August 27, 2025
Dear Liza,
Sometimes I need to make a few tries at a project before I get it right. At our last ZOOM art group, Ruthie Inman had us start this vase of flowers, made with the windows from business envelopes. Mine turned out really tiny, about three inches high, and I wasn’t crazy about it.
The other members of the group used bigger windows from bigger envelopes, and therefore, bigger flowers. I liked theirs better, so I found just such an envelope and gave the project a second chance.
Ruthie also suggested creating surroundings for the vase, to ‘give it a place to be’. So I started building my scene. I started with the inside of that same envelope, which had a striped pattern. I gave it a thin coat of a really pale lavender so it would fade into the background.
It took a few days to draw, cut, and watercolor the flowers, long stemmed yellow and orange daisies. To go with that bright yellow, I found an abstract blue page out of an art magazine for the billowing curtains. It was starting to look like a picture.
I remembered that Shirley, from the ZOOM group, had used blue paper to make the water in her vase. I wanted mine to be transparent, so I mixed some aquamarine acrylic paint with some glue and painted it on the plastic. It stuck!
Then I used the same color for the sky through the window, a soft yellow paper made the window frame, and graph paper made a nice tablecloth.
I now had all the pieces for my picture, but I wasn’t ready to glue anything down yet, because I didn’t like where they were. It felt static, even with the curtains billowing in the wind. So I walked away and thought about it overnight.
The next day I moved the window a bit to the right and the vase a bit to the left, loved it, and glued it down. Finally, I glued the stems into the vase, but left the flowers loose, so they can flop a bit.
Another Ruthie Inman inspiration, all done!
Love,
Grandma Judy
Dear Liza 