Creative play

Today was a great day!  I've been dragging all week with a tired, fever, headache, coughing sort of virus.  I perked up enough today to feel like doing something again, so I thought I'd work on an unfinished watercolor painting.  I decided to just play and see what happened.

This painting is about the ukulele band I want to start at our church...it's a little obsession of mine...a longtime dream I can't get out of my head!  I can see it all happening as plain as day...a group of all ages...all musical abilities...talented...mediocre...and no sense of rhythm whatsoever (I fall in the last group) getting together to learn to play the ukulele.  We'll play old silly songs that we sang as kids and old gospel tunes and whatever else we want to.  I'm getting excited just thinking about it!!!  More about that later...back to painting!

I'm painting in watercolors on a stretched canvas...mainly because I didn't have any watercolor paper and I wanted to see how the canvas accepted the watercolor pigment.  It seems to work just fine.  But I had quit before I finished and it's just been sitting around in my studio gathering dust.  The neat thing about watercolors is that they come back alive and workable again with just a little water.

Here's how it looks so far.  This is more suggestive and loose than most of my bluebird paintings.  I added the girl with the ukulele looking up at the bird and the big triangle above it.

The triangles are symbols of the ways God guides us and intervenes in our lives.  I love the way watercolor puddles and gets darker in certain spots. I raise the canvas up and let the puddles drip down the canvas all the way to the bottom.  I like the way it looks.  When all 4 triangles were done...they reminded me of giant flowers  reaching for the sunshine.

The top triangle looks like it has a sideways heart in the center.  I didn't try to paint that.  I was painting a red triangle inside the yellow one and the watercolor was really wet and just sort of rolled around into that shape...so I left it.

I gave all the 3 ukulele players' shoes an ever so faint touch of red for their journey...you've just gotta have the red shoes!

Maybe it's finished...maybe not...we'll see how it feels after a few days.  But just squeezing out the paint...playing and watching the colorful drips made me feel so much better...now... if we could just get our band organized... :-)