a tiny painting...

Jana's birthday was a very long four and a half months ago. I have started and stalled on several ideas for gifts for her along those four and a half months. Luckily inspiration struck on Saturday when my brother called to say, "we're pregnant!" to which I replied, "HOORAY!!" This new little baby will be my first Proff niece or nephew and I couldn't be more thrilled for them. The boys are over the moon about having a new baby in the family and even more excited about having a cousin who lives (relatively) close by. Lynn is currently delusional, thinking we should have another baby so this new baby will have someone closer to his/her age (uh, no thank you...I'm just now getting my body back to myself)...as if Molly isn't close enough. Sheesh.

Anyway, roughly four months ago I purchased a stack of canvases to use in assemblages or some kind of mixed media sort of thing for both Jana and Katie for their birthdays...nothing was working out the way I wanted so all efforts were benched several times. I knew I wanted them to focus on a patron saint of some sort but just couldn't get it to come together in my mind. Leave it to a new baby to do the trick. After some googling I decided Saint Anne would be perfect and since it was Mother's Day too I figured I would incorporate the three of them (Anne the grandmother, Mary the mother and the baby Jesus) together. This is the initial drawing:



I love the faces in this drawing. I think I'll carve a stamp from this drawing too...I've had that itch again lately. I wish I'd been able to better replicate the faces in the painting, but then again, I've never been very good at duplicating a drawing exactly the way I want to. I am happy with the way the painting turned out though. I'm running by the Catholic bookstore tomorrow to look at their medals and santos so I might do something more to it tomorrow before I box it up and send it off.