1. Paint

You get what you pay for in this department. I use a mid-level brand (Grumbacher) that I’ve been pretty happy with, but I do find that I need to add more medium to get them to flow properly. With a 40% coupon at Michael’s I got a set of 10 for $35 in the basic colors. Then I purchased a few Winton color tubes separately for about $8 each.

2. Brushes

It’s nice to have a broad range of brushes for oils, and great to have a few with a longer handle for painting with your whole arm, which is very important. Synthetic or natural fiber brushes will do just fine.

I use mostly round and filbert brushes, and I like to have two of the same size of my favorites – one for painting and another to keep clean for blending or picking up paint.

Bright and flat brushes are also good to have – I’ve never used a fan brush so you might be able to skip that one. I also have one or two really tiny brushes for detailing.

3. Oil Medium

This is your replacement for turps and thinners. I use Refined Linseed Oil, but you could use Walnut oil, or really any type of oil medium. You will use this to thin your paint, prep your canvas, and clean your brushes.

4. Palette

A glass palette is my favorite because it’s clear and flat and super easy to mix colors on and even easier to clean – just use some pages from a phone book to wipe it clean! You could also use a disposable palette for convenience.

5. Rag

You will need a rag to wipe your brushes while painting, and you can also use it to clean your brushes of excess paint. An old cotton t-shirt works well for this.

6. Bar of Soap

A bar of soap with olive oil in it works best, which can be found at health food stores. This will be used to clean your brushes. Works like a charm and it’s completely safe!

7. Easel (Optional)

You don’t have to have this, but it does make painting so much easier than having to hunch over a desk. Not to mention dealing with glare from painting on a flat plane.

That’s it! Next week I’ll go into the basics of toning/priming your canvas and sketching out your subject. I hope if you’ve been intimidated by oils in the past, you will give it a try. Oils have become my absolute favorite medium. Until then! Have a great weekend.

Also, make sure you don’t miss the giveaway at the end of the post to win a risograph printed notebook specially made for our winner with one of Nancy’s designs. Enjoy!

1. What does art mean to you? Art means a few things to me but I think the most important is that art should stir something up inside you. I think good art and design should make you think, feel, ask questions, or solve problems. I’m a big fan of the aesthetic movement and in my slightly vain outlook art means the most to me when I consider it beautiful, I find beautiful art very peaceful. I remember seeing the Monet exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland when I was still in school. I was blown away at how beautiful his paintings were, that was enough for me!

2. What is one challenge you’ve overcome as an artist? I suppose being the sort of person that I am means I come across daily challenges. I try to have a good work ethic, and set my self lots of tasks. I do think however most of the time I end up giving my self too much work, but those manic moments make the little successes feel so much better! If I have to pin point the biggest challenge I have had to face, it would be the moment after I graduated art school, realising that you have to face the world with just you and your skills is a very scary concept. However there is something magical about being a creative, the fact that I am a textile designer is a wonderful thing and doing what I do feels very natural for me.

3. Describe one thing or person that has influenced your art the most. This is an easy one! Without a moments doubt I have to say its my Father. He was a wonderfully talented artist, photographer, designer, in fact everything. Not only was he incredibly creative but he was also a wonderful person. I doubt I’ll ever meet anyone else like him. I think he has influenced pretty much every thing I do, the good and the bad! Him and my Mother made the greatest power couple ever, and I think my brother and I owe them a lot for how they brought us up.

4. Name three artists that inspire you. This is a really tough one and I think I may have to cheat a little! The two main influences with regard to textiles would be Lotta Jansdotter and Lena Corwin. Both of these ladies are very talented textile designers, their books have been invaluable to my textile education. My talented creative friends are also very important to me, somehow I have managed to surround myself over the years with a great collection of extremely hard working and talented designers and I am very lucky to have them as my friends.

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Thank you Nancy! Now it’s giveaway time. To win this beautiful notebook, perfect for storing your thoughts for the new year, just leave a comment below on what kinds of amazing things you might record in these blank pages. A comment will be randomly selected one week from now. Good luck!

UPDATE: A winner has been randomly chosen…congratulations ESTHER comment #23! You will be a proud owner of a NS notebook. Thanks everyone for entering!

Who knew that penne pasta was the perfect shape for making chevron patterns? Now, I experimented with different necklace bases – I used jersey fabric pretty successfully, but I settled on a knit i-cord for the strap, which let me control much better how they hang. I’m sure if used an actual necklace chain, you could also get pretty good results.

Simply paint the pasta with acrylic craft paint and string onto whatever you’d like to use as your necklace strap. If you have four rows like the photo above, you will need four lengths of fabric/chain/i-cord to attach onto the necklace base.

Large ditaloni pasta makes for great bracelet beads. Just string a few painted pieces of pasta on a strip of jersey and tie around your wrist.

When I was having doubts about using pasta, I tried to recreate the shape using fabric, stiffened with glue and rolled into a bead. Then I cut the bead at an angle to achieve the same look. I’ll probably explore fabric beads a little more, it was a fun experiment.

So what do you all think? Is this something you’ll try?

I first discovered my love for drawing in the 5th grade. I always just assumed I wasn’t good at it before then, and had other interests, so I hadn’t even tried. To my surprise, I wasn’t too bad. But after those classes – for some reason or another – I abandoned drawing, only to take it up sporadically in the years following.

So fast forward to last year, and I’ve been having the most unshakeable urge to paint and draw. After my drawing challenge last fall, I rediscovered my passion for it and have been shaking the dust off my rusty skills to see where it goes.

There is a local painter here in Oklahoma City, whose work captured me immediately when I saw it on display in a local art gallery. I recently met with her, and she told me the 5 words that gave me the push I needed – “you need to work hard.”

Understanding that I have to be willing to fail and create bad art while I learn, I’ve been painting with abandon. So I got out my oils the other day while the husband took the boys to the zoo. I created a decent painting, but I could not get her second eye right. So right now the painting looks like this:

And of course my dear husband (ever the comic) had to completely deface it by cutting an eye patch for her out of paper. Haha, honey. :)

I’m not sure where my art will take me in 2012, and I think I will always have a love for the craft arts and DIY projects I’ve done through the years, but be prepared to see more art related posts, as I pursue this passion that I just can’t ignore.

PS These are silhouettes I did in Illustrator of my two dashing young men, who are now 3 and 1.5 – they made Christmas so fun this year!

Want silhouettes of your little kiddos? Send me an email to info@evie-s.com, I’d be happy to do them at a special rate for you, my readers – my gift to you. Happy holidays!

When Janet asked me a couple weeks ago to do some project illustrations for the December box of For the Makers, I jumped with excitement at the chance. I absolutely love the concept that her and Katie have come up with – a box of goodies shipped right to your door to get all crafty with. The projects and tutorials they provide are cute and stylish. Getting the box each month has been so fun – it’s like opening a little box of treasures.

Creating the illustrations was great. I can’t wait to do it next month! If you haven’t signed up yet, you can do that here. They make a great gift for the creative person in your life.

Photo courtesy of For the Makers

Every year since having babies – when the weather dips down and I’m found wondering what to do in the long winter months, I pull out my yarn and get to clicking away on the needles. I can be found in my bed with blankets piled on top of my lap with a nice fluffy hank of yarn and a quiet house while the babies nap.

I don’t really knit for myself these days, I usually get the failed projects. When I knit, I knit for the people I love and mean alot to me. And with most every stitch, I’m thinking about (warning: sappy stuff here) how special they are and how thankful I am to have them in my life. Of course I hope that they will love it, but I suppose part of it is selfish too. I love doing it, and it really does get me through the horrible winter cold – and then I inevitably lose interest in springtime.
What about you? What gets you through the long winter months?

To make your own, all you need is mod podge, needle, metallic gold thread, scissors, two sequins, two beads, and a couple of earring hooks.

Step 1: Start by painting a layer of mod podge on both sides of your dried leaves. Allow to dry. This makes them plyable and resistant to breakage. (To dry leaves, try pressing them in a heavy book for about a week.)
Step 2: Take a strand of metallic gold thread and thread both ends through the needle. (Make sure it’s a single strand)
Step 3: Gently pierce a hole through the top of the leaves and thread them on your string, followed by the sequin.
Step 4: If your leaves have a pointy top, snip off the top so it’s flat. Otherwise your leaf won’t hang down, it will hang to the side.
Step 5: With both tail ends of the string, make a knot right above your leaves/sequins – double knot to keep it secure. Cut off the excess tail.
Step 6: Pinch the top loop and slide on a bead through the loop – you need this weight on the earring, otherwise it will be too light.

That’s it! Put on a pair of earring hooks using the loop and wear with care.

Recently my 1.5 year old lost his pacifier – and I ran out of backups. My first son never really took one, so it was foreign to me to have a babe that desperately needed it so often. So I had the choice to force weaning him from it or get a new one. I chose the first option. Poor guy, he was having a pretty rough time.

Just a few months ago I successfully weaned him from nursing, after about two months of hard nights and days trying to get him unhooked. I started to think about why it was so traumatic for him. And it’s simple really, I’m removing something from his life that comforts him.

To which I thought, “Hmm, that’s familiar.”

God has been leading us on a journey that has resulted in comforts being removed. In the last 3 years the comforts of money, safety, friends, family, and things that were familiar have been slowly stripped away more and more. At first it was very uncomfortable. I might have even thrown a few tantrums. But by now, I’ve not only gotten used to it, I welcome it. For it’s in discomfort that often you have the chance to grow the most. To trust. To actually know who – or what – you really put your trust in.

Ultimately God has done this, I believe, to force us to grow up a little. Kind of what my little babe has to go through. But I think the big reason why is to learn:

He is sufficient. He is enough.

He is our comfort. Not our house. Not our money. Not our marriage or relationships. It’s Him. So in other words, if all those other things in life were removed (which, let’s be honest could be removed at any time), the ideal response would not be a traumatic one, but a peaceful one.  One that’s totally and completely comforted by the sufficiency of Christ.

As for my baby, well…I broke and got him a new pacifier. I know – tsk tsk! Let’s just say I’m saving that battle for the road ahead. But he’ll learn soon enough that the little bit of temporary comfort that a piece of plastic and rubber can give him will soon hopefully be replaced by something far more valuable and eternal – the comfort of the true and living God.

Yesterday I mentioned that I got a box in the mail filled to the brim with all kinds of crafty things from For the Makers. For the Makers combines DIY tutorials with hand-selected materials delivered to your door so you can discover new projects and create and share your projects with others.

Here is what I got:

I can’t wait to create with this stuff!

Simply sign up for $29 and every month you’ll receive supplies for four to six projects. They source the coolest materials and deliver them straight to your door, letting you skip straight to the fun part. They’ll walk you through each project with a fun how-to on their website but they also encourage you to explore the creative potential in each package.

The most exciting part is that once you make something, whether it’s one of their projects, or your own, you’ll be able to post it and share it with friends and fellow Makers.

This would make a great gift for the creative person in your life!