In My Mind’s Eye

I’ve been seeing several artists doing painting on wooden plaques lately, so when a couple of plaques found me in the thrift store yesterday, who was I to say no? I started to envision a brightly colored geometric painting on one of my dark wooden thrift store finds. I wanted to do a step by step set of photos, but today when I got home from work, I was so excited to get started that I forgot to take the before picture with the old plaque artwork—a cheesy poem and a painting of a little boy and a sunflower.

I got right to scrubbing the paper off the plaques and felt very inspired when I saw the lovely wood underneath:

Here are my two plaques drying after their bath. I liked how they looked at this stage so much that I considered leaving them this way and starting a wall hanging collection of blank plaques, but the vision in my head and my paints called.

Sadly, this post does not have a happy or colorful ending. As so often happens with a completely new project, things did not work out exactly as my mind’s eye imagined them. I now have one plaque partially painted, but just can’t seem to get the background color right.

Part of the reason I love working in pen so much is that it doesn’t involve drying time—I am not a very patient person. So perhaps, this post is about failure—”If you never fail, you never try anything new,” right? I hope to be back tomorrow with a finished painting. For now, I am trying to accept my defeat with grace—unfortunately, I don’t have quite enough grace yet to share a picture of my defeat! But stay tuned!