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Okay, I think I’m in the home stretch with this one. I did horrible, evil, cruel things to the painting (there was some scrubbing with paper towels to get texture, the screams could be heard for miles) but now it’s starting to look like something. I’m going to soften the SUPERRR-HAPPY! green tone defining the ground (more in the forest tones, less SUPERRR-HAPPY) and that’s about it. I like it. It’s a definite departure from my typical style (everything preplanned, organized, defined to the max) and I enjoyed the experimentation without knowing exactly where I was going. It’s nice sometimes to leave your comfort zone.

Before I get to my purse, I saw the play “Frost/Nixon” the other night with Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. It was so, so very good. It was described as a master class in acting, and they weren’t kidding. I mean, it’s based on a real incident, when David Frost interviewed Richard Nixon after his fall from grace, and how Frost the British talk-show host got an apology out of Nixon. You know what’s going to happen, and you’re spellbound despite that. I love good theater. I just wish the seats weren’t $100 all the time, otherwise I might go more often and get more culture.

Now, purse. I painted it and I must say, I’m awful proud-like. It’s got orangy-red pomegranates and blue squiggles with orange Swarovski rhinestones on the pomegranates. I’ll be proud to drag this thing with me everywhere I go for the next six months or so.

New and improved! Now with trees!

And blue shadowing at the bottom. It took me forever to tape out the negative spaces around the trees, but it was worth it. They’re a metallic brown with green accenting at the top. Very nice. Now I only have to figure out what to do to make it less stark…

I’m working on a three-panel painting. It’s a new direction for me, since I normally work in pen and ink, or watercolor. This is acrylic (with some airbrushing, thank you for the airbrush, Cricket!). I’ve laid down the bases for all the sections, and now it looks like this:

And now I’m painting trees. Spiky, tall, very vertical, very stylized trees. I using my T-square like it’s going out of fashion to get all the lines parallel. I made a mockup of the idea in my head in Photoshop (just to figure out how I wanted the layout):

After I paint in the blue shading at the bottom and the trees, I’m going to reach a spot where I have to make it interesting because otherwise it’s just a bunch of lines with a bunch of smooth transitions (airbrush, thank you Cricket!) and zzzzzzzzzzzzz… boring… zzzzzzzzzzz… no…texture…. zzzzzzzzzzz… I’ll figure something out.

I was profoundly anti-purse for a long, long time. I just wore a jacket regardless of the season and kept my keys and wallet in my pockets. This was a fine system in the winter, but in the summer in New York, lemme tell you, it gets mighty hot and humid and it doesn’t help when you’re wearing a jacket, even a thin one. You’re gonna sweat. A lot. About three years ago I bought an iPod and this threw my whole wallet-and-keys system all to hell. I had to get a purse. Because I have no shoulders I wanted a messenger purse I could sling over my opposite shoulder and have hang on my hip. I eventually decided on this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Wash-Medium-Messenger-Bag

And I could paint it! Hooray! So I did:

And that worked out nicely. Then it wore out and got all stained and whatnot. (Alas!) So I bought another one and painted it with fat little firebirds:

And then that one wore out, too. So (you can see a pattern, no?) I got another one and painted it with a monster saying in French, “I am a monster. Boo.” but because French has to have a bunch of silent letters, “boo” is spelled “boux”. Ha ha ha! I am so funny.

(Note our office fish, Harry Potter.)

Now my monster one looks all grotty and tired and I think it’s time for a new purse. I have a gray one (like the first one) and I think I’ll paint a vine on it with pomegranates. I love love love hexagons (I love them) and I can make the pomegranates hexagons with sparkly seeds! What more do I need? That’s what I thought. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.