I spy, with my little eye, ....

A palette knife!  If I were to buy a traveling art box, this would be it.  Orange and purple swirly zebra-esque print.  It's a statement piece, and it belonged to my mom back in the day.  Don't ask which day, because I don't know.  In this day I've got way too much crapola to pack up for travel so I can't use the case for its intended purpose, but every time I look at it I am reminded that I come by my wonky sense of color legitimately.

Speaking of wonky sense of color, this potential travesty has happened:

Hey - it matches the travel case!  It's like a camo-koi.  That panel was going to have a word on it (I just this minute remembered the word was going to be WONKY) but it never happened.  I am slowly but surely exhausting my supply of pre-painted canvases and panels.  I forgot to take a picture of the background so you can't really see the orange bits running through the purple.  I wanted to use that pattern and the more I looked at it the more I saw a koi.  He looks better as a rough draft:

That's charcoal pencil on the paper so unless I spray it eventually it will all rub off.  However, last time I sprayed a page in this book it stunk for over a week.

Oh what the hell, I'm going to do it anyway.  Hang on a minute ....

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Okay, that's done.  So the painting.  It is compelling in the same way the dragonfly explosion is.  I think it would be quite smashing with a black frame.  How someone is to work purple and safety orange into their decor I have no idea, but stranger things have happened.

That's what I was going to name this blog post originally.  Stranger things have happened.  Then I realized this camo-koi pretty much IS the strangest thing to have happened.

In other news, I've got a bit of a quandry.  In fact, it's a multi-faceted quandry.  I painted something else.  Facet number one is that I love it and want to keep it because it is yummy and awesome.  Facet number two is that the 14" x 18" panel is quite large for me.  That in and of itself is not a problem, I'm just afraid once I go big it will be hard to go back to small.  Big = loose.  Loose = good.  Using that logic, bigger = looser and looser = gooder.  Or something.  It's a math equation, not English.  Anyway, when (or perhaps I should say "if") the snow melts and summer gets here I'm going to really throw some paint around outside and see what happens.  I may create a masterpiece.

Here's the sketch of the quandry painting:

And here's the actual painting.  Looser was gooder.

"My name is Roxie, and I approve of this painting."