paint chips.

how beautiful is this paint chip art by zipper 8 design? though i am not going to lie...this just might be an idea that i steal ;)

i think the monochromatic ones are my favorite...

oh and i have something exciting i have been working on to share with you soon...i am hoping maybe sometime next week.......

victoria reichelt.

i came across this artist the other day and i really love her paintings. love all of the different arrangements of books and magazines - and how detailed the paintings are. oh and her use of color!

mural walk.

for my birthday my aunt planned a trip for me and her to walk the philadelphia mural mile tour and we were finally able to go this past friday (i was hoping to get a nice fall day, instead we got stuck with 95 degree weather...but it didn't ruin the tour at all!). philadelphia has an enormous amount of murals throughout the city and the mural arts program is one of the best city mural programs in the country. so since the mural mile is in center city, and there were a few other ones that i really wanted to see that weren't on the tour, my aunt and i started by driving to a few murals outside downtown - starting with half-tank, a mural of philadelphia painted on a large oil tank. this one was a little hard to get close to, so this isn't my photo - but it was one of my favorites:

then we went to the peace wall which was also beautiful - but not quite as large as i had imagined...this actually happened many times throughout the tour - but then again some were also larger than i had thought!

after we found a few more murals...we headed downtown and started the walking tour! there were quite a few on the tour by david guinn which i really enjoyed...including one of each of the seasons...except for summer since it is to be painted this fall!

and he also had another one called gimme shelter:

and these are a couple others that i enjoyed:

 

what i think is so awesome about this next one is that the brick all around the edge of the mural is painted...from afar and even up close it doesn't look like that at all...sick!

and these last couple are other ones we went to go find that weren't on the tour...but ones we really wanted to see!

 so that was our day! we of course stopped in to redding terminal market and bought a cannoli at terminis - they are the best cannolis (sorry to mike's up in boston!)!! it was really fun to see the different murals...and it is always nice to wander around the city for the day! thanks aunt linda!

oh and this is a shot of my aunt's new puppy maggie...isn't she a cutie??

washington.

well i just returned home from a very fun spring break and i have quite a few images to share with you and some stories!

i went to washington, d.c. with my family to visit my brother who lives there. the main reason we went - besides seeing my bro! - was because a friend of his was giving us a private tour of the white house! i have a couple nice photos to share with you below, but unfortunately i wasn't allowed to take any photos inside of the west wing.

the inside was so beautiful! i think one of the things i liked the most was that pretty much on every wall there were different photos of the president at different events and doing different activities. it made him seem more like a real person because it showed all different sides of his personality. but the best part was the oval office! it was sooo cool and definitely unreal to be able to see it! it was weird to think about all the people who have used it over the years - definitely very cool! one thing i thought was extremely cool was that there was a painting on the wall of his office by one of my favorite painters - childe hassam. it was random because earlier that day we had seen some of his paintings at one of the art galleries we visited and i had just finished telling my family how much i loved his paintings. my mom happened to ask about the painting during our tour and the painting just happened to be by him! i am pretty sure that this is the painting they had hanging:

anddd i actually got to see the first dog - Bo!! he was out playing on the lawn that we could see through the windows in the office! that was so neat - i think he is such a cute dog! i am pretty sure he was playing with one of obama's daughters...but it was pretty far away so i can't be sure...but i would like to think that it was! oh and i also forgot - on friday we were at the corcoran museum of art, which is literally right next to the white house and as we were leaving the street was completely blocked off in all directions for cars so we waited around for a couple minutes to see what it was. and obama drove by in his presidential limo!!! there were like a billion cars surrounding it which was crazy - but i am pretty sure he was in there and it wasn't a decoy!

so those are some of my fun stories! it was such a fun weekend :) but while we were there i saw a bunch of art and actually found some new artists that i love (the paintings aren't new, i just had never heard of them before!). the first one is actually cool because he has the same last name as me - but i do actually really love his paintings as well! his name is guy wiggins - an american painter. i would say his style is somewhat of a impressionist style painting, but he definitely made it his own. he does a lot of city paintings which i find beautiful. the first one is the one i actually saw and then the ones below are some that i found online to share - the second one is my favorite:

the other artist i have discovered is jean-francois raffaelli - a french painter. unfortunately i wasn't allowed to take pictures in the galleries that his were in but i found a few below online (but they don't really do the paintings justice!) i really like his style and he also does a lot of city scenes and in the ones i saw in person, they have sort of an unfinished feeling.

well i guess that is all i have to share with you for now! hahahaha this is also my second post from today...so make sure you scroll down to see the rest! hope everyone had a nice weekend!

rainy scenes.

to go along with this endless rainy weather we are having...i found an artist who does some beautiful rainy scenes. it seems that the artist, leonid afremov, used the rain for the reflection of color in the streets, very much like they do with movies that take place at night. the things that i love about these paintings are their brushstrokes and huge array of colors (his use of color is amazing). because of those two things, it seems that this artist was most likely influenced by impressionism, which is one of my favorite movements and is also most likely why i love these paintings so much.

here is a link to his etsy store...he has a ton more paintings posted on there - these are only a dew of my favorites.