Emilee Williams Art

I'm having so much fun with my new handmade watercolor pallet that I mentioned a few posts back! I started with a simple painting of leaves and such. It was harder than I thought to come up with six different types of leaves/foliage so I had to turn to Pinterest for a little help... I love the simplicity of this one.

One of my all time favorite things to paint is trees. They are simple but effective and you can combine pretty much any colors and they look great. Two posts back, I wrote about a handmade watercolor pallet I purchased on Etsy and I used that to paint these trees (with a little brown from my own pallet). I see many more of these in my future-- especially with fall coming up!

In my last post, I talked about an amazing new handmade watercolor pallet I bought on Etsy. One of my favorite things to do with watercolors is just simply watch them blend and bleed together. I like to find two or three colors that look interesting together, paint them really close together-- touching in one or two places, watch them blend together and then let it dry. This is one of the first things I did with my new pallet and here are the results:

I've seen a lot of Instagram accounts for people who make watercolor paints recently. Honestly, I didn't even know that was possible and I am obsessed. I HAD to order some. So, I ordered a small pallet of handmade watercolors from an Etsy shop called Designs by Rachel Beth . Her watercolors are so beautiful and perfectly matched. She releases new watercolors every Friday-- how cool is that?! I bought a small pallet called Let's Go Camping and let me tell you, the colors are perfect! I don't camp and the colors still remind me of camping! I'm so excited about that Toasted Marshmallow! She also included a sample of her Neon Pink that is amazing! So bright and vibrant. I was truly surprised how vivid the color is. So the first thing I did was make a chart of sorts to see how the colors look on paper in a little bit bigger swatches and how they blend. Check out that pink! I love how that Toasted Marshmallow mixes with other colors Needle...

One of the new things I've been wanting to try for a while is brush lettering (or calligraphy?). I took calligraphy in high school and I really enjoyed it. I hadn't thought about it again until recently when three things happened: Awesome videos on Instagram. If I'm being honest, these videos convinced me that I needed to try. I'm just mesmerized by the different styles, color and creativity. Thank you notes. I include a thank you note with every order I send out from my Etsy shop. I think it would be fun to have hand-lettered thank you notes rather than trying to decide between 100 different styles at Target. I am getting married next year (!!!) and I love the look of hand-lettered envelopes for invitations... this one is a stretch, I know. So, to get started, I bought a Lettering for Beginners (that's me!) book and Tombow brush pens. Also, I learned on Pinterest that there are a lot of resources for free, printable lettering practice sheets. Tombow actually...

Meraki is a Greek word for the soul, creativity or love put into something. It is the essence of yourself that is put into your work. This seemed like a fitting word for my pottery when I was thinking of names for my Etsy shop. Each piece I make has some of my soul, creativity and love. Thus, my Etsy shop is called Meraki Pottery. My goal is to make pottery that is simple and functional. I like to make pieces that are really simple with something just a little different. Here are some more recent pieces of me:

In my last post, I mentioned that I had only painted once in the last three years. They were very special paintings that I finished earlier this year, in March. My fiancé, boyfriend at the time, Greyson, asked me to paint him a sunrise for a tattoo he's been wanting to get. And he'd been asking for a while... a long while. I'd been too afraid to paint it for fear of him not liking them and also just the thought of someone tattooing something on their body that I painted is... not intimidating at all. I decided his birthday was as good a time as any to give him the sunrise if I was ever going to do it. But, I couldn't just give him ONE sunset after he'd been asking for so long. So, I painted him as many sunrises as I could to make up for all the times I put it off and all the times I said I'd do it but chickened-out. And I gave him a box of sunrises for his birthday. So, ladies and gents, here you have it. In all it's glory. The only thing I've pain...

Oh wow... were to begin? I'm returning to my blog after a long break... three years long. Oops! I may not have been blogging but I have definitely been busy making things. Over the past three years, I've been doing pottery. A lot of pottery. And I love it. I'm passionate about it and I'm going to keep doing it. Lately, I've been feeling like something is off or missing in my life and I think I need a change. I'll be honest, I have only painted once in the last three years. ONCE. I think that's a big part of my problem. I have all these thoughts, ideas and feelings floating around in my head and I have nowhere to put them. I literally daydream about color, texture, pattern and layering. Pottery satisfies a big part of my need to be creative. I have a desire to create things that are tangible, that make sense and that have a function and pottery is great for that. At the same time, I feel a need to create things that don't really have a purpose and t...