Tag: art

La vache violette

Je n’ai jamais vu de vache violette
Je n’espère jamais en voir un
Mais je peux te le dire, de toute façon
Je préfère voir que d’en être un

My mother used to recite this Gelett Burgess poem to me (in English). I have it in this book, first publication date after I left the right age group, but this edition was also before the time of my nephews and nieces. Who knows how or where I acquired it. The lines around the poem are part of the way the publisher decorated the page. No child scribbled those.


Since this was the first of my coloring books in which I could find a page with a cow, I decided I must do a little more to make her très chic to match the week’s purple theme. She’s definitely outstanding… out standing in her field, as my Uncle Dwight might have said.

 

 

Tiny Tuesday!


A small bottle ideal for perfumes and scents. Also purple.


I thought the bottle might pair well with my “Bridgerton” coloring book. Based on the Regency romance book series by Julia Quinn, the fourth season of the TV series returns in 2026.


On this page, the anonymous “Lady Whistledown” is making a surreptitious late-night visit to her printer so all the gossip about London society (and a bit of the royal household) can be consumed by anyone with around five cents to spend. (They were free at first, and once the populace was hooked, she began to charge for her sheets.) This coloring page was a big help to me yesterday.

Regarding the rest of today’s post: I don’t think today is necessarily the best place to share this information, but it’s uppermost on my mind and is impacting what I feel like sharing here and how this kind of thing can dominate my thoughts and my days. For example, I can color, because it’s soothing. I can manage my household and my health because I have to. But I can’t write. Writing fiction demands that I tap into a full range of feelings, many of them including conflict.

I can’t watch anything (movies, television) that will have too much emotional impact.

I don’t easily handle small frustrations (yet I STILL feel grateful for all the things that go well and the wonderful parts of my life, because I’ve hardwired myself to do so).

I’m doing what I can to proceed with Christmas (still don’t have a holiday photo for our Christmas cards/letters this year, and still haven’t mailed out the packages I’m running out of time to send).

I need the normalcy of updating here. I need the structure it provides. I’d rather not be thinking about yesterday’s event or letting it affect me, but these tragedies always do and likely always will. I won’t rant. I’ll just provide a graphic and talk about my website. (After a cut, so if a coloring page and a photo of a bottle is what you can handle today, I completely get it. For me personally, the amount of news and social media exposure I’ve cut out since November is necessary for my emotional and mental health.)

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Christmasy stuff, etc.

Before I write another word of this post: I FINISHED CHAPTER freaking 16 15 (I somehow skipped a number, so all these times I’ve called it 16, I was wrong) in book seven of the Neverending Saga. It’s a Christmas miracle.

Meanwhile, this holiday-themed book was only released in 2023, so I don’t think I’ve colored out of it before. I really like its drawings, but yesterday, I was confused about some ornaments.

I texted Lynne, hoping for clues to the questions, What the heck are these; how do I color them?


She texted back: Pine cone or artichoke or pomegranate or all had a baby. Deferring to that botanical wisdom, here is my finished page.

And a couple of close-ups so you can see most are shiny in some way.

Also, this happened today.

Just like every year: Mrs. Claus has to mend Santa’s hat. Santa is painting another yellow skateboard. One of those elves looks like he’s taking a knife to a small child.* The wee reindeer keep watch. The tree has been decorated. Toys a’plenty are ready for Santa’s bag.

This is my yearly reminder that I was lucky enough to know Liz, who helped me love Christmas again many decades ago and painted and gave me Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus and some of their workshop accessories. Lynne has a matching set (in different colors) painted by their mother. One day, Lynne’s set will be given to her granddaughter, and my set will be given to Lynne’s grandson. This is one tradition I hope will continue long after I’m gone.

Even before Santa’s Workshop opened for business this season, Tom’s Workshop was busy repairing several broken ornaments that I found when I unpacked decoration bins in late November. News flash! TOM IS SANTA’S HELPER. Did anyone ever doubt it?

*ETA: If you doubted me. Tom says the elf is whittling a doll. Sure, Tom. That elf chose violence.

Coloring fiction (and history)

Taking a suggestion from Mark for coloring that might include history and England…

C.S. Lewis was a British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian. You might know him best because of The Chronicles of Narnia, which begins with the first novel, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When the four Pevensie children are evacuated from London during the Blitz*, they live with a professor in his house in the countryside. There, they discover a wardrobe that’s a portal to a magical land named Narnia.


The coloring pages I did below, of the wardrobe, can be found on the copyright page and last page of this lovely coloring book.

I didn’t read the Narnia series as a child. I was introduced to it by my college roommate Debbie, who I think gave me a paperback set for a birthday or Christmas. I then told Lynne about the series because both of us read fantasy as teens and young adults, specifically The Lord of the Rings novels (J.R.R. Tolkien) and The Sword of Shannara trilogy (Terry Brooks).


Years later, when I worked at a bookstore, badly damaged books were often marked 50% off, and that’s how I was able to afford my hardcover collection on my meager salary. While they may not be the prettiest, they came to me gently loved and remain loved.

Debbie’s recommendation also began my fascination with lions thanks to Narnia’s Aslan. Aslan is the reason my father did this for me in pen and ink:

And Lynne’s sister Liz did this ceramic piece for me:

And Debby gave me this canvas print by artist Leonid Afremov as a recent Christmas gift.

*The whole lion fascination was a detour. Back to British history. Long before I read C.S. Lewis, I’d read books about children who were evacuated to the English countryside as well as to the United States to stay with host families during World War Two. The Blitz is the term for Germany’s bombing raids of cities and towns in England from September 1940 to May 1941. In London during that period, there were 57 consecutive nights of bombing. People wore gas masks and used blackout curtains. They were on food and petrol rations, and volunteers patrolled the streets at night to sound warnings and make sure people got safely inside shelters during air raids. Civilians, including women, drove ambulances, helped rescue people trapped in bombed houses, and tended to wounds as they could. Mark, in a comment you left on Mindful Monday’s post, you pinpointed some of the qualities that explain why I have so much love and admiration for your country and its people.

Because of my interest in that period of history, there’s a backstory for a brother and sister in the Neverending Saga that includes being sent to live with relatives in rural England during the war. Though their parents were killed in a London bombing after the Blitz, just in London alone, 30,000 residents lost their lives during the Blitz.

Tiny Tuesday!

Yesterday brought good mail. One of the first things that showed up was my 2024 sleigh bell. Tom and I still haven’t decided exactly which decorations we’ll put out this year (at least the tree is already up), but seeing the new bell made me look forward to all of them hanging on their garland again.

Back in December 2022, I put a couple of photos on Instagram showing most of the many paper angels that I’ve colored or have been colored and given to me through the years.

Coloring angels dates back to when Steve R was alive (early 90s) and introduced me to Catherine Stock’s A Christmas Angel Collection coloring books. A friend commented on my Instagram post that she really liked them, and I offered to send her a few if she wanted to choose one to color.

I’ll share this in the most privacy-respecting way possible, but my friend had some big life changes coming her way, and it turned out coloring an angel added to the stress. A lot of people find coloring stressful. In fact, several years ago, at the fundraiser Debby and I went to that reignited my interest in coloring, one of the other people attending got so stressed out that she had to stop. What’s calming for some of us is the exact opposite for others.

My friend’s angel was the other thing that arrived with the mail, along with her explanation for why she never finished it. There’s nothing wrong with stopping a project that doesn’t bring you happiness. I was excited to see the angel and the colors my friend used to start her.


All of the angels in Stock’s book are based on great works of art, and this one is derivative of the artwork St. Macarius of Alexandria, from the School of Rublev, Russia, late 16th century. Angel colors are completely up to the person coloring (i.e., it’s not important to try to imitate the art, because it would be so boring if all my angels looked alike).

New angel, new sleigh bell.

I finished my friend’s angel using her colors and my additions, and now this angel can join the others when I unpack them and put them out this year.

Mindful Monday


Taking my own recommendation, I realized I have another book I haven’t used but once on here, Hey, Thanks: A Guided Gratitude Journal.

I found this page that you might reflect on and answer (in comments or only to yourself):

I thought it fit in with the mindful theme of “be who you are in this moment.” So I found a coloring page in this book:

And colored it for you.

The quote on the back of the page, from “Unknown,” says, “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?”

Bold style


I’ve used Coloring In Style for pages to share on Instagram nearly a dozen times. It’s a go-to book when I want fashion and color but not a ton of detail (though there are some busy pages in it, too). Did these two over the past few days.

Still taking suggestions of anything you’d like to see colored, because…this is my shelf of coloring books. I’ll never run out of pages. Some themes: fashion, seasonal, fantasy, animals, world travel/people/places, sayings, flowers, decades, music, angels, groovy…

Or… Here are some of the random books I sometimes draw from to create posts. Pick a book and challenge me to find something in it that matches a coloring page? I have no idea if this is possible, but I’m willing to give it a try. Coloring somehow always leads me to writing, whether it’s the work in progress, something new, or poetry.

You write it

From this coloring book, back in April and May of 2021, I colored this page (using a photo of a particular surfer for my color choices):

Blue Sky Boy recently suggested “seaside/surfing” as a theme, so here’s another page I just colored from that book.

I didn’t write any flash fiction about it. I did find a prompt in the Write The Poem book, if you’d like to write poetry or prose using the coloring page as your subject. You can share it in comments or keep it only for yourself. In addition to the words the book provided, I’m adding: sailboats, camera, rocky coast, beach plums, and inlets. Enjoy a burst of creativity!

How to make…

This year I’ve been mostly on my own to start decorating our large tree, and let me tell you… I MISS MY THREE TO SIX ELVES. I used to call myself the Christmas hooker, because all I did was put hooks on ornaments and hand them over to volunteers who’d work for fun, food, and good tunes to hang them on the tree.

There are so many bins of ornaments that I was overwhelmed, so this year, I made the decision to leave a whole lot of them in the bins, and that included most of the beautiful ornaments that have been made for us by children and gifted stitchers and other arts and crafts friends through the decades. THEY ARE STILL HERE AND STILL LOVED. They’ll be hanging and beautiful again on future trees.

On the other hand, I’ll offer a Saturday morning pictorial of How To Create An Ornament That Nobody Will Want*.


Back in July of last year, I had a bunch of 2-inch by 2-inch canvases and painted all of them on the same day, for future use as wanted, with acrylics. I picked one of those for An Ornament That Nobody Will Want. Enjoy!

Step 1. Do an online search for free downloadable mini mandalas, and find a 2015 set from Tiffany Hastie. Be very grateful, download it, and print it on regular paper so you can check the size.

Step 2. Adjust the size (down, in this case) to print on cardstock. Do that and pick your pens.

Step 3. Get to coloring and realize you don’t need those sticking-out circles for what you’re doing. Oh, well.

Step 4. Cut out the mini mandala and pick a canvas.

Step 5. Pick your glue. Be grateful for your friends who have taught you from their experience to organize and label all your craft supplies.

Step 6. When the glue is dry, take your wee canvas outside with your preferred spray finish (in this case, matte), spray it, and leave it outside to dry.

Step 7. Time to call in the muscle, in my case, Tom, to find the right hook and insert it into the wood frame of the canvas.

Step 8. Find and cut the right piece of ribbon from this mess.

Step 8. When the ribbon is on the hook, hang it on the Christmas tree. Festive fun!

*An Ornament That Nobody Will Want is not a bitter name. It is a truth universally acknowledged that crafting is in the pleasure, art is subjective, and experience is a teacher. Also, Becky is not a perfectionist unless she is ruthlessly editing someone’s (including her own) writing. Which she’s about to get back to doing.