I've been not that creative lately
First, I had to let go of my annual crafting plans this year thanks to my health issues, which are now not an issue for my hands anymore. The complaints in my hands seem under control thanks to the meds for my blood pressure so I'm pretty sure I don't have to worry about having carpal tunnel syndrome anymore but it was a result of a nerve pressing due to high blood pressure instead. Since I have meds for that, things are going much better. But I feel kind of sad that I didn't get to create any Christmas crafts this year, and not added anything new to our tree thanks to that either. On top of that, the walls are still empty white while I wanted to have them decorated with some paintings by the end of the year. C'est la vie, let's try to change it soon, though.
I had an idea to paint
When my daughter and I were Christmas shopping a few weeks ago, I found this cool decorated plate with gnomes on it. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to try and paint it and decided to make it an activity for the Christmas holidays. I had to relax a bit on the 24th so we did it yesterday when we were feeling creative. The doll house my daughter received for Christmas was moved aside and I put up the plate with the gnomes I wanted us to try and paint.
Drawing the gnomes on canvas
For the first time I drew the painting first, which was a smart move because it's a fact that I'm a much better drawer than painter, so it was stupid not to do this every time, haha. Check out the process so far below:
With the Christmas tree in the background, we started to try and draw the gnomes.
My first one ready, and I was happy with the result of the drawing.
The second one started of weird and never recovered from that as you will see later. (lol)
My daughter's second one is a work in progress in the picture above.
See how the body of the right gnome is just off, I erased and corrected a lot but without real result, I hope I can fix it with paint later..
My daughter started to get frustrated as you may be able to see, she thought hers were ugly and got angry at the canvas.. I told her it's just an example and we can cover things up, just keep trying.. but at this point it was hard to convince her.
Above the last part of the drawing, almost ready to paint.
And this is where I started painting my canvas.
The painting process
I was still drawing when my daughter started painting, here are her first steps with paint:
Focused! Can you spot Mochi?
She was painting the first gnome and I finished my drawing here more or less. Time to start painting myself..
I just start painting lol, don't ask me why I do it the way I do, often it's to finish up the paint my daughter didn't use, as I did here with the green..
Meanwhile, this is where my daughter was at:
She didn't want to continue at this point as she felt she ruined it, so I figured we'd pause it for the day and continue the next day.
Meaning I had to use a lot of red asap as I didn't want to waste it so I started painting the hats and clothes.
I messed up the shoe, oops, will try to cover that later..
And this is where we're at now, I gave her some options to cover it up, she's not ready to decide yet so I will most likely finish mine first tonight and help her with hers tomorrow. Even though things aren't perfect, I'm happy we had a few creative hours together.. We will have loads more of these in the next two weeks as we're both free from school and work, yay!
Hope you enjoyed this little work in progress gnome painting journey.. I will publish the end results in a few days hopefully..
Feliz Navidad!