A New Project

I finally got a day to just paint. It was heaven. I have had this walnut pen holder for over a year and have been thinking about what to do with it. It is only about 2" wide, so whatever design was to be painted on it needed to be long and narrow. I finally hit upon pears. The line drawing is from the Dover Library of copyright free designs. The Dover Library publishes a large selection of books on a number of different subjects. They consist of copyright-free designs that may be used by artists, crafts people, designers, and others with certain restrictions as to the number of designs you can use in one project or publication. They are a wonderful source of reference material and designs that can be adapted to a number of different uses.


Because it was a pretty piece of wood, I did not want to cover it up by basecoating the whole piece. Instead, I sealed it with a coat of Final Coat wipe-on varnish before painting it. The design is painted using Genesis Heat-Set Oils. I found that I should have used more than one coat of Final Coat as a sealer. The first layer of Genesis dragged a bit as I applied it. It needed to be heat set and then painted a second time to get even coverage. At the end of the day, the Pear Quartet makes a nice embellishment for this little pen holder.