Allright so here are some things I did just before Christmas that I wanted to share.
This is the last photograph that was ever taken of Grandmom, and she's holding my daughter Eve who was just a month old at the time. It was their first meeting. I snapped a cell phone picture, and it's one of those photos you're later so glad you bothered to take.
The photo turned out to be really grainy - pretty poor quality - but that's when I started experimenting with gel medium and I found that a gel transfer erased all the grainyness and instead made the photo soft and almost incandescent.
I decided to do a series for my Mom and sisters, a kind of in memoriam, but even more a celebration of Grandmom's love and life. She made a habit of kindness and good cheer.
"I sing" is the one I did for Mom -- it has a song sparrow (Grandmom loved songbirds) and an old hymn refrain "I sing because I'm happy" which just seemed to fit. I painted the frame and I had alot of fun with paintwork on the canvas although it's a little hard to see in the image above -- maybe this closeup will show it a little better.
(By the way, you can see any of these images full size by double-clicking them.)
The next one I called "Seeds of Love," and it is the one I did for Catherine. Grandmom was always sowing seeds of love, and the butterflies remind me of this quality of her. I had fun with the paint on this one too, building it up pretty thick and stamping down into it. The heart shapes were sort of a free trope on the butterfly shape, and I cut them from rice paper with imbedded seeds. They look to me like the kind of seeds that would blow on a breeze.
I framed it, and I can't remember why I didn't photograph it in the frame, except I was probably in a hurry and it was right before Christmas (lol).
The last one I've shared before but here it is, in a frame. It's called "Ill Fly Away" after another one of Grandmom's favorite hymns, and here's a newer photo. I did this one for Amy. I remember watching the bluebirds at Grapeland Lake with Amy when we were little girls.
