Carnival 2011

I thought I would share our family's Sunday before Lent event held every year for as long as I can remember since meeting my husband. My husband's family called it Carnival! It is celebrated on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday to mark the beginning of Lent.  We have the traditional  lasagna dinner with italian pastries on that day.

Cream Puffs

Chocolate Eclairs

I carry on this tradition now for our family but  have changed it a little by adding the "Mardi gra" effect with masks and beads for decorations, mainly for the grandchildren to enjoy and have something other than the religious values to remember.

Our granddaughter Sarah has a birthday in March and since the lenten season started later this year  we decided to include Sarahs birthday into the days feastivites adding to "Mardi gra" theme. Our oldest daughter made a "Mardi gra" cake for Sarah! 

The fondit is also homemade, I secretly think she may be the next cake boss!!  I'm so proud of her!.

Thank you for enjoying this event with us!

UFO #1

I started  this painting in the fall class of 2010. We took many photo's of an organic nature for a composition that we could agree on as a group. We prepped a double thickness 10 x 24 bainbridge board with liquitex past gel, once that dried the  shells and the marble vases were drafted in with an HB pencil, then an acrylic wash of adobe tan was laid over the entire piece. After the abobe tan dried I painted in with acrylic with the blues, grays, diazanine purple, van dyke browns, flesh tint, buff titanium, oranges and alizarin crimson lest not forget the whites and greens over the sketched in shells and vases and background.

The oil overlay was added working the curtain, table cloth, marble vases and shells from right to left with the same colors only in the oil paints. I am stuck on the shell at the left of the picture, and I am still adding glazes over the marble and large shell to create depth. I will keep working on this a little at time until I get it right! 

 I'm on a mission over the next couple of weeks to actually try to finish the half dozen or so UFO's hanging around in the basement. Last night I finally finished my dream beach scene after lets say.... three or four years!  Now that I've taken  art classes on a regular basis, I feel a little more confident mixing colors and actually can make a cloud look like a cloud. Although these clouds are kind of bumpy because the paint aged from when I plastered it on three or four years ago, and couldn't be scraped off or painted out.  I framed this and have it hung in the guest room called my Island room! It's 16 x 20 and with the frame it looks great over the bed.

                                                    I think I'll this call "Dreams of Kehei"

Now on to the next UFO now that I'm on a roll!