AEDM Day 24, 25 & 26

First off, here is a really quick creation I did one day this week...

I know it is pretty grade school level but I just cannot help my adoration for glitter! We are celebrating Winter Solstice this year, decorating with mainly blues, white &  silver, so I thought these would be really pretty hanging on our tree!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, or as we like to call it in our house: "Tufurkey Day"! No really it is NOT as terribly icky as the name sounds or the YouTube videos you have seen, I swear! As a vegetarian, I don't eat many "fake-o" meats because, well honestly, they usually taste too much like meat for me to stomach! I do like the Morningstar Chik Patties and Tofurkey though...maybe it is just the psychological connontation of it not being "red" meat...!
Anyway...we had our usual very quiet, lazy, intimate day of living our blessings of just being together, doing whatever we wanted to do, which included sleeping until almost 11 am, browsing through the 2 ENORMOUS newspapers we subscribe to (I bet they weighed about 6 lbs. each, and consisited of about 99% store ad flyers for all of the "amazing door buster Black Friday-which has turned into Black Thanksgiving Eve-sales...you do not EVEN want to get me going on THAT subject!), playing with our hounds, listening to holiday music, snuggling by the fireplace watching the dog show on tv, playing card games, staying warm drinking Mead, snacking on delicious little appetizers, reading to one another, napping a bit, enjoying a traditional Tofurkey feast around 9 pm and then watching a movie! No fuss, no stress, no mess, no work, no drama, and bonus: we stayed comfy in our jammies all day long!

AND, best of all, my guy & I spent about an hour and a half creating together, side-by-side, for the very first time! I have only seen a few of his works of art, but I know that he is an AMAZING artist and I have been begging/bugging him to just MAKE something for months and months! I had hinted that I had a little Thanksgiving craft project in mind I wanted us to make together to use as a decoration but instead, he just asked if we had any watercolor paper...so I took that as a hint and got everything he wanted out of my "studio" and we proceeded to sit at our kitchen island and paint together for the next hour or so!

Here he is in action (using my super cheap-o watercolors!):

and his finished piece:

(although he says he still wants to add some marker & pastels,

I think it is GORGEOUS as is!)

I swear, seeing how he just whipped this out made me want to never pick up a paintbrush again...sigh...I may have an eye to be able to capture photographic images but when it comes to creating something so realistic and beautiful from my minds eye, I have the ability of a first grader...

as the following photo of MY artwork for the day proves!

(he was so sweet to me in my frustration, assuring me that he would

"love to be in that beautiful forest"!

Yeah, he's a keeper!)

Regardless of how I felt my painting turned out, the process of creating alongside  my love was so incredible! I just loved the shared energy we created, watching him work, and trying to make him feel like he always makes me feel: like the most awesome artist who ever graced this earth! ;)

The next day, I worked on a piece I had hoped to get finished before the holiday...but now it will just have to wait until next year to be part of our fall decorations!

I started with a canvas square that I got at Goodwill Outlet, which sells by the pound...so it ended up costing about 15 cents! It had a layer of (what I later firgured out from a second smiliar canvas i got) decorative printed scrapbooking paper glued onto it...

...which I painted over with brown acrylic paint...

...added (with mod Podge) some beautiful dried & pressed fall leaves I collected at the nearby bus stop I frequent...

...and a soft sprinkling of fine glitter, multi-colored wool fiber, gold paint spirals and one of my very favorite quites, by Meister Eckhart...

I am not crazy about how the lettering turned out (another of my weakest artistic abilities) but all in all, I suppose I like it well enough.

And so far today, I have begun work on this, which is in oil pastels & watercolor on a kind of weird paper I also found at Goodwill Outlet-an old notebook of photographic blotter/drying paper! It is heavy and a bit textured, but difficult to work with the watercolors on as obviously, it soaks the water up IMMEDIATELY!

I have no idea who this is or what she is to become...I think it kind of looks like me, although I can only WISH I had hair that thick & luxurious! lol!

So I think that "catches me up" to day # 26...and now I am off to check out other AEDM artists blogs & artwork, and then hopefully get out into my garage studio & create some more...

which keeps me a very:

Happy Me-Laurie Z!