This is an old post from 2023 that I never got around to putting up.

I had a bit of surgery a few years back and despite the ups and downs around that, I decided to make a painting for my surgeon to say thanks (as if the $$$$ I paid him wasn’t enough, lol). Spoiler alert: he loved it.

At the time, I was playing around with a new to me technique where you drip paint on the paper and use a squeegee to pull it down and make abstract shapes. You can also use a credit card to further manipulate the paint and get some interesting shapes in. This project deviated from that significantly lol.

I knew I wanted to do a portrait of his dog, Buddy, so I stalked his personal IG and found a great picture of him. The first step was to use my Cricut to cut out his name, and center it in the middle of the paper. The original image is of the him in the forest, so I tried to get tree looking sticks in the background with the squeegee paint, but I hated it and it just didn’t achieve the look I was going for. Not wanting to waste the paper, I flooded the squeegee with blue and white paint, and with a few strokes, got a great streaky sky looking background.

Then I went in with a dry brush and tried to mimic a green bush around his name, but it was too dark and just looked like a green blob. So I flooded the squeegee with green and white paint, and pulled it along the bottom. Then I pulled the lettering off to reveal the white paper beneath it. The paint was all still wet so it mixed nicely. I let it dry a bit, then went in with brown on a credit card, and scraped a line down on the left, and pulled that to the right before running the card up and down again. It’s an easy and fast way to create texture, and when a bunch of them are lined up, they look like trees.

Then I taped the reference image on the table, and taped the front of the frame (a record frame since he likes music as much as I do and the image was from IG so it’s square anyway), and traced the outline of the dog with black and white Posca paint markers. I picked them up for a similar project I did for my mom, and really like the control you can have with them. Originally, I was going to leave the dog see-through and only do an outline, but it was severely lacking something, so I painted his copper muzzlepouche. It made it look like he had this huge mustache, which like, fine, but when it’s portrait, it has to be bang on otherwise it just looks off. It did, so I added the beard and tried again. This time, it was very clear that the writing wasn’t centered to the dog, and the trees going through the left side of his head just looked weird. I wanted to bring him front and center more.

I played around on my phone and found that filling it in with 40% opacity helped make that distinction, so I headed to the art store to get grey paint and some transparency medium. It didn’t do what I wanted, and ended up with really streaky results, so I decided to just go full opaque with it.

I struggled with the lettering, which is normal for me. I couldn’t figure out how to match it to the glass properly, so I tried tracing with the paint marker on the outside of the glass, and painting with paint on the inside. This wasn’t great, and resulted in squiggly text with uneven thickness. Then I laid the glass on the paper and lined up the lettering from the outside, and pained the inside with the marker and then paint. It went okay, but it was still off a bit because it’s nearly impossible to line two stencils up like that. I think the next one I do, I’ll cut a mirror image of the name so that I can line it up exactly, then paint around it. You can still see a sliver of green underneath, but I think it looks okay.

The collar also had some issues. I used the paint marker to do the design, but I did it rough and quick, and some of the black came off when I painted the teal on top. I don’t think it’s a huge issue, and I didn’t care enough to go back and take up all the paint to fix it. I also thought about adding gold to the tags, even though they’re silver, but I figured I’d be fucking with it forever, so I put a stop to that and focused on the lettering, which I ended up fucking up anyway, but whatever. Sometimes you have to call it and just put the brush down.

Once I was done, I flipped it so the inside painted glass was up against the painted background, and framed it in the rest of the frame.

I was a bit sad to lose that tree behind his head on the left, but I think the image is better centered, and the tree doesn’t pull away from the face as much. And he’s really front and center now. Anyway, I’m a lot happier with it like this. I know it’s weird to give your surgeon gifts, but sometimes I see something, or I get an idea for something and I have to make the thing. If he doesn’t want it, I’d understand and wouldn’t be butthurt. I had a hairstylist once refuse a portrait I’d done of her cat (she didn’t see it but didn’t want it). No problem. I was going to re-use the canvas (because who wants to put a pic of someone else’s cat up?) but I ended up using it as a test for resin coating, and it’s up in the kitchen, under one I did of Tug.

For each holiday, I usually make a craft for my work crew. I haven’t posted the one for Valentine’s day yet, so you’ll just have to take these out of order.

I got the idea to make these mason jar bunnies from a reel I saw on IG. I picked up six mason jars and six plaster bunnies from the dollar store. Six, because there are 3 people on my team, 2 TLs, and my boss. I usually make something more elaborate for my immediate team, and then something thoughtful for the rest, because I don’t want to make 15 elaborate gifts for everyone :\

I went to Michael’s to get some spray paint. I initially was going to do a chalk pastel colour, but I didn’t like anything they had. I fell for this gorgeous teal colour, but was suspicious of it’s opaqueness. Two ladies there repeatedly and wholeheartedly assured me it was indeed opaque. It was not. I had suspicions because I had fallen for a similar black finish last year. No matter, I had the teal paint on hand, it was just another step I had wanted to avoid.

So I glued the bunnies to the lid with Gorilla Glue (first time I worked with it – there are pros and cons), then painted them with two coats of teal, then spray painted them with the teal glitter. Now I’m not good at spray paint, and I realized the bunnies had this white cloud on them. Turns out, that’s called bloom and it happens if it’s too cold when you spray, it’s too hot when you spray, if you spray too close, if you spray too far, if it’s Tuesday, if it’s raining, whatever. I don’t honestly know. The only way to fix it is to sand and re-spray.

I didn’t want to do that because the bunnies are plaster, so I ended up re-painting the bloom spots, and re-spraying.

Then I used some ribbon I’ve had on hand for probably close to 20 years, and glued it around the bottom of lid. I filled the jars with paper Easter grass and chocolates. If there’s anything I’d do differently, I’d pay attention to how the lids closed. If you don’t have a rabbit on the lid, it doesn’t matter where they line up when you close them. But if you want the front of the bunny to face the front of the jar (with the writing on it), then you need to make a mark on the lid to align the bunny with the mark. I don’t think anyone will care, but it’s just one of those things I realized after I was done. I also realized I didn’t care enough to fix it. Oh well. Lesson learned for next time.

For the rest of the team, I picked up treat bags and filled them with grass and chocolates. I also made little business card sized cards with a stamp on it to identify who the present was from, but I didn’t bother photographing them.

Then I made six cards to go with the six bunnies. It’s probably the most layered and complex card I’ve done in awhile, so they took FOREVER, but I bought new paper so was excited to use it. I of course didn’t NEED new paper, but whatever. Michael’s had a saaaaale.

Then last night, I snuck into the office with my bestie to deliver the presents because I like making sure folks get the gift before the actual holiday. I was happy to deliver them because I started this project back in February, so it was good to get them out of the house.

And that’s Easter, 2026! Next event will be Canada Day, but we’ll see if I end up making something elaborate or if I just get everyone Canadian flag boppers or something.