

Indian inspired

shades of the same color

combining patterns from 2 dresses

Use clothes from your closet to inspire your design.

Asian inpired

a simple repeating pattern works best on the sides

The same pattern can be painted in different colorways

Soft pink tones coordinate with the clean white straps

Hawaiian inspired. Swarovski crystals on the sides add a bit of sparkle

Bright florals

The sides can be completely different

Tattoo inspired

Love

The same pattern works with different colored strips

bold florals in bright colors

patterns can be simple and bold

soft toned florals

flowers look great with stripes

Inspired by french toile de jouy fabrics

lavendar straps with pake yellow and green design

dots are easy to paint

bright colored dots and stripes

hawaiian print

easy to paint dots on the sides

abstract zebras

zebra stripes flow onto the sides

What You Need:
A pair of Dr. Scholl's sandals
Painter's tape
100-grit sand paper
Wood primer
Acrylic or craft paints
Water based clear coat finish

Step by Step Instructions:
1. Open the clasp on the straps. Using painter's easy-to-remove tape cover the edges and top of the straps& fold them back & tape them to the bottom of the shoes to protect them during painting.
2.  Remove the Dr.Scholl's label & lightly sand the wood.
3. Prime the wood using Primer for wood. Let dry as directed on can. Sand lightly.
4. Lightly sketch your design onto the wood. To plan your design you can trace the shoe and play around with your pattern until you come up with something you like.
5. Paint your design. Acrylic or craft paints will both work. Allow to dry completely.
6. When completely dry apply at least 3 coats of clear coat, allowing to dry between coats. You need a good strong finish to protect the shoes from wear.