It's Beginning to Look Like Christmas

My front door with snowman greeter

It's beginning to look like Christmas around my house. The day after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days to start decorating for the holidays. This year I painted snowmen greeters to hang on my front door as well as to give to my friends as gifts. These happy snowmen will bring holiday cheer to my front porch and to all who see them.

Take a little break, pour yourself a cup of tea and let's take a little tour of Debra's Cottage for some holiday inspiration for painting a happy little "snowman greeter" for your holiday door. I will give you a quick how to lesson on painting your very own snowman greeter.








Finding Inspiration at Debra's Cottage . . . . .

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How to paint a snowman door greeter.

The snowmen door greeters are so easy to make and will take you about one hour to complete. I like to use a square canvas - 5 X 5 is the best size for the door greeter. You can also use a 5X5 square of plywood. Michael's Craft store is a great place to buy art supplies. They also have pre cut wood boards in all sizes.

Pick a color to use as your background - I paint with acrylic paints as they are not toxic and water based (means easy to clean up ) and used FolkArt #922 -Bayberry. Draw a circle for the head and add a top hat - or any kind of hat you want on your snowman. Then draw a carrot for the nose and a mouth and eyes.

Now you can start painting - you will need several coats of white for the snow - note that I used some lavender on the sides of the face since snow is not pure white. This will give him a more "painterly" look, however; he will look just as cute with pure white. Paint the top hat black and the scarf any color you want. Paint the area under the scarf white for the body.

Now for the fun part - putting the finishing touches on your snowman. Put a little white with your black to add high lights to the hat. Paint two black circles for the eyes and a happy mouth. Mix a little red and white to make pink and paint the round cheeks to complete the happy look. Paint your scarf any color - I used red and green to match my front door and added a little red ribbon and holly on the hat. The last step is to add the snow flakes. Thoroughly wet your paint brush and dip it into the white paint - make sure your brush has lots of water - then splatter the paint onto your canvas by hitting the handle of your brush - this will fling the paint all over your canvas to create the look of snow. CAUTION - this is very messy - I put the painting in the bottom of my kitchen sink to do this or better yet - take it outside. The last step is to add screw eyes on the back of the canvas and tie with a bow.

This is what the screw eyes on back look like. They are very simple to screw in and then thread your ribbon through and tie a bow.
Completed snowman greeter.

Please feel free to leave me a comment if you have any questions about making your snowman greeter. Next time we will paint a pink "shabby chic" snowlady greeter.

Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is almost upon us and I have been busy in my kitchen this weekend baking pumpkin bread and cookies for my family and friends. My kitchen smells yummy and I am reminded of how thankful I am for family traditions and how much I treasure my family and friends.

As I look around my kitchen, sipping a cup of tea while waiting for cookies to bake, I am reminded of how much the simple, every day objects in my life serve as inspirations for my paintings. My kitchen is a happy place ;filled with southern light all throughout the day with blue and white check curtains blowing in the breeze and filled with my treasured collections of roosters.

Finding Inspiration . . . . . . Here . . . . . .

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If you look close, you can see roosters on my chandlier and on plates in the plate rack.

Everywhere . . . . . . .

Bentley, my Studio Assistant, waiting for the cookies to come out of the oven!

With all of the roosters for inspiration, I decided to paint roosters while waiting for the cookies to bake.

I painted two small roosters and added eye hooks so they can be hung with a ribbon on a door nob in my kitchen.

Next I sketched out a "welcome rooster" painting that I will hang outside the French door to my kitchen. I like to sketch with a fabric marker instead of a pencil (pencils tend to smear and I prefer the marker). Next I started filling in the dark feathers on the rooster. I paint the darks first and then paint the lights and finish with highlights.

The cookies are done and I am off to deliver pumpkin bread to friends. I will show you Mr. welcome rooster completed on a later post.

Wishing you and your family blessings during this season of Thanksgiving.

More Pansies

I am still planting my late fall and early winter pansies and can't seem to get enough of their happy little faces. I found these darling Victorian seed holders at a garden store last year and thought the Pansy seed packets looked adorable in them (I think that they would make a cute little painting).

Finding Inspiration

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Pansy painting inspired by my newly planted pansies.

The garden cloche with bird on top was a little treasure I found in a vintage garden shop. I really like it and have used it over and over in my garden paintings. This time I put a little pot of lavender pansies in the cloche. I like to arrange items together to get an idea of how they will look in the painting. I call this my "set up for inspiration".

"Garden Day" painting with pansies and roses.

Cooking with edible flowers

My Grandmother was an avid gardener and loved to use edible flowers, especially pansies, to decorate cakes and cookies. This year I planted pansies from seeds so I would have organically grown pansies to use in my baking.

Pansy Flower Cookies

To make pansy flower cookies: use any standard recipe for sugar cookies - wash and dry culinary or organically grown pansy flowers and set aside - bake cookies for 5 minutes and remove from oven - lightly press pansy flower on top of cookies - sprinkle with sugar and bake until lightly browned. Flowers will come out lighter and have the subtle look of the pansy petal.

Lightly press flower into sugar cookie after baking for 5 minutes


Remove from oven and enjoy!

Mini cupcakes decorated with pansy flowers.

Pansies-Happy Faces

Pansies - Finding Inspiration

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The Pansy is named for the French word pensee, which means thought. As a child I always called them "Happy Faces" and recently read that some feel the French probably named the Pansy that because the flower petals often resemble a human face when the flowers nod forward as if thinking.

Pansies are easy to grow and in Southern California, where our fall and winters are mild and the sun shines almost every day, they bloom all winter. They come in a wide range of colors, ranging from gold, white, violet and blue. Pansies make me smile and the ones with bi-colored petals are my favorite to paint since they remind me of happy faces.

All of those "happy faces" were the inspiration for my painting of pansies.

Painting almost complete - needs a little touching up!

Completed painting displayed on a garden bench at Debra's Cottage

Pansies are a member of the genus Viola, and they are closely related to violets. Did you know that you can eat organically grown or culinary pansies? The blossoms are beautiful sprinkled on a garden salad and you can also cook with them? Only eat flowers that are organically grown without chemical pesticides. It is best to plant pansies yourself if you plan to eat them or order from an edible flower source.

My organically grown pansies are ready to harvest and today I am experimenting using Pansy blooms to decorate sugar cookies. I will let you know how they turn out in my next post.

Have a lovely creative week.

Debra's Cottage

Debra's Cottage

Finding inspiration . . .here. . .there. . everywhere.

"Rose Garden" painting


Welcome and join me for a little stroll through Debra's Cottage where I paint and meet customers on the first Saturday of the month. Debra's is a fabulous cottage style shop located in Costa Mesa, CA where I sell my art and home to over 100 talented vendors and artisans specializing in Cottage, Shabby Chic Style and Garden furnishings to romance your home.


The beautiful home decor and accessories at Debra's Cottage serve as many of the inspirations behind my Shabby Chic Style and Garden paintings which are shown on my blog post today.


"The Boudoir" painting

Inspiration for the "Tea Time" painting

"Tea Time" painting

"Garden Day in the Rose Garden" painting

"Flower Shop" painting

I will be painting at Debra's Saturday, November 1st and Saturday November 8th which is the day of our Winter Open House.

Debra's Cottage will be featured in the December issue of Romantic Homes Magazine and is located at:

2777 S. Bristol, Costa Mesa, CA - 714 662-5828 -http://debrascottage.com/

There is lots more to see at the Debra's charming cottage store and I hope you will join me next time when we will continue our tour.

Lavender

Welcome. Autum is in the air in Southern California and my garden has taken on the look of fall. Today I picked the last of my lavender and fragrant sage to dry. I love the tangy smell of sage and the lavender flowers remind me of the fragrent lavender fields in Provence in the South of France. I was inspired to post about lavender by a visit to Ruth Welter's beautiful blog, artful-creations.blog.spot.com, and was struck by the fact that no matter what part of the world you visit, the colors of mother nature are the same and how similiar the colors in her photographs of Zion National Park in Utah were with my photographs of the lavender fields in Provence. Both of our photograhs show soft greens and shades of umber, ocher and lavender - the colors of nature and the inspirations for our photographs. You must visit her blog to see her georgous photographs of nature taken in Utah.

I am very new at blogging (this is my 3rd post) and still learning to use my new scanner to scan some of my "nondigital" photos to share with you. After many tries I was able to scan one lavender field only to find that I was unable to enlarge it to show you.

I decided to post without showing the inspiration photos of lavender fields in France and show you other photos of inspirations.

Sage flowers drying in the sun

Paintings inspired by a trip to Provence in the South of France where the skies are blue, the hills are carpeted with sunflowers and lavender and the air is filled with the heady scent of lavender

Sunflowers and lavender fields

"The Lavender Harvest" - insiration by lavender fields.



"Blue Shutters"


"Sunflowers and Lavender"
"The Girl on the Red Bicycle"


A yummy receipe for lavender sugar brought home from Provence.

Bentley ( my studio assistant) waiting to get his taste of rasein bread with lavender sugar.


Lavender Sugar
Combine 1 cup of sugar and 1/4 cup fresh organic or cullinary lavender heads. Place the mixture in a sealed container for about one week. When ready to use, sift the sugar to separate it from the lavender. . The sugar can be sprinkled on sugar cookies, ceral or toast or used to flavor your tea and lemonade

Lavender sugar sprinkled on rasein toast.

A friend gave me the web address of a beautiful farm in Sequim, Washington that grows organic lavender. You may want to check out:http://purplehazelavender.com/ for their "cooking with lavender guide" as well as their blog.