Friday, May 17, 2013

Mothers' Day gifts: footprint paintings

As I mentioned in my very first post, I want to use this space to share the Pinterest-inspired projects that I've finished. I saw lots of cute handprint and footprint gift ideas leading up to Mothers' Day - like these adorable penguins, these reindeer, this bouquet, and these butterfies. (You can follow my "Great gift ideas" board here.) I particularly liked the butterflies, and I thought they would make great Mothers' Day gifts for my mom and mother-in-law. I do realize that - technically - they would be more appropriate Grandparents' Day gifts, since they are my daughters' feet and all, but my hubby and I just knew our moms would love them.

Occasionally my husband will accuse me of being slightly hoarder-ish, but I maintain that I only save stuff that I know I will eventually use. I admit I was pretty proud of this habit when I didn't have to spend a penny on this project. I had some canvases that I had planned on using for wall decor, but that just never came to fruition. (This is a famous move of mine... big ideas that are never fully realized - an unfortunate tendency I've had since way before Pinterest was even around.) I used acrylic paint that's been sitting in my craft box for quite some time. I was disappointed to find that many colors had completely dried up, but relieved that the primary colors had survived. I've been saving brushes from paint-by-number kits and other craft sets forever, all of which also end up in my craft box. I finished both paintings with some glitter paint that my mom had found in her house. (Do I want that *insert craft-related item that's still in usable condition*? The answer is always yes.)



I painted this one for my mom. She loves pansies and gardening. It's supposed to look like a little garden sitting in a field/back yard covered with dandelions and violets - I was going for a stylized realistic look.(Having taken many art classes, I've learned the right semantics to be able to "rationalize" any awkward proportions that might occur when I paint - hehe - which is why the pansies look huge and have no stems or leaves.) The feet on the left are my nephew's - he was not a fan of the footprinting process. I was shocked at how well my girls' footprints came out, however if you look closely you can see that I tried to reprint one of the middle ones.



This one is my mother-in-law's - her name is Rose. I wanted this one to look more abstract, but I wanted the roses to look realistic, so I used the great diagrams from this blog (after searching for "how to paint a rose" on Pinterest. Watch out Google...). This time neither of my girls wanted to unscrunch their toes enough for really clear prints, but you can still clearly tell that they're feet. When I do another footprint project I either won't put as much paint on their feet (hopefully reducing toe scrunching) or I'll use an ink pad instead of paint.

Mothers' Day was really nice this year - I saw my mom and grandmothers on the actual day-of, and hubby and I took the girls to see his mom later in the week. As we anticipated, they both loved their gifts - you can't lose with grandchild-related anything lol. Besides the paintings, I have to mention that I got a pretty fantastic gift from hubby, as well - my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 makes Pinterest even more amazing! (In reality the tablet is for the whole family to use, but I got to pick all the backgrounds and set up the home screens and all.) He gets a gold star this year haha.

I had lots of fun with these and can't wait for a reason to do it again!

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