today

Today I painted a table for my daughter. She is in Michigan visiting the in-laws, having fun on a farm near Lake Michigan. She will be home Tuesday. I felt 'deadline' looming... time to paint with no boys, no interruptions....

I began yesterday by painting the table a shade of brick orange. In church today, while pondering the Jesus walks on water story (I get something different every time I read that one) I sketched a design on the back of the bulletin.

My design was basically this. A square in the middle with a line running through it and a border line, that had this decorative square in the corner.

After I put in the lines I put four clumps of ZZ plant and wrapped a vine-type plant around the center line.

I filled in the background with a light blue, trying for lots of brush strokes and surface blended colors.

The other day I bought this dragonfly stamp... I couldn't help myself... I added it in.

But I thought the table still looked too plain... I stamped 'Dreams' onto one side....

and 'Dragonfly' onto the other.... still it needed more oomph....

so I pulled out my caulk pastels, filed them onto the table surface, and rubbed them in.

Tomorrow I need to go back and put a sealer coat on... I think before I do I will hit it a bit with my colored pencils to define some areas, put in some little detail...

If I'd had more time, I might have worked harder at mixing paints and not fallen back on the caulk... on the other hand, since the classes I have taken in the last week, I feel freed to mix it up quite a bit... I am interested to see how the table will look with the sealer, I am using a polyurethane, since it will be their main kitchen table... what I hope is that the sealer will bring the colors out more and make the whole piece more vivid....