Bright Glass Bubbles Holiday Card is a "Today's Best" at zazzle.com

Bright Glass Bubbles

The Bright Glass Bubbles blank holiday card was selected as a "Today's Best" for June 6, 2012 at zazzle.com.


It was "...hand-picked as an example of creativity at its finest. Out of billions of products on Zazzle, your design was chosen for being one of the best!" I am honored.


Fans of nanoscapes may recall the 13 weeks in 2010 that I spent in the World of Fractured Glass when I painted Fractured Glass 1, 2, 3, and this glass bubble painting. It was fun!


Click here for the link to this card at my zazzle store

Stained Glass Cat: a creative conundrum

Stained Glass Cat

Stained Glass Cat will be a new small friend, but her roots are with the nanoscapes' Fractured Glass family. She has brought me to the brink with a creative conundrum: is she finished?

Because the Fractured Glass technique is in my comfort zone, I began work on her when I needed a break between identifying and painting new small friends and tackling new nanoscapes projects.

Now that all of her "glass bits" are finished and "grouted" with watercolor, she might be finished. But perhaps not. I might paint a "fractured glass" frame or add a horizontal line to anchor her. Or maybe not.

This eerie feeling -- hesitating before making a paint stroke -- may be as close as I ever get to what I imagine sculptors and gem cutters feel before making a critical cut. Will it work? Will it do what I want it to do? Will it do something better? Will it cause the entire enterprise to fall flat on its face?

Stained Glass Cat: in progress

Stained Glass Cat Day 2

Yes. I love stained glass. Yes. I think that any work with glass is magic. No, I will never work with glass because it requires safety equipment for cutting or being a heat-resistant human who can work with the temperatures required by melting and fusing.

But wait! I can paint. Adding to the nanoscapes' Fractured Glass and The Glazes, this small friend Stained Glass Cat is based on a needlepoint pattern that I have carted around for 30 years. When complete, it will be for sale through the small friends website.

When Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscopes Collide

Having acquired a number of new paint colors during the past few weeks, I want to explore them and to see how they work with one another, and with the related colors on my ever-expanding palette.

As you can see, I am not yet finished with Fractured Glass (three paintings unambiguously celebrating random color), nor have I abandoned the nanoscapes' vision of Kaleidoscopes and Molecular Biology. DISCLAIMER: My version of molecular biology is not a reflection of what I may have learned in 9th grade Biology in 1963 at Hyattsville Junior High School in Hyattsville, MD.

Fractured Glass #1 celebrates random color and begins to answer the question "What happens when triangles go wild?" It is 12x16 inches.

For a painter who can't have or make too many colors and who (as she learned from Russ Dittmar) never met a color she didn't want to enhance, Fractured Glass is a platform for fun.

Among the earliest nanoscapes, Molecular Biology 112 shows things heretofore unrevealed by electronic microscopes.  It is 4x6 inches.

In 2007, in the beginning of the nanoscapes' creative process now called Painstaking Enthusiasm, I used cookie cutters to create the circles, drew the patterns, painted them with Sepia (now abandoned for the lighter Davy's Gray), painted in the shapes, and outlined the shapes with a Rapidograph,  a technical pen with a very, very tiny point. Once I was brave and confident enough to use a tiny watercolor brush, I ditched the Rapidograph.

This first and as-yet-unnamed marriage (or collision) of the Fractured Glass and Kaleidoscope Families (12x16 inches) may be an exploration of patterns of surface tension on bubbles of unknown origin.  Or perhaps not.


But each color will be fun to explore.