The Louvre will never be knocking down my door

Because I resorted yesterday to posting the crazy possible explanations that I made up for the stroller with a missing baby to entertain myself in traffic, it is probably obvious that I have very little to blog about in my life. That's not entirely true, but there are quite a few things going on that I don't feel comfortable telling the internets about.

So instead of subjecting y'all to the insanity that goes on in my head on a fairly regular basis, I'm going to subject you to the equivalent of looking through someone's vacation pictures. I've been painting a lot lately and I'm going to share some of my latest paintings. There are some I'm not going to post because, quite frankly, I am no photographer and I need to take new photos of a lot of them. When you look at my sorry photo abilities below, just remember that I have a lot that are way worse than these. I can never get the lighting correct so a lot of these have really bad glares on them and honestly, the color is not really accurate on any of them. So imagine that these paintings look better in person. Honest.

I have figured out there are a few subjects and techniques that I am not good at so I take as many classes as I can in those areas to try and improve. For instance, I have discovered that I pretty much suck at painting flowers. I also suck at paintings that involve using really thick paint. That is just not my style. This horrendous painting that I did Tuesday night pairs both of those things up. I'm just trying to keep it real by sharing my failures with y'all and not just the ones that I like. I call this "Ugliest Tulip Painting in the History of the Universe". Oddly enough, the founder of the studio was in town and taught the class and told me she loves this. I can only assume that she was high.


This next one is another tulip experiment gone terribly wrong. I call this one "Red Tulips on a Red Background is a Very Bad Idea - and the Glare Doesn't Help Either". I actually have some more I want to do to this painting but I fear it will not rescue it.

This next tulip was done with a palette knife which means it is a thick paint kind of piece. The photo came out horribly, but I actually like this one okay in real life.

This next flower is one I feel very indifferent about. I call it "Huge Yellow Flower" for obvious reasons. Again, excuse the glare.

Some of you may remember the angel I posted previously. I've done another one but I still have a couple of 'tweaks' to make to this one. So this one is called "Angel Still in Progress and Probably Will Still be in Progress One Year From Now Because Beverly is a Procrastinator".

Here are some pears I did. I call it "Pears" because I'm so original.

This next one is of a tree (you can call me Captain Obvious). But it's kind of a special tree because I didn't use any paintbrushes on it. I painted this with paper towels and the trunks were painted with my finger. I came up with a very creative name for this one too: "Paper Towel Tree".

I might hate this next painting more than anything in the world. But it's a style I had never tried before so I gave it a shot. It is super ugly and I don't think I'll ever have a room in any house in my entire lifetime that this painting would go in without standing out in a not so good way. Meet "Ugly Paisley Vase with Horrendous Green Background (Also Ridiculous Black Squiggly Lines)".

I kind of like this next one. It was done with a palette knife instead of brushes so the paint is very thick. It's an abstract in case anyone was going to leave a comment telling me I didn't put enough stars and stripes.

I can take or leave this next one. I don't hate it but I really don't love it either. And even though I didn't have to paint the entire word "Chardonnay" I still didn't spell it right. But let's just move on and leave that in the past.

I kind of like this next painting even though I'm not the type to ever hang a ballerina themed piece of art in my house. Although, I have visions of one day living in a loft-type condo and having a huge brick wall and hanging all of my paintings on one huge wall in a mixed up mess even though they don't all go together. If I get that wish I'd stick this ballerina painting in there. What do y'all think? Hot Brazilian and I have been making plans for the future and he may not be so crazy about that idea if he has to share my pretend loft-type condo and look at that brick wall with the crazy mixed up paintings every single day. He's very honest about his feelings when he sees some of my paintings. Sometimes he looks at a painting and grunts and curls up his lip and then I know that it is not on his list of favorites. I usually agree with him but not always. He may just have to close his eyes when he walks past the huge brick wall I'm envisioning in my head in our future made up loft. And he's the kind of guy that would do that. He'd let me have my crazy wall even if he hates the idea.

This is a bunch of circles. This one wasn't all that difficult. Luckily it's an abstract and the lines weren't supposed to be straight and the squares weren't supposed to all be the same size. Because that's exactly what mine turned out like.

Here's a sassy little black dress. At first my dress was plus-sized (apparently I thought I was painting one of MY dresses) so I had to fix this one a little bit and trim down the waistline. It's okay, but I'm not really blown away by it.

And here is a funky cross I painted a few weeks ago. I have this one hanging in my living room. It looks a lot better from across the room instead of gigantic and in your face like this photo.

Here is a girl I painted about a month ago. I took it to the studio to ask my friend/the manager to tell me what else it needed because I felt like it was missing something. She grabbed it from me, turned around and hung it on the wall, said she loved it and that she may put it on the studio's calendar for me to teach soon. I guess that means it turned out alright. If you can't tell by this photo, when people come in and take classes they get to paint their name on the wall. That's why there is a huge "G" to the left of my painting. I imagine that person wishes they had painted their name elsewhere.

This is one my niece requested. She turned 11-years-old in July and my brother and sister-in-law redecorated her bedroom as part of her birthday gift. She wanted a painting to match her new color scheme and she requested "something with a lot of swirls" so this is what I did. She loved it. I took this photo in front of my extremely professional living room backdrop of a chair full of pillows and a footstool.

And now you've seen only a small sample of what I've painted in the past two or three months. I have a lot more, but I imagine y'all have had your fill. Plus, these photo heavy posts make me want to pull my hair out. Next time I'll be back to writing about the total nonsense that makes up my life. I can hear each of you cheering with excitement already.....