happy heart, double word score

yesterday i ended my blog with a teaser: i'll show you a monopoly piece next ..... and now .... that teaser .... is wrong ..... i worked and worked simultaneously on a juicy bright background... three feet square .... that went PERFECTLY with the red of the monopoly of indiana, illinois and kentucky ...... but then, i veered off ... the red was too pink ... and i added a brown glaze and some deeper red ....and then some marvin gardens yellow and some new york orange (i'm certain you all are monopoly players and know what i'm talking about) .... but then it was SO vivid i decided to do brown letters to tone it down .... and oops .... the monopoly board with its blue sky and green grass no longer went with my background .... at all ..... really, at all .... but look ... the clue board AND the scrabble board BOTH look super with it .... some of this chatter was in my head ... some of it was with allison ...my art partner for the day ...... so .... this is what i came up with:

the scrabble board seemed to work for me the best ... the clue board was actually too big and had some green on it that i didn't want to deal with.... and i had a home sweet home thing in my head ... which also had to be rethought .... no blue sky, green grass with that background ..... so ... i was thinking of an apple .... to go with the pear i'd done earlier on a scrabble board ... but.... in a round about way, i ended up with this one lone tree branch with a happy heart dangling from it ......

and here is a detail .... a close up ... so you can read the words that i glued on ..... i spent a good 20 minutes looking through scrabble tiles ...hundreds of them ..... looking for a j .... for joy ... no such luck ...... but happy heart works too ......



we have house guests for the next five days ...not sure how much that will hamper my art endeavors ... perhaps not entirely .... time will tell ....