Elephants and Fish

Hello Readers!

As promised yesterday, we have a ton of Ellies and a little fish picture to show off.

I promise there won't be near as many pictures as yesterday and probably not as much commentary either. We will take a look at the milo field and my mystery plant after the art showing!

Enjoy!

:)

The muse returned in full force over the weekend. All of these elephants were done between Thursday and Sunday of this past week.

 I have no clue why Blogger decided to change up my pictures. They were all fine in my documents but went wonky when I downloaded them here. I don't know how to remedy this situation so you all will just have to tilt your heads to see them right. 

All but one of the elephants is done in markers on cardstock.

 Some of them better than others.

 

 These spotted fellas with their bird friends are my personal favorites of all of these.

 This one is collage on cardstock. The elephant is cut freehand out of painted paper. His tusk is a piece of plastic from a frozen concentrated juice can. The pink layer beneath him is a piece of silk glued to cardstock. There's some glitter glue smeared on as well.

 My muse finally tired of elephants after 14 of them.

My latest fish picture finished. This is fish picture #16. It's actually #17 but I wasn't thinking clearly (gee that's a shock!) and wrote #16 on the back when I signed it. So the big fish picture laying on the cabinet in the laundry room has been officially dubbed FP#17. YOu all will get to see it again once I get it finished! And if I'm going to enter it in the fair this year, I better get my butt in gear and get it finished. I'd enter this one but it's a bit small I think. It measures all of 5 x 5 inches.

My paper mache dress form is coming along nicely. It now has a stand! Brother had an old wooden bed frame out on the patio in his wood pile and I requested he take the spindles off of it and give them to me. He got his sledge hammer out and knocked the bed frame apart and I got some wooden spindles. They work great for this project. The spindle is stuck into a styrofoam ball (2.5 inches) and there's a plastic doodad that came off of who knows what. Brother thought it was brass as I stole it out  of his brass bucket in the garage. But it is not brass. It is plastic, painted to look like brass. I attached it to the styrofoam ball with a screw and some hot glue. Then I paper mached the entire ball and end piece. I didn't paper mache the wooden spindle. I just painted the whole shebang with 'skin' colored wall paint. This project is not done yet. The muse is contemplating dress making. More to come on this project at a later date.

I am going to be kidnapped week after next so this will probably not get done for a few weeks unless the muse figures out that dress making business before my kidnapping. It's pretty bad when your kidnappings are arranged affairs! If my granddaughter had her way, I'd live at her house full time. Instead I just get kidnapped on occasion. It has been 7 months since the last kidnapping so it is time for  one.

 Still working on the green and purple bag. I might have it finished before the kidnapping. If not, I'll take it along on the kidnapping and finish it at my son's house.

 The milo is coming along nicely. The heads are beginning to turn brown. They are supposed to do this. This picture was taken on the 30th of July.

 I walked out to the field on the 1st of August.

 The milo heads are still immature at this point. 

There will be regular updates on the milo field.

 My mystery plant is growing fruit! I'm almost certain these are acorn squash.

 I've counted five fruits on the three plants that voluntarily came up by the front porch. There should be more to come if these are indeed acorn squash.

 Mystery plant is growing like a weed! Literally! It just came up all on its own. I water it almost daily. Usually with yesterday's coffee or tea leftovers and the rinse water from washing dishes. It has quite a few flowers on it still so I'm going to assume there will be more fruits set on in the next week or so.

 I have to tell you all about the crazy rooster. This bird is a mess! He thinks the two ducks, Daisy and Max are his hens. He chases them around the yard and tries to mount them both. They run from him and he grabs ahold of tail feathers in his beak to slow the ducks down. I told my brother, who owns these birds, that that crazy rooster needs to go in the stew pot! He's a very confused bird!

He could have his own flock of hens if he weren't so stubborn. Brother got three new hens a few days ago. The old hens want nothing to do with the new hens so if he wanted (or knew how to) he could have the white hens and the black rooster could keep the red hens and the ducks could live without the pestering of this confused crazy rooster who I believe I will call Chester.

And I will leave you today with a picture of Miss Lola keeping an eye on the ducks and the crazy rooster out in the front yard.

Thanks for reading to the end!

Remember....

Be good to one another! 

It truly does matter!

Peace

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A Fun New Gadget to Play With

Hello Readers!

I still haven't installed my new keyboard or the new (to me) monitor my brother gave me so I am fighting the keyboard this evening as I type out this blog post. Lots of backspacing as the keys are still sticking from that spilled rootbeer float awhile back.

This post will be heavy with pictures. That seems to be a reoccurring theme; lots of pictures.

I got a new gadget that is great fun to play with! Best $6 I've spent in a long time. It's a microscope you can attach to your smart phone and take super close up pictures of different things. I bought it because I figured it would come in  handy photographing hallmarks and maker's marks on things I have up for sale in my etsy shop. It will indeed work wonderfully for that but I haven't actually taken any such pictures. I took almost 250 photos with it the day it came in the mail.

I promise I won't share all of them! 

 lavendar and white ball of nubby yarn

It doesn't appear yellow at all to the naked eye. My little microscope is useless without a phone's camera to hook it too. It takes photos up to 30x true size. There is no way to determine how many x's your photo is enlarged.

 I took a ton of pictures of the sheet of newspaper laying on the painting table in the kitchen. This lavendar wall paint, blue acrylic paint and blue glitter glue. I took quite a few pictures of the glitter laying around on that paper and not all glitter is shaped the same. This is Elmer's Glitter Glue.

 I have no idea what that brown thing is lurking amongst the bristles of my hand brush.

 The bristles in the picture before this one are the green ones. They're green because nothing is safe from artful experiment! Natural boar's hair bristles WILL be permanently stained when use your brush to make marks with green acrylic ink. That's your public service tip for today!

 I really didn't think that little gadget was going to be so interesting!

This is a piece of green silk with a torn piece of paper from a paperback book laying atop it. I just love how that paper looks so close up!

 This is the bamboo fabric sheet on my bed at the moment. To the naked eye, the weave of the fabric is very hard to see. It surprised me the weave looked like this.

 One of the cooler pictures taken with the microscope. That's a green glass bead with hot glue strings on yellow acrylic yarn.

The point of star (1/2 inch wide) punched from printed newsprint paper laying on the styrofoam meat tray pallet with blue acrylic paint on it. The styrofoam tray appears to be quite smooth to the naked eye.

 This is the seam in a jigsaw puzzle that hangs on my bedroom wall. The picture is of a herd of elephants on the savannah at sunset. It glows i the dark! The lighter parts of this picture are where it glows. Ever since I rearranged the bedroom and put up different curtains, that sucker glows like crazy when the the sun goes down. I've woke a few times in the dark and wondered what the hell that glow on the wall was. Always takes me a second or two to realize it's just the puzzle. My friend Cory gave that puzzle to me a few years ago. It is glued together with Puzzle Saver. You can see the glue in the crack. The glue is crystal clear to the naked eye.

 Machine made lace.

My current paint rag. It's a kitchen towel. The brown is part of the design of the towel. It had brown stripes of differing widths along it. I always cut the towels into manageable sizes before using them as paint rags. This is green wall paint mixed with pva glue. 

 This is the cork mat that lays beneath my keyboard on my desk. I use it for sticking pins and needles into when I'm sewing at desk watching youtube or hulu.

 This is a large ceramic egg with faux cloisonne. It looks pretty cool up close!

 This is a blob of hot glue on the newspaper on the painting table. It's been there through a few painting sessions.

 This is a needlepoint (machine made apparently). It is embedded in the lid of wooden box. I always thought it was hand done, but this up-close certainly says otherwise!

 Brass chain that was taking up space in one of the many containers of little junk on my shelf in the kitchen. Until I took this picture I thought this chain was perfectly fine. It appears to be really worn!

The round edge along the bottom of the picture is part of the microscope. This picture isn't taken at 30x. More like 20x or so.

 Tiny glass balls. Purple. These are stuck to the newspaper on the table that catches all the waste paint.

Cotton fabric. I was wearing this dress when I took this picture.

More glass beads with glitter and purple paint. These little glass beads have no holes and are about a millimeter across.

 Cut lettuce on the cutting board.

 Taklon paint brush that I use for gluing. I use it to paint with too, but mostly for glue because I don't care if it happens to get left laying on the table when I walk away and forget it. You can see flecks of yellow pigment on the bristles. I had just used yellow paint with it.

 This is the same paint brush as the previous picture. I apparently used green, lavendar and black with this paint brush. I've had this brush for a very long time and have used it a LOT. This the spot where the bristles go into the ferrule.

 Gold Elmer's Glitter Glue on newspaper. There's some metallic gold paint splattered along the right hand bottom corner.

 Aluminum chain.

 Cotton Pillowcase. It is mostly blue with pink roses and green leaves. The design is printed on the fabric, not woven into it.

 Green polyester fabric with a few hot glue strings and I'm not sure just what that white blob is. Some kind of fiber.

 Tiny nail head. This nail is less than a half inch long.

 Machine stitching on  silk fabric.

 Printed magazine page. This was a design of little dots that when seen at 30x magnification becomes even tinier dots!

Plastic mesh bag full of garlic bulbs. The white is garlic.

 Magazine page with ballpoint pen.

 My fingertip with glitter glue on it. I think it's cool how the ridges of my fingerprint show through with the dried glue on them. It appears I have a fiber of some sort stuck there also.

 Paint on CD pallet. I use dead CDs for paint pallets as well as styrofoam meat trays. All depends on how much paint will be used as to which gets used. I use them over and over and over.

 This a label on a paint jar. The yellow spots are droplets of fabric paint that gets sprayed from a pump bottle. I get it everywhere when I use it! What can I say? I'm a messy artist.

 This is a plastic net bag full of onions. That which appears to be skin is actually just the outside of an onion. Which technically makes it skin so disregard that skin business. The plastic net bag looks like some kind of sea creature at this size.

 This hairy hole is actually my sea sponge that I use while painting sometimes. I'm pretty good about washing the sea sponge each time I use it.

 Tissue paper scrap glued to the newspaper on the kitchen table then covered (not purposefully, just willy nilly) with green and blue acrylic paint.

 This is a wood roach antennae.  The white part is a chunk of packing styrofoam that the roach is pinned to. I like that you can see how hairy the antennae are.

 Not a very clear picture, but this is the wood roach's leg. Back one I think. It was hard to take good pictures of the parts of the roach.

 This looks like a house roach, aka german roach. It isn't. This sucker is almost 2 inches long. House roaches don't get that big. (Thankfully!) I caught this guy on the porch one night. It was clinging to the wall under the porch light in company with a bunch of millers. The white dot on the roach is the head of the pin holding him to the styrofoam.

Earlier today I took close up pictures of a dead fly that are way cooler than the wood roach. I'll show them to you all in another post, another day.

And beings I've shown you way more pictures than I intended to... I should probably tell you a little more about the little gadget that made these pictures possible.

 Get your own here.

Well, no you can't get one right now. They seem to be out of stock at the moment. That's a shame! 

This really was the best $6 I have spent in a very long time! 

You just slide it over the flash on your phone camera and using your camera's zoom you can take pictures up to 30x magnification. 

I do plan on testing it out some jewelery I want to put in my etsy shop. I've sorely neglected the etsy stores for far too long.

I'll be back tomorrow with some art to show!

The muse showed up and demanded we draw elephants. LOTS of ellies....

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this subject as fascinating as I find it!

Remember...

Be good to one another!

It matters!

Peace

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