Cherrywood Art Fair Starts this weekend!

I have been working hard on getting ready for my holiday shows this season! The first one Cherrywood Art Fair: Saturday, December 10th and Sunday, December 11th from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day. This is a sweet little art fair that is getting bigger every year, though it manages to stay sweet.

Come on out and say hello!

East Austin Studio Tour THIS WEEKEND! And Friday Egg

Good morning!  An extra special Friday Egg for you this week to mark the occasion: the East Austin Studio Tour starts tomorrow, November 12!  It is both Saturday and Sunday this weekend and next weekend from 11 to 6 each day.  Hundreds of East Austin artists are opening their studios to the public so you can see where the artwork is made, talk to the artists about the creative process, have a glass of wine or nibbles and buy buy buy beautiful artwork!  For more information on the tour, go to the East Austin Studio Tour site. I am honored to be on the tour again this year and was excited to be picked by Wayne Alan Brenner of The Austin Chronicle as one of the top 25 stops on the tour! Check out the listing; I'm in pretty good company!  I hope if you are in town that you can come this weekend or next to peruse some of my new work.

Onward!  Today's Friday egg is an ostrich egg done in the traditional eight-pointed star design.  This truly is one of my favorites: always a show-stopper!  Halfway through I was enchanted by a lovely light blue that I got from washing down a darker blue and it ended up changing my entire color scheme from scarlet, orange and dark red to lovely blues. The last photo shows the ostrich egg next to a quarter so you can get an idea of how big it is.  I hope you enjoy it!

Friday Egg: Halloween!

No Friday Egg this week. I was asked by my friend Jen to do her makeup for her Halloween costume: a Roy Lichtenstein comic book character. I was a little nervous as I have never done makeup before but I think it turned out pretty well and had a blast doing it. If we had another six hours I would have made the dots a little smaller, but I think that we got the idea across pretty well.  Trying to do the dots evenly over a three-dimensional surface was actually a lot like working on an egg. The last picture is of friend Stephen who was dressed as "Gigantic!" I loved both of the costumes and hope they win the costume contest. Happy Halloween!

Friday Egg: Tiny Little Beauties on Location

This week I worked on doing a bunch of quail eggs to sell as ornaments at the various art shows I am doing this fall and the coming Christmas season.  Quail eggs are simply adorable.  So tiny and cute you can't help but want to pick one up and hold it.  Just like a baby!  They can be fragile because the smaller the egg the thinner the shell, and in this batch I lost two completed eggs being too rough with the paper towels rubbing the melted wax off.  Once I get some varnish on them they will be stronger.

Most are simple traditional designs without too much detail, but there are a few that are  more intricate and two lovely butterfly designs that I will have to replicate on larger eggs.

It was such a glorious day today that I took the quail eggs on a field trip!  We shot on location in my front yard, in the grass and in some small nests I have for display and even found a pecan husk (that is surely not the correct word but I don't know what is) to use as a prop.  I would love to see a whole tree of decorated quail eggs peeping out from the husks as they ripen.  It would be so pretty and would save me so much time!

Happy Beautiful Friday!

Friday Egg: A Bigger Fish Fry!

A goose egg for this Friday Egg.  As with last week's egg, I really enjoy the interlocking patterns that make up this fish design, especially the fins. I took a lot of pictures, but I don't know if you can really get a sense of how these fish bodies interlock.  I hope you can.

I started with a white goose egg, waxed all the areas that I wanted to stay white and then went through all colors light to dark.  The hot pink and orange make me happy - it makes them look like exotic skeletal tropical glow-in-the-dark fish underwater at night. Or something like that.  Each fish's inner body patterns are different, which makes it a lot more interesting for me to make since the same pattern four times can get boring.

Happy Friday!

Friday Fish Fry

An oldie but goodie today!  I love this traditional design from the Ukrainian Gift Shop's Design Book 2 and have recreated it many times.  It is such a satisfying design because everything is interconnected, creating the fish design by interlocking shapes and small details, reminiscent of Escher.  In the original, they use a brown egg, with yellow and brick dyes.  I chose to use my current favorite Golden Wheat and Turquoise on a white chicken egg, with a final color of black.

I hope you enjoy it!

Friday Egg: Heraldic Shield

This egg reminds me of a shield or coat of arms. I think it may be the diagonal element on the almond or shield shapes beneath. The colors are prefect for fall, which I hope will arrive soon because I am sick of 100 degree days.

I started with a white chicken egg, waxed all white lines, then dipped in Golden Wheat and waxed, Asparagus and waxed, then a final color of Dark Red

Happy Friday, my Lords and Ladies!