I watched the tornadoes that ravaged the south on April 27, 2011 in real time from the comfort of my chair here in Iowa.  (I posted more about that experience here.)  It’s heart wrenching to see the destruction afterwards.  The image for this piece of art has been haunting me until I sat down and did it.

I helped with the decorating of my friends’ Christmas cookies.  They thought it was funny that I’d use so many silver dragees and figured people would break teeth on them.  I argued that they were both stylish and safe as the dragees would take up some of the moisture of the icing and become soft.  So I ended up with the cookies with the most dragees.  I think they are very pretty!  And I ate the little gingerbread man after taking the photo and the dragees basically melted in my mouth.  It was nice they gave me the cookies in a heart shaped tin so I could use the picture on the blog.

I had to have this cute little thing to put teabags in.  It was plain white porcelain when I started.  That’s the great thing about hearts.  It’s easy to make something up without drawing something first.

More experiments in porcelain painting.  It works like watercolor only better in some ways.   You can work into the porcelain without it wearing down like paper.  This must be the benefit of Clayboard.  The tricky part is that the colors aren’t exactly the way they look after the piece is fired, but that’s some of the fun of it, too.  The outside of the bowl is a pale green to match the leaf.

I’ve discovered the joys of ceramic painting.  This is the first of my hand painted hearts.

It only took about an hour to put together.  I started with a 2 x 2 inch canvas.  I drew the heart with Inktense pencils, then smeared the color with a watery brush.  The blue is acrylic craft paint.  The dots are metallic copper craft paint.

The hardest part was putting the ribbon on.  (The ribbon came from Dove Chocolate Discoveries.)  I used an artist’s quality glue to start with, but it just wasn’t sticking.  Then I got out a jar of Golden Acrylic Gloss Medium (after finding that the lid of the jar of matte medium is permanently affixed – damn!).  I smeared that on with a palette knife.  That seemed to work better although it still took a tremendous amount of time to dry.

I didn’t put any varnish on it, and there are a couple of messy shiny places where my medium coated fingers accidentally strayed to touch the front. I decided that added character. I don’t know how I would have varnished it for sure. Probably sprayed it with fixative (which would have darkened the pink ink – not good) and then sprayed some varnish on. I didn’t really want to darken the colors, though.

Just a simple fun heart.

It also looks good on a black t-shirt for Halloween.

Ask me where you can get it.

Another heart made using Photoshop brushes from my friend BSilvia at graphics-illustrations.   I used them as an eraser to lift color out of rasterized shapes.