If you’ve followed my blog for a while you might know that I’ve been trying my hand at painting the little concrete garden statues. I’m far from being an artist, but I can usually get these little creations to look good if you see them from a distance.

It all started with the calf that I got for my dad:

Then I saw a cat and knew that I had to paint it for my sister:

This was painted up like her cat, Joey

The problem was that every time I went to the garden center I was tempted by all of the adorable little concrete statues.

I decided that I needed a few little creatures in my garden, too.

First came the sleeping kitten

Then came the Bob Bird Bath

Last summer I purchased two more garden statues, which I haven’t had time to paint so you haven’t seen them yet.

Because I don’t have enough to do in what little spare time I have, I decided that I needed to paint something for the garden area by my sister’s pool.

My first thought was that I wanted to get her an angel statue to represent our older sister who LOVED to lounge in a pool. You had to be right there with her, but she would float with her inner tube all day. So, an angel was a necessity for the pool area. But then I saw another little guy who I just KNEW had to have a place, too.

His name was Peeping Tom…

He makes me laugh every time I see him. I can almost see his tail switching happily.

My sister loves orange tiger cats so I begin modeling Tom loosely on that color, but my model wouldn’t stay downstairs with me.

She wasn’t really impressed the one time I called her down to the basement to see if I could get the yellowish-orange undertone mixed correctly.

I was going to put stripes on him, but they weren’t turning out like I wanted. And again, my model refused to hang out with me. Since the stripes weren’t happening I decided that there wouldn’t be any stripes and I would just orange him up a bit.

This is when he was all done. I used some of the same techniques used for making realistic-looking rocks on a model train layout on the pile of rocks that Tom is sitting atop. I’m not sure exactly what it is that he’s supposed to be sitting on, so I just painted the top brown to cover up the orange that I had splattered on the bottom.

Don’t you think that’s going to look adorable? She’ll have to set it up almost near a bush with Tom looking towards the pool. So that as you’re sitting by the pool (or in it) this is what you see:

In cartoons when somebody is looking through binoculars you always see their eyeballs in the glass, so that had to be done on this one. I’m not good at painting eyes, but I think I did okay on this one.

Okay, so on to the angel.

There were all different styles, but I didn’t want a cherubim-styled nor did I want one that looked like a grown woman. When I think of Boogart (my older sister) I think of a child-like innocence and so that’s kind of the essence that I wanted to capture.

I also wanted a soft look to it. I think that I had grabbed a watered-down bottle of white acrylic off of Jay’s shelf, so when I mixed it with the other colors to tone them down a bit it ended up give the paint more of a washed-out look when I painted the statue. As I did it I realized that I liked the look. It reminds me of those pictures you see that were taken in black and white, then were colored in later.

My sister loves Victorian things, so I hope that it will have kind of an older victorian-esque look to it.

I think she turned out okay, don’t you?

I did a slight wash on the wings to make the feathers stand out a bit more. And I had problems trying to paint her eyes.

Because I’m not good at painting I can’t seem to paint eyes without making the items look creepy. I got tired of trying to make the angel look like she wasn’t frightened with mis-aligned eyes, so I closed them. I painted them a shade darker to highlight the lids, then I used a brown colored pencil to draw in eyelashes. You can’t really see them in this picture, but up close it looks good. At least, I think so.

I hope that she likes them.

Now that these are done I can go back to painting mine and working on my sewing room cubbies. My sewing room is a mess so it will be nice to have it organized!