My flopped go at a sloppy quicky

First I have to say that if you are my sister in-law (aka, Lori) please stop reading now and click away.

 Fast.

I don't want you to see what I have been up to this afternoon because it is something that is for you and I don't want you not to be surprised.

Please wait to read this until I have seen you this weekend.

Thank you!:-)

Secondly, I just realized that from my title some of you might have your minds in the gutter. Get them outta there! There is non of those shenanigans going on around here.

Just messy art, quick messy art.

Ah, whew!!

So I have a custom order portrait sitting in my studio (once upon a time my dining room) and I have been waiting for the time to get it started. It is detailed and I will need to be precise. However it has been a few weeks since I last painted and I had a big messy itch to get out. While the kids were playing with Auntie Em this afternoon I decided to give the messy, sloppy brush stroke painting style a shot. Emily was here to play with the kids for an hour and what you see above is (almost) what I banged out in that time.

This painting is inspired by a picture my sister in-law showed me over a year ago and I have been wanting to do this for her for some time.

After Emily left the kids settled down with snack so I snuck back over to the table for a few minutes and added her hair. During that time I should have been watching Ethan (who was sitting right in front of me) more closely because he was getting busy painting his body with a marker. (see a few photos later on below)

After the kids went to bed (early---Hallelujah!!) I added the finishing touches and there you have it. Above with no flash and below with a flash.

My sloppy quicky. It took just under three hours and normally a painting this size would take double that time.  Then again I would have planned it out better and blended to create even color transitioning.

 I am actually not so happy with it. I free handed it and am not sure I will wing it like that again. I do like to plan my paintings more precisely. I am also not happy with my sloppy technique. I had in mind these wild brush strokes and I am just way to uptight or something and have to have crisp lines. I still managed to get a lot of wild strokes in but I had in mind one of those paintings where when you stand up close you don't know what it is and it just looks like blobs of paint and when you back up it is this stellar piece.

I think I need to take a 'how to relax and wing it' class or something.

Kaitlyn was also inspired to create and decided to draw uncle Phil. Dude has long legs!

Then since the kids wanted to paint I dug out their water colours and we went to town splashing and dotting and creating cards. 

Please ignore the chocolate donut all over her face, she was multi tasking.

Kaitlyn claimed mine right away saying she had to write a message about cleaning up in it for her babies.

And now I will leave you with this.

A few moments of distraction and this is what I get!

And of course it was the green apple smelly Crayola kind.

Thank goodness it was washable!