Kat Eye Studio

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Be Delighted

Sometimes, when you are following your heart and your creative inspiration, when you just play around, you get to be delighted. Happy surprises appear out of nowhere. This image is one for me. I found this free action for Photoshop (works in Elements too – yay!) through a post on a Flickr group yesterday. I went to run it on another photo I had open, but somehow chose the photo incorrectly and got this one. Happy accident! I loved the result, it made the photo of the carnival lights in Geneva much more abstract and interesting.

Here’s the original:

When we get creative, when we play, we have a lot of opportunity for happy accidents. These are what happen when we give up the idea of Serious Creativity with all of the pressure of creating something perfect, something that others will love, something marketable even, and just have fun.

Yesterday my son decided it was an “art day” and (to my neat-freak husband’s horror) proceeded to pull out all of his art and craft supplies (and some of mine) and spread them out on the dining room table. I found some artists chalks amidst the wreckage and had fun playing with colors and getting my hands dirty. I call the result “The Color Comet.” Here’s another recent happy outcome, a painting I did a few weeks ago when I just felt like putting paint to canvas and playing around. Not trying to be an Artist with a capital A, just enjoying the process of creating. I like the colors and the message, it sits on my desk and reminds me everyday to believe in myself. I share these little pieces, not because they are fantastic art, but because they are not fantastic art. They are just the result of creative play. The process of playing around delighted me, so the end result delights me too, if only for the memory of the fun I had. Pastels on my fingers, paint brush in my hand.

So if you have time this week… wait, let me rephrase that… Make time this week to play creatively. Find a fun new action, pull out the paints or the pastels, go through your art and craft supplies and see what your fingers itch to hold. Don’t have a plan, just have fun. Be delighted in the result. Come back and share your happy accidents!

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Rising Sun

It felt too weird to be posting pics of Italy while I’m here in Corvallis, so I decided to post this picture of my most recent painting, Jenny’s Rising Sun. I hung out with Jenny here in Corvallis today and was finally able to give it to her, so I could also post it here without spoiling the gift!

My friend Jenny left the company we both worked for earlier this year to start her own business, Rising Sun Coaching, where she coaches people to help them find happy and fulfilling lives. I’m so inspired by her, she is one of the most amazing people I know!

I have had this painting rattling around in my head for a couple of months and finally committed it to canvas when I knew that I would be coming to Corvallis and could actually give it to her. It’s interesting, it’s the first painting I’ve ever done for someone else, and the first painting I’ve given away. I thought I would feel a little bit of loss when I gave it to her but I think I actually feel the opposite. It’s like there is a piece of me there with her wherever she decides to put it, hopefully providing positive energy and inspiration.

I’m enjoying my time here in Oregon so far, about ready to head out for dinner with some other friends. I’m fading fast but trying to make it through so that I’m functional for the next week. World travel is fabulous, except for the jet lag. Our bodies are just not made for this!

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Kitchen Composition


My latest painting project has been a decorating one. Today I just finished painting the 5th of my “Kitchen Composition” paintings, to go above our kitchen table. These paintings are all 20x20cm on stretched canvas, my first experience with that. They are simple compositions, I painted directly from life without drawing, playing around with that some more.

I like how it turned out overall. Right now I’m all about bright colors and I love the orange and green we have decorated our kitchen with. I wanted to bring interest to the wall above the kitchen table, it’s such a big white wall!


This is a close up of my favorite painting of the series, the oranges.

If you want to see the paintings each on their own you can view them in my painting album. I think I’ll do some more of these small canvases, they are quick and fun!

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Painting without a net

OK, maybe not painting without an actual net. It’s not like painting is that dangerous. More like painting without a plan, painting without a drawing. Playing with color and shape and layering paints but not doing a big “painting.” That’s what I did on Friday night, because I didn’t feel like drawing more of the “painting” I had planned and had started to draw. I just wanted to play with some color and see what I could come up with.

I came up with a lot of things I didn’t like. But this is just play, right? So I kept playing. And eventually painted this cup, which I did like. I liked the colors and the brushstrokey-ness of it (is that a real word?). When I paint from a photo and a drawing, I feel like I am too precise, too linear. Yeah, people seem to like it but I’m not convinced that’s what I want in painting. I like the paintings where you can see the brushtrokes and the paint clumps and know it is a painting!

So, for the last day I’ve been wanting to paint more tea cups. Play around with what I had learned Friday night. Paint some more without a drawing. Let myself be brushstrokey and see what emerges. I put a tea cup in the window and started to paint. OK, this was not as bright of orange as I wanted. Apparently my beautiful dark red doesn’t turn into a beautiful bright orange when mixed with bright yellow. So, learning something about color mixing too… try again. More the color I wanted. Still not quite so bright, more work to do there, but closer.

So, here you have my painting experience for the weekend. Thanks for joining me on this little creative journey I have going. It helps for me to type these things out and solidify the things I’m learning. Oh, and by the way, one more lesson – be sure not to drink the tea you are painting after you’ve accidentally cleaned your brush in it! Maybe there is something dangerous about painting after all…

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Painting #3

So, painting #3 is finished. This is Marksburg Castle in the Rhine River Valley. With all of our vacations this has taken a little while to finish!

This painting incorporated some new elements for me… it was larger, for one, at 40cmx50cm (my previous were both 25cmx35cm). It included clouds and trees, new and different. But the biggest difference was that this was of a structure – where perspective and angles and light and shadow were all important. It was a lot more difficult! I think the eye is less forgiving on a structure than an element of nature. While I like how it turned out, I didn’t enjoy painting it quite as much as the others. I think I need more nature in there!

I showed it to Rosella, my italian teacher, and she asked me where I learned to do all this. That made me think. I did learn somewhere, didn’t I? How and when did that happen?

I guess I learned perspective back in drawing classes in maybe junior high school, we did quite a bit of drawing back then. But I didn’t learn a lot about light and shadow from there… I realized that I have learned a lot about light and composition over the last 10 years from photography. Also the scrapbooking/card making I used to do has taught me a lot about color and composition/design. So I’m just pulling together different elements I’ve learned over time and using them in a different way. I guess it’s surprising to others that I had all of this inside me just waiting to come out, but for me it is natural. It just seems to make sense, it feels right.

You never know what life is going to show you…

(PS – I created an album on Multiply where I will add photos of my paintings as they finish. If you want to see them together click here.)

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New Painting and Trip Musings

Finished another painting! This was almost done before our trip, I just needed to add some of the darker areas of the flower and the shadows. I’ve realized that a painting is never finished, you just have to declare “Done” and move on. Hmmmm… maybe that’s a lesson in life for us perfectionist types!

Our trip to Amsterdam, the Rhine River Valley and Germany was interesting! You can read all of the details on Patrick’s blog. An interesting thought, since I don’t scrapbook anymore the online albums I post plus Patrick’s blog are our new scrapbook. I’ll get to pictures eventually but since I took somewhere around 2000 of them it will take me a while. And I need to start a new painting now so that will of course take some of my time away from picture sorting. 🙂

A few musings on the trip…

– It was so much easier to travel within Europe than I expected! I’m sure part of it is the travel time is short and we didn’t have to deal with jet lag, but I think another part is that by living in a foreign country we’ve learned how to adapt, learn the ways of doing things, etc. A “Europe trip” used to seem like such a big deal but it was as easy as any other vacation.

– You can’t really get an idea of culture from a visit to a place. I think living here and experiencing the culture of Italy in a day-to-day way has shown me how little you really learn of a culture by going on vacation and visiting. You get the tourist version of the culture, where you pick and choose the pieces you want to experience and can distance yourself from the parts you don’t want. Or the place you visit does it for you, by catering to what a tourist wants. That’s not to say that you don’t learn something about a place, a culture, a way of life by visiting; that you don’t expand your horizons my travelling; that you can’t have a different experience by getting off the beaten path – it’s just doesn’t have the depth of learning that you get by living in a place. I would never have thought that if we weren’t living here now.

– My high school German still exists in my brain! I was able to use it quite a bit and more came the longer we were there. Of course, I came back here and for the first day couldn’t say a thing in Italian because the German kept coming, but hopefully eventually my brain will get more comfortable switching between the two. It does make it easier to know some things. I’m going to be a mess when we travel to France or Spain… 🙂

– I am just getting an appreciation for so much more about how culture and geography and history shape all of us in ways we don’t even realize. I thought of myself as an individual before, but I’m clearly an American individual. Shaped so much more than I thought by what surrounded me for my whole life. We have such a short history in America compared to other places. A relatively safe and sanitized life. Our whole outlook and psyche and approach to life is shaped by that in ways that I didn’t even realize, until I started to see and understand more of other places. Not for good or for bad – it just is. But I think without understanding that we can’t have a deeper understanding of the world we live in, the conflicts that exist and how to resolve them. We can’t have a deeper understanding of our selves.

Enough musings for today, I hope everyone has a great day!