Dark Flowers

 A little while ago I was contacted by Christina Landrum of  Pomp & Circumstance Wedding Events to create a wedding suite for an upcoming wedding shoot.  The theme: "Dark Flowers".  Sounding ever-so-mysterious, I joined the team of many other talented wedding contributors, to create a fairytale wedding for ABC's The Bachelor star, Ashlee Frazier.  This week, the popular wedding website, Junebug Weddings, featured our wedding shoot as "What Junebug Loves".   You can view the feature here. 

Here are just a few of the photographs from our Dark and Mysterious Wedding Shoot...

 

The amazing photography by Joseph West Photography.  You can view the entire wedding shoot here.


For the wedding suite, I painted the invite jet black, and added flowers in the top corners, that cascade down the sides, framing the wedding details.
 

The response card features a bold magnolia, framed in black.

The star of the suite has to be the hand-painted liner.  I painted a variety of bold, colorful flowers that overlap, all against the midnight black, which is found throughout the suite.

I love how all of these pieces came together to create our Dark Flowers Watercolor Wedding Suite.

Here's to Fairytales ♥ ♥

Custom Recipe turned into Painting

I had a client contact me recently with a request for a recipe turned into a painting.  I had never done this before, but it sounded like such a great idea, I gladly signed on.

Chantal has a dear friend, Mina Stone, who is a chef, and a designer (designed the blue dress in this Portlandia episode)

So I gathered the information I needed to translate Mina's wonderful recipe of Roasted Whole Fish, Greek style into a painting.   The recipe is all hand-written in script, with a sub-recipe of Latholemono tucked inside of the lemony-yellow envelope.  The roasted fish are placed atop a plate of blue design with a sprig of oregano.  I just recently listed this custom recipe option in Dusty Shamrock Studio~ in the Custom Painting section.




  

My husband has some wonderful hand-written recipes from his late Grandmother Adelina that are on my list for personal projects.  From what I hear, she was a master in the kitchen, and made the best  tamales.  She would roast local red chilis, remove the skin, and mix them into the masa to create the perfect tamales, all wrapped up in a corn husks, ready to steam.  Yum!

Fine Spring Weather~ and Hedgehogs

All of our plants are in bloom early (unlike the rest of the country, we had a very mild winter), and the birds are feasting on seeds throughout our yard.  One of the exceptional beauties that we have growing in our gardens is what our girls refer to as the "butterfly plant", otherwise known as the passion flower vine.  We harvested some seeds, and planted them three years ago.  The first year, the leaves on the vine could not keep up with little hungry caterpillars that covered the plant.  Years later, the vine has really taken off and the caterpillars have nice, full bellies.

Spending so much time outside in our warm weather inspired this little guy: Elliot the Hedgehog, who loves his ice cream (mint chocolate chip- count me in!).

Irish Wedding

When I first started my second watercolor studio, Tying the Knots, specifically for custom wedding stationery, Maura and Adam came first.  Literally.  They were the first couple that I worked with and I am happy to say that I am still working with them today.  They wanted me to design every paper element involved starting with their Save the Dates:

Celtic Invites in washes of warm oranges, and rich yellows:

Rsvp Cards with lined, addressed envelopes:

Custom Map of West Clare, highlighting all of the points of interest for the guests:

Information Cards detailing the "Friday Night Sing-a-long" at the local pub and the Sunday Brunch:

Rehearsal Dinner Cards carrying the Celtic Knot theme:

Still in the works: Custom Table Numbers, Name Cards, Menu, Program, and Thank You Cards featuring a sunset over Spanish Point, Ireland, with a signpost.

I couldn't have enjoyed this project more, not only because I get to visit Ireland each day in my design, but because I have had the opportunity to work with such a wonderful family.

This is one of the many aspects that I enjoy about designing wedding stationery~ getting to work one-on-one with brides (and grooms).  I see every design detail from the very beginning to the end product.  I also love learning about amazing venues around the world that I wouldn't have ever otherwise seen (ahh, painting PARADISE!!)~ all of this makes my job pretty close to perfect.

Art after the holidays

It has been a while~ the holidays were busier than I could have prepared for.  I did come close to running out of some supplies completely...but thankfully, all emails were returned, everything was sketched, painted, printed, packaged and shipped.  YAY!
 

I wanted to share some of the wonderful projects that have kept me busy over the past few months.  The most requested original pieces were Custom House Paintings: 

These houses are always such great projects.  There are so many architectural features that require such attention to detail, I feel like I get to know the house, in a way.  The stories of each of these projects can be found in my shop:  Dusty Shamrock Studio by clicking on each individual house in the Custom Paintings section.

Hope everyone's year is off to a great start!

New Year's plan: organize studio :o/  (again)

We recently did a little craft fair for an Irish event.  It was a beautiful day.  Before we opened our Dusty Shamrock Studio "shop away from home" I took a photo of John setting things up.  I like how nice and calm everything appeared ;O)

 

Lately, I have been devoting all of my creative time to building my second shop's inventory.  It is very time consuming when the shop is so new.  In fact, I don't think that I ever finished finalizing things for Dusty Shamrock Studio (always a work in progress)!  Here is a sampling of what I have been working on in Tying The Knots:

I love creating wedding stationery, but I have to admit... I think designing the maps are my favorite!

~Have a wonderful weekend~

Red Rocks, Pine Trees, and Pumpkin Cats

We just got back from a nice little family vacation- forest and desert in one trip.  Lake Powell and Flagstaff... red rocks and pine trees- such a wonderful dichotomy.  On our last morning the sky was so beautiful.  The air was so clean and cool (so nice to get away from city pollution); the clouds looked almost like computer generated images- they were so fluffy and perfectly shaped, and the sky was such a brilliant shade of blue.

Many plans on the horizon here at the studio.  Flagstaff was so nice and cool- I couldn't help but think of all of the Fall events coming up... pumpkin picking, Halloween costumes for the girls...I have been meaning to list Witch Kitty:

 

Cooler weather is on the way (finally)!