Hot air....

I'm very excited about being Emma's favorite Aunt (pronounced "Aunt" not "Ant") or at least, one of her favorites, so I was very eager to have a hand in painting her baby room. Rebecca opted for a hot air balloon theme complete with wall mural. That shouldn't be too bad for my first attempt at painting a wall mural right? A whole bunch of elongated circle type objects with basic geometric designs. Geometry, simple. Very basic color scheme too, predominately green and yellow with accents of purple and white. Nothing too complicated, I even managed to chalk in a pattern that looked reasonably promising and not too ambitious or overwhelming. We bought the paint with a heightened sense of anticipation, Rebecca seemed just as thrilled as I was. Our first foray into clouds was an unequivicable success. The "special" paint we got at Lowes was translucent white with a shimmery sheen to it, add an elephant ear sponge for swirly texture and our clouds came straight out of dream worlds. Feeling confident with the clouds and the chalk, I opened up the first can of paint and eagerly plunged in my brush.

Two paint sessions later I'm feeling remarkably disgruntled, although Rebecca still thinks it looks great. The problem is, I went into painting the walls wanting to reproduce THIS....

And instead, after struggling with getting enough paint to cover up the blue underneath, trying to make clean curved lines, wrestling with painting on an upright surface I can't spin around to make it easier on my wrist, and painting while on a rolling office chair to get the tops of the balloons, I produced something very similar to THIS.

Buh.


If I can step back enough to look at it objectively, it perhaps does look better than my computer Paint rendition, but because I was aiming for something else it stil makes me slightly grumpy. I think it'll turn out well, I'm pretty sure people will at least know what I was aiming for and parts of it are going to be entirely too much fun (two balloons have actual baskets coming out of the wall). Rebecca and Nick seem to like it which is the most important part.

I'm not fishing for compliments on artwork with this post, I'm halfway laughing at myself because I think this is why I don't paint as much as I want. I get these great ideas for pictures, but it never looks in paint like it does in my head. Some of my paintings I think actually turned out pretty decent, I'm rather fond of the wolf painting Brian has in his man cave for instance, but I still see all of the flaws and imperfections and things I missed or did wrong that makes me itch to take it out of the frame and try and fix it up.

In other actual wolfhound relavant news, Remus chews on the Vincent house, barks at everything, and whines like a two year old in a candy shop every time I bring him over. I got him home, he was very excited and wriggly tail wagging prancy, and he has yet to whine, has only chewed on his bone, and very obediently went to his crate to lie down. Oy. I wish he'd take his good behavior with him when we travel...