Psalm 118:8... Printer/Watercolor Test

Today I decided to do a test.  First I tore a couple of 8.5" x 11" pages from a 22" x 30" sheet of watercolor paper.  I wanted to see if I could print something using my Epson printer onto the paper then watercolor it without the ink spreading when I added water.

SUCCESS!!!

Below is like the original file that I printed (I closed it without saving it so I had to recreate it to share with you)  Everything but the text was added by hand:

The large font is one I have available under the "My Font Store" in the menu above called MFH Stitches. (the "e" is different now because after I saw it printed on my original I decided to change it).

You are welcome to download the black and white version as soon as I can figure out how to do it!  I use to use Google Docs but I don't think that exists anymore???  All I could find was Picasa so I downloaded that and it has been loading every picture on my PC forever now!!!  I have 1000s!!!  I'm hoping it will also help me see what I have where.  We shall see!  You can try right clicking and saving it that way, I'm just not sure of the .dpi.

Let Go and Let God

It feels kinda weird having "God" be polka dot... But, I was trying to cover up a mistake :-/

Two testimonies:

If you wait long enough God will bring help...and from the most unexpected places!

Last week someone broke my mailbox in half! Literally, I went out and the actual mailbox was on the ground! Awwwww man! (Said with a Whiny voice)...  Who the heck do you get to install a new mailbox??? OK add that to changing tires making two reasons to be married.   Though my ex wasn't all that great at tire changing....  

Anyway, anyway...  I decided to check out Angie's List.  Did you know that you have to PAY for that?!  It was going to be $29 just to be able to find a handy man!! So, I decided to think about it.  The very next morning I got an .email from them offering a 25% discount!  OK, so that makes it a little better.... Not only that, if you pay using PayPal there is an additional 20% (i think) off.   ...always my preferred payment choice anyway....  Soooo, instead of paying $29 I paid something like $14!!! 

Would you believe that during the night someone had temporarily fixed the broken one!  Several days later the guy across the street came over and confessed...someone had backed out of his driveway and broken it...he was going to replace it over the weekend with a whole new one!  DONE!  I now have a brand new box...AND... He noticed the blue tarp on my roof (used to cover a 6" hole made by a falling tree branch almost TWO years ago!  It was too expensive for me to fix then so it was now on my Angie's Fix it List.  He offered to fix that too!!  FOR FREE!  GOD is so AMAZING!  "Let Go and Let God"

Side story...  His house is up a hill....one day about 11 years ago, just one month after my "fire destroyed" house was replaced with a brand new one I was sitting in my dining room and heard this gosh awful crash.  I went downstairs to investigate and found the tail end of a truck INSIDE my shower!!!  Their daughter had not put the emergency break on and the empty truck had rolled down their driveway and ended up in my bathroom!!  It was the most bazaar thing because the truck had to go past 4 trees and other bushes to get to my house and not one branch, leaf even, was touched!!...but I got ANOTHER brand new bathroom!  I think that is the only other time he and I have ever talked before the mailbox thing.  We aren't a "get to know your neighbor" kind of neighborhood for sure!  I have lived here 30 years and don't even know any of my neighbors last names.... PITIFUL!

 

 

Be Creative! What can YOU DO in addition to praying?

I have thought about prayer a lot this week because I have a friend that just had MAJOR heart surgery at the age of 80 (in a few months) and I started seeing TONS and TONS of offers for prayers.  

Cool! 

Everybody's praying... but.... 

- where are they?  

- what else are they doing? 

- is anyone actually DOING anything to help?  

Because let's face it .... 

And you can't just say "Be sure and call me if you need ANYTHING".... knowing full well that the person will never call and ask for help!

I know my friend, ANY offer of help would be immediately answered with "Oh honey, that is so sweet, but I am fine, really." She "wouldn't want to put anyone out". But I also KNOW that there are things that she needs help with!  

- Who is running the errands that need running?  

- Who is taking care of the pets?

- Who is vacuuming the carpet?  

- Who is giving the care giver a break?

Don't just offer to help, INSIST on it!  JUST DO IT!!!  

Don't ask "what?",  you need to be creative ... AND JUST DO IT!!!!   

Heck!  EVERYBODY could use some help of some kind!  OF COURSE someone that is going through something that requires your prayer could also use YOUR HELP!

Galatians 6:10

New International Version (NIV)

10 Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

....there, I feel better now....

Flowers and Vines (19 doodled .pngs for sale)

Last week Jeanne purchased my MFH Polly Wolly Doodle Font then asked if she could also purchase the flowers that are used in some of the examples found throughout the site.  Unfortunately, I had hand drawn all of those and hadn't done any digitized version of them so I decided to give it a go and create something.

These are the 19 .pngs that are now available for purchase:

Flowers and Vines (19 .png files zipped, will be emailed) $6.50..........

I made them so that, if you have a graphics package like PSE, you can combine, resize, and color adjust, if you know how.   They will definitely require some knowledge on how to manipulate .pngs so if you don't know how please don't purchase.  They will come as a .zip file containing 19 separate .png files.  

Below are a few examples of how they can be used:

Thanks for the challenge Jeanne!  I hope this is what you meant!

Psalm 112:5

Well! Today was one of those days when I really wish I had more of an idea of where I  going BEFORE I took off in full trot!!

All I had in mind when I started today's doodle was a scripture (Psalm 112:5) and a flower.  Scripture made it, the flower didn't.  But that isn't where the trouble started.  If you have been around for a while you may have noticed that I like frames....and I like for things to hang over and out of the frame...today that went all wrong.  See the picture below... The inside/outside got "off" with the word "GOOD". Had I been thinking ahead that heavy black frame around the word should have been drawn BEFORE I watercolored anything....then I would have done that box a different color.... But, I drew it after the fact in an attempt to "fix" my mess...FAIL!

 

 

So, I spent the next hour working on it, with several options not working :-(.  Believe me, this was one of those times when much less time would have been spent starting over...but, nooooooo, I am way too bull headed for that!   I tend to get more and more determined to make it ok.

I ended up with this:

Unfortunately, you can't see what I see... The "GOOD" is actually gold glitter and it looks kinda good.  :-). It sparkles!  I love sparkle!

I do wish I had the "want-to" to do it again "right" because there is a lot about it that I would change..... But, I over it, no do-overs today.  

Oh, here is something I doodled last night while watching a movie...on one of the 5000 (?) index cards I bought at Staples this week .... they were having a sale :-/

 

 

 

Value the Differences

There have been several times in my life that The Lord had me in a position to see people treat others with a superior attitude because they "knew" something that the other folks didn't know.  They thought the other people were stupid and had little value because the others didn't know what they knew..

I spent 13 years at AT&T working with programmers as the "voice"/designer (aka: Human Factors Engineer) for end-users, the people that had to use the software that was developed.  I would sit in meetings listening to the progammers call the users stupid!!!  That would make me crazy and I'd have to jump to their defense!  "Just because a person doesn't know what YOU know doesn't make them stupid!!!  I guarantee that person can do something that you can't do!"  It is all about training!  Not SMART!  And God designed us differently, for different purposes :

Romans 12:6   "We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.... " 

Value the Differences

I was married to a brilliant man for 17 years and I can't tell you how often he would get angry because I didn't know everything he knew!  What?!  Perceived Value = Zero.  It didn't matter that I knew things he didn't know, I was stupid in his eyes.

You have probably heard all your life, like I have, if everyone agrees then someone is not necessary.  You NEED people that know different things and/or have different skills to get things done and/or to come up with the best solution to a problem!  If we are all alike there is a hole somewhere!

Value the Differences

I wished that I had said something different on top of the puzzle pieces but it was too late.  Something more along the lines of "You might miss out of God's best plan for your life"...

The Real Heart Test

 

Guess who did that yesterday!  Me, with four different people, all giving the wrong answers!!!  Ya know.... I really do consider myself a nice person, but honestly, NOTHING brings out the yuck in me like trying to get a helpful answer from a phone support person in any country, but magnify the issues when fighting the language barrier!!  So much time is spent saying, repeating and spelling!   

NOT PRETTY!

Please don't get me wrong, I LOVE people from other countries, its just I am usually already on edge because I have already tried everything, doing my best to avoid he dreaded call, (including reading and watching YouTube videos).  Then I call and spend the first 30 minutes answering, repeating and spelling answers to questions that have NOTHING to do with the issue... And when I  finally get to the actual question I have, I find out I am talking to the wrong person!!! .... And there I go, into endless support-line-hell-loop!

Forgive me Lord, please.

 

2 Timothy 3:2-5

I woke up at about 4:00 AM this morning thinking about a conversation I had with a friend Sunday night.  She was very upset with her brother and said that she probably would never see him again because she is so mad at him.  He lives only about 6 hours away but their father died last month and he hadn't bothered trying to come when "the call" was made to hurry.  And she didn't like the way he had treated their mom when he did finally bother to come about 3 days after his dad died.

Everything about the conversation screamed 2 Timothy 3 to me where human behavior in "the last days" is described.  The "all-about-me", disrespecting of parents generation.  We are smack dab in the middle of it (or the last of the last, I'm hoping)

ANYWAY, I had referenced the verses in our conversation, but, as usual, I had said, "you know, somewhere, it says something like ...."

Ya know, I use to be better at quoting scriptures but with all the new versions available these days it is almost impossible to quote verses!  for me anyway....  I really wish I had stuck with the King James and I would be much further along... that's what I learned growing up.... BUT .... 

So, I decided I wanted to memorize 2 Timothy 3:2-5 and I got up and started by lining three different versions of the Bible up, side by side.... easy enough to do with Biblegateway....  I had the NIV, King James and The Amplified.  But, even side by side they were hard to compare because the Amplified uses so many extra words that they don't stay lined up for long.  I decided to make a chart to help me see each characteristic more clearly.  I had no intention of making a "doodle' out of it... I just wanted to study and learn.  And that's what I did between 4:00 and 6:00 this morning.

I did the chart on the only tablet that was handy, one of my art journals, so as I was looking at it a little while ago I couldn't help myself, there was, after all an inch between the two sections!!  Oh the sections are there because that's how much paper was required for the list...the list goes down then jumps to the right for the rest of the verses.

Anyway, anyway, here it is after I got done "doodling"

 

More Of The Same, Only Different

Yesterday I started this page....the top part only....then I got kinda bored and stopped....

Yesterday I punched out the oval from a piece of cardstock and used the hole as a template to draw the oval onto the watercolor paper with pencil.  NOT the best answer!  After I drew and painted everything inside the ovals I filled in the black background and I did a really lousy job of going around the ovals with the black marker!  So, today I did it differently.  I used the piece that was punched out and drew around it with the marker first, then did all the drawing and painting.  WAY better!

And that's why we practice right?

 

Just Killin' Time

Draw some ovals and fill them...then color black a background.