Screen Door Paintings, A Shed Mural, & Other Outside Things

When the world slips sideways and I can’t seem to concentrate on more “serious” artsy stuff, I gravitate to creative projects that take less emotional energy or that I feel less pressured by. This year, that’s translated to a lot of outdoor sprucing. I haven’t accomplished a ton of the “inside” creative goals I set for myself (ahem: book-making), but I’m trying to cut myself some slack and celebrate the things I have finished.

Screen Door Paintings

At some point this year we had to replace our front door, which gave me a good excuse to give our screen door some love too. It’s been a part of the home since I was a kid and the house still belonged to my grandparents. A screen-door slamming shut sounds like home – a face-lift was the least I could do. Now it’s a soft grey color facing out, sky blue facing in, and there’s a painting on the middle dividing plank and along the bottom.

(The floral designs are built from individual flowers and leaves I learned from Draw Every Little Thing by Flora Waycott – I really enjoyed drawing along with this book. The leaping bunnies were inspired by vintage embroidery patterns.)

The middle:

The bottom:

Shed Mural

This started when I added dark grey scallops along the bottom of our backyard shed to camouflage rainy day mud spatter. But when that was done, there was a large blank space on the side that called out for… something. So I sketched a quilt block (kinda) design, pawed through our leftover house paint collection, and tried to allow for imperfection.

The random-cool-junk groupings on either side weren’t a part of the original plan, but after an intense weekend of cleaning out my dad’s basement (he passed away last December) I came home with boxes of what I’ve been calling “basement artifacts”. I have a very similar urge to collect things purely because they’re neat looking, so I’d like to think my dad would have approved of the artifact display.

Other Stuff

Such as: a brick spiral, an arch (welded by my husband and covered in sticks and twine by me) to frame the path to our little wildlife pond and nature table, and a fairy house for nieces and nephews to find when they’re exploring the yard.

I’m officially running out of ways to push off my other projects.