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Monday Morning Art School: are your paints toxic?

Sunset sail, 14X18, oil on linen, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling in the continental US.

Unless you’re eating it, modern paint poses no known health risks. (Pastelists and encaustic painters are more exposed and should follow special rules for handling their materials and breathing fumes.)

That, unfortunately, is not the whole story.

Many people think watercolors are somehow safer than oils. That is not true. The binders for oil paints are siccative oils. The major ones are linseed (flax seed), walnut and safflower oil, all of which are edible. Some people have a sensitivity to odorless mineral spirits, but if you’re not drinking them or bathing in them, the current consensus is that they’re harmless.

What can be toxic are the pigments, and they’re pretty much universal across all mediums. That includes tattoo inks, which are a toxicological risk to human health.

Buffalo Color (foreground) and Bethlehem Steel (background), and the filth they were spewing into the Buffalo River in 1967. Photo courtesy EPA remediation project.

Making pigments is a messy business. Buffalo Color (formerly part of National Aniline and Chemical) manufactured pigments along the Buffalo River in my hometown, and pigment deposits remained along the shore as late as the 1980s. The photo above shows the condition of the river from Buffalo Color and Bethlehem Steel, now both gone.

Environmental legislation stopped wholesale polluters across a variety of industries in the US. That didn’t mean we weren’t still creating pollution; we just outsourced it to the developing world.

Cobalt, cadmium, and lead aren’t going to injure you as a painter, but they can injure the people who mine and refine them. Today’s emphasis is on mica, which gives us the glitter in makeup, car finishes and, yes, iridescent paints. Mica is mined in the US, but the top two producers in the world are China and Russia. India, the world’s eighth-largest producer of mica, is known to use child labor in mica mining.

Two Peppers, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Since the mid-1990s, pigment production grew quickly in mainland China and India. They are now the first and second producers of pigments in the world. The number one producer of cadmium? China. Of cobalt? Congo and China. Lead? China. Child labor is a real phenomenon in China; about 7.75% of children ages 10-15 work. So too is forced labor, using both minorities and prisoners. Congo’s child labor situation is more dire, with roughly 40,000 children in the cobalt mines, some as young as six. (The majority owners of these mines are Chinese.)

Cobalt, cadmium, and lead are all, to varying degrees, mutagenic (causes mutations), teratogenic (interferes with fetal development) and carcinogenic (causes cancer). In the modern world, we can’t avoid them entirely; for example, we need cobalt for lithium-ion batteries. But we can reduce our use of them where it’s less critical, and pigment is one of these areas.

For years, I’ve given my students a palette based largely on 20th century pigments, using the iron-oxide pigments as chasers. The one exception has been cadmium orange, because there’s still no reasonable substitute in oils; in watercolor, the quinacridone oranges are great. I’m not worried about my students; I’m worried about the children, involuntary workers, and those driven by poverty to work in unsafe conditions.

Brilliant Summer Day, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The 20th century pigments were developed first for the automobile industry, with other manufacturing applications branching out from there. Because they were intended to be used in American factories, they are safe, cheap, brilliant, and lightfast. In fact, they are far superior to their historical antecedents in almost every way.

Regardless of what pigments you’re using, waste should never be disposed of in our sewers or on the ground. For water-based paints, let the old paint water dry and put the residue in the solid-waste stream. For oil-based paints, let the solvent settle, pour off the clear liquid and reuse it, and let the remainder evaporate for disposal.

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Midsummer

Midsummer, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3,188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“I really like that painting you did of the flat houses.”

“What flat houses?” I asked, perplexed. I was envisioning the architectural equivalent of Flat Stanley, the children’s book series.

It turned out that she meant Midsummer, above, and she was referring to the paint handling, not the drafting.

I painted this during a residency through Parrsboro Creative. The view overlooks the general store at Port Greville, Nova Scotia. To access it, I drove up a side road and painted from the edge of the escarpment, just past a very nice lady’s lawn.

This escarpment roughly parallels the shore of the Bay of Fundy. In places it’s gradual, and in other places it’s a steep, raw scarp.

In Maine, our cliff edges are made of granite, so I was totally unprepared for the edge of crumbly red sand to drop out from under me. My fall was stopped by a thicket of alders growing on a ledge about ten feet down.

I landed upside down but unhurt. After I turned myself around, I gathered my tools and threw them back up over the brink. Then I figured out how to climb back up to my easel.

It’s all in the drawing, even in plein air.

Cumberland County, Nova Scota is full of this crumbly soft red sandstone-and-soil mixture. It’s unstable, which makes rock-climbing risky. At Cap d’Or, the cliffs are a few hundred feet tall, but you wouldn’t be long for this world even if you miraculously survived the fall; there’s a wicked riptide. Every major storm causes erosion, so it’s a constantly-shifting shoreline. That in turn reveals a new cache of fossils, minerals and gemstones after every weather event; the area is world-famous for fossils.

These are also the highest tides in the world. I visited Joggins Fossil Cliffs to walk on the beach and perhaps paint. I’d arrived at the wrong hour. There’s a narrow window of time where you can be at sea-level; the tide rises so fast that it will cut off your escape.

These double-bay houses, so typical in Britain and the Canadian Maritimes, are not common here in the US; however, there are some here in Maine. We also have old-fashioned general stores like Dad’s Country Market, towards the left in my painting.

This painting took two full days to complete. The first was spent in drawing out the architecture.

“Draw slow, paint fast,” a student once told me. It’s an excellent motto, because the more time one spends on the drawing, the less floundering one does in the painting.

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How to become an artist

Skylarking, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3985 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I learned to draw and paint from my father. However, my parents were adamant that I couldn’t major in art unless I planned to teach, and I hated the idea. That prohibition turned out to be blessing in disguise, because art education at SUNY schools in the 1970s was dismal.

I’ve helped a lot of kids get into art school but it isn’t something I’d encourage today. A year at Pratt currently runs $73,390. That is unrealistic for anyone but a trust fund baby.

Instead of being a fine artist, I became a graphic designer. Programs like Microsoft Publisher reduced the need for layout artists, so I went back to college for a software degree.

Ravening Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I took off my last semester immediately after the birth of my fourth child. Bored, I set up an easel in my kitchen and started painting again. “If you can paint that well after laying off for so long, forget software. The world is full of programmers; but there aren’t that many good artists,” my husband said.

I didn’t need to be told twice.

I knew my skills needed updating, so I commuted on weekends to the Art Students League in New York from Rochester. That is a 670-mile round trip, but when you want something badly enough, you’ll find a way to do it. There, I met Cornelia Foss. Her first assignment for me was to draw and paint an orange. “If this was 1950, I’d say brava,” she told me. “But it’s not.” Of my teachers, she was the most demanding, and I owe more to her than to anyone else.

In Control (Grace and her Unicorn), 24X30, $3,478 framed, oil on canvas, includes shipping in continental United States.

I decided to paint plein air once a day for a whole year, excluding Sundays. That generated an inventory of 313 landscape paintings. Having no better ideas, I started doing tent shows like Rochester’s Clothesline Art Festival. Eventually, I did these across the Northeast and Midwest.

These are fun but brutal. When 5 PM rolls around on the last day, you must pack up your merchandise, stow your tent and display walls and then drive home. I started doing plein air events instead. I still enjoy them, but I now only do a few each year.

Two old and dear friends were the nucleus of my first painting classes. Today I look back and wonder how I had the audacity to teach when I knew so little. I’ve learned as much from my students as they have from me.

I have friends who painted right after art school, but too many promising painters are forced by student loans into working other jobs. It’s more common that art is a second career. Most of us must make a living before we do art. As my mother once trenchantly put it, “In my day, we didn’t have time to self-actualize.”

Ever-Changing Camden Harbor, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Here are my recommendations for a career in art:

At first you must play. I made prints, sculpted, and drew for decades before I settled down into painting. Don’t worry about wasting time and money at this stage; exploration is important.

Then choose one medium and do a deep dive. I was once a competent musician, but painting took all my available bandwidth. That’s a necessary sacrifice, except it never felt like a sacrifice.

Take classes and workshops. It’s cheaper and easier than trying to figure out everything by yourself.

Study art. Know your place in art history.

Do art every day, at least when you’re starting.

Let your style evolve naturally. Resist the temptation to pigeonhole yourself, or, worse, be pigeonholed.

Suck it up and apply to shows. Competition drives us to be better, faster. But don’t get discouraged; there are a lot of excellent artists out there.

Embrace marketing, it’s not a dirty word. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” That’s nuts. The world loves a good marketing plan, first and foremost.

My 2024 workshops:

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Happy New Year, my friends

Drawing by Carol L. Douglas. In a perfect world, I’d do nothing but draw every day.

Every year my repeating New Year’s resolution is to unsubscribe myself from all the mailing lists I’ve been dumped on over the past year. This year, I aim to:

  • Reduce my use of plastic. Most plastic-79%-ends up in landfills or as litter. Revoltingly, we ship much of it overseas, and then complain that third-world countries dump that waste into the ocean. There are many uses for which plastic is unparalleled; for example, plastic wrap has revolutionized food storage. But there are places where we use tons of it for no good purpose. Despite the bottle return on plastic drinking bottles in many states, 80% of one-use plastic water bottles end up in landfills. And nobody can convince me that water stored in plastic for months is as healthy as the stuff that comes out of my tap.
  • Practice scales. I used to sing-a lot. My voice went to wrack and ruin after my first cancer, and old age and lack of practice haven’t helped. But a little work will go a long way towards mending a broken voice. Now, to find the time.
Drawing by Carol L. Douglas

What are your New Year resolutions, if any? Whatever they are, I wish you a blessed and happy new year.

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 framed.

As I look at this painting through the mists of time, I wonder when was the last time I stayed up until midnight on a New Year’s Eve. No matter what the text on the painting page says, it’s 35 years if it’s a day. Now, I’m frankly too old to party except with my grandchildren, whose bedtimes are not much later than mine.

Said grandchildren (and their parents) are here for New Year’s Eve. This weekend, my other children will arrive so we can celebrate Christmas and the New Year together.

The beads in this painting came from Mardi Gras in New Orleans, brought back by my friend Karolina. The hat and noisemaker were left in my studio by a student, then a teenager, now pushing middle age. And the purple velvet and feather boa? They are mine alone. As ratty as I look while painting, I do like bling on occasion.

My favorite part of this painting is the gold lettering on the hat. If I didn’t point out that it read “Happy New Year” would you notice?

This is the last weekend that you can take December discounts. They are:

  • 10% off any painting, with the code THANKYOUPAINTING10.
  • $25 off any workshop except Sedona, with the code, EARLYBIRD

Believe it or not, Sedona and Austin are right around the corner!

My 2024 workshops:

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Art rules

Vermillion desk and chair, 1965, Wendell Castle, courtesy Sotheby’s
  1. If you are in love with an idea, you are no judge of its beauty or value.
  2. It is difficult to see the whole picture when you are inside the frame.
  3. After learning the tricks of the trade, don’t think you know the trade.
  4. We hear and apprehend what we already know.
  5. The dog that stays on the porch will find no bones.
  6. Never state a problem to yourself in the same terms it was brought to you.
  7. If it’s offbeat or surprising it’s probably useful.
  8. If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.
  9. Don’t get too serious.
  10. If you hit the bullseye every time the target is too near.

–Wendell Castle

Table with Tablecloth, 1978, Wendell Castle, courtesy Memorial Art Gallery
  1. Work Hard. We all start out bad, and go as far as talent and dedication will take us. Start when and where you are, and practice; you’ll improve.
  2. Don’t Steal. Don’t take credit for the work of others. Make your own magic.
  3. Be Enthusiastic. Creativity is fun, it is also work. Enjoy it, but do it like it matters because it does!
  4. Don’t Compare yourself to others. It’s fine to analyze the work of those you admire to help you improve your own. It’s how we learn. But be careful. Comparison can make you miserable.
  5. Be Generous with praise and encouragement. Know the difference between critique and criticism. Be clear, concise, and firm with critique, and offer it only when asked.  And leave the criticism to critics.
  6. Value Perseverance over talent. Talent has limits and will let you down.  Perseverance lets you punch above your weight.  It will keep you going when you want to quit.
  7. Be Confident, never arrogant.  Confidence allows you to admit when someone else is right. Arrogance prevents this and will stunt your growth.
  8. Reach Back. It gets harder to get a break every day. Veterans should mentor. (And remember, mentorship is not a dating app.)
  9. Be Brave, but be humble. Even it out. You are neither as bad, nor as good, as you think.
  10. Keep Practicing. There is no destination for artists. It is all a journey.  Apply yourself, and you’ll keep growing forever.

-Source unknown

Shawl, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.
  1. Learn to love the process. Creating is often a long and tedious process.  Learn to love each step.
  2. In the middle of the process there will be stages that can seem dreadful or look hideous. You’re not done. It’s a process.
  3. Put it up on the wall, place it on a stand, sit it where you can live with it for a few days. Keep walking by. The next step will come to you. One of my pieces sat for three years.
  4. Some people can go to a class and create finished pieces that look done. I go to classes to learn techniques, so nothing looks done, just experimental.  You are who you are, and you haven’t failed if your classwork isn’t a masterpiece.
  5. Sometime in the history of art, oil painting got shoved to the top of the heap as the most valuable art type, followed, maybe, by certain types of sculpture. Look back in history and you’ll see that it wasn’t always the case.  Artists created all kinds of work.  Even Michelangelo (di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) produced what is now called decorative art.
  6. Take classes in techniques and disciplines that are out of your territory.  You’d be surprised at how much it broadens your possibilities.
  7. Learn from many teachers. Even if you take away just one thing from a class, it will be worth the price of admission.
  8. Buy the best tools and materials that you can afford.  Sure, you’ll start with basic materials, but as you progress, you’ll find that good quality will help you create your best work.
  9. Women are the unsung heroes of the art world. It will make your teeth grind. Ignore the ignorance and work to demolish the myth. You know the drill.
  10. Try not to pay attention to creating what you think will sell. Create without the constraints of whether it will look good over someone’s couch or whatever similar statement applies to your medium. Such thinking will be the death of your creativity.

Write some of your own rules and share them. Also, take the best and leave the rest. Not all rules work for everyone.

–Jane Bartlett, who also wrote this post for me. Thanks, Jane!

Jacket, textile design and construction by Jane Bartlett, courtesy of the artist.

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Monday Morning Art School: Merry Christmas!

Beth Carr drew a concolor fir, which has a softer branching pattern than many other evergreens.

My friends (and students; the line is blurry) Diane Fulkerson and Beth Carr drove up this week to spend Christmas with me. While they were en route, I texted them to ask if they would do this morning’s exercises as examples. “I knew there would be work involved,” Diane said. The last time she visited, I had her do an exercise for Monday Morning Art School on using Pilot FriXion pens with watercolor.

I drew a Fraser Fir. If I’d been thinking, I’d have drawn a balsam, which was my favorite tree in the days when we had real trees. (I’m allergic.)

If you look at Christmas tree drawings online, the majority have boughs facing down. That is not how most young evergreens grow. Their boughs point up until they reach maturity. Even then, the upper branches tend to arc upwards. Pine boughs droop when they’re snow-laden, so maybe that’s why people persist in drawing them that way.

Moreover, every species has a unique branching pattern, needle length and color.

Diane Fulkerson did a blue spruce. She’d started out wanting to paint a black spruce, but her photo from Schoodic was too backlighted to be useful.

This is an exercise in seeing. If you celebrate Christmas, look at your tree and draw or paint it. If you don’t have a tree, look online for some of the common species used for Christmas trees, including but not limited to balsam firs, Scotch pines, blue spruce and Douglas firs. (My own Christmas tree is so fabulously fake that I used an online picture.)

Diane, Beth and I decided to use colored pencil so that we could work in the dining room next to the wood stove. None of us are expert in this medium, but we still had a great time. Pam wisely used watercolor.

Pam Otis painted a Christmas tree that was brought to the beach by a family. “They had a nice picnic and a campfire and left the tree behind for others to enjoy.”

I don’t really expect you to do much work today, but this will give you something to do if your uncles get into an argument about politics, your cousin gets stuck too deeply in the eggnog or your partner falls asleep after eating too much pie.

Above all, have a wonderful and blessed Christmas Day and Christmastide, and may God bless all of you.

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Lake effect snow

Winter lambing, oil on linen, 30X40, $5072 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

My home town of Buffalo, NY is the most famous lake-effect snow city in North America, but it’s hardly unique. Erie (PA), Rochester, Syracuse, and the small city of Oswego regularly get buried in snow. The Great Lakes are very deep, so they don’t freeze solid in winter. Arctic air sweeps across them, picking up moisture that then drops in deep blankets onshore. I miss those blizzards very much.

There are other, smaller snow plumes that are not as well known. One of these is in Orleans County, New York. I spent two decades driving weekly from my mom’s house in Niagara County to my house in Rochester. That took me straight through the Orleans snow belt.

Wind sculpted snow in Orleans County, NY.

As my children can recite by heart, you don’t drive in snow country without a candle and matches, bottled water, a chocolate bar, car blanket and collapsible shovel. People have frozen to death in their cars in Buffalo.

The drifts that formed the basis of ‘Winter Lambing’.

It was on a bitter winter afternoon that I found myself flagged down by an Orleans County Sheriff’s Deputy. She directed me around an accident and warned me that the road ahead was barely passable. The wind was whistling along the long, flat fields of the Niagara-Orleans lake plains. There, wind can pick up already-fallen snow, reducing visibility, and driving it into drifts as hard as cement. When these form across a road, your steering wheel can be wrested right from your hands. Road salt doesn’t work in extreme cold, which is perilous in icy conditions.

Bad parking job.

I’m an old hand at winter driving, but I slowed right down. At one point, I stopped entirely, which is when I saw the drifts above. At the time, I was thinking through a solo show at Davison Gallery at Roberts Wesleyan College called God + Man: Paintings by Carol L. Douglas, about which I wrote last week.

James Herriot wrote about the bone-chilling work of the Yorkshire veterinarian, particularly the grueling task of lambing during blizzards on the high Dales. Not only were shepherd and veterinarian at risk, but newborn lambs were in danger of freezing or predation.

I wanted to paint that feeling of intense cold at high elevations. At first glance, viewers see these shapes as mountains; it’s only when I tell them the backstory that they realize they were a series of drifts just a few feet tall. Context is everything when it comes to reading a painting, and the artist has lots of latitude in repurposing reference pictures.

It might look soft, but that stuff is hard as cement.

God + Man was about the relationship of God and man in the natural world. This painting was based on Isaiah 1:18, which says: “Come now, and let us reason together,”
Says the Lord,
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
They shall be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They shall be as wool.”

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Art is not eternal

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

“Art is eternal,” read yet another meme on Facebook. Not surprisingly, artists like to repeat this. But art is no more eternal than any other handiwork of man.

History is replete with examples of art that is gone. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Great Library of Alexandria and all it contained. The Great Hypostyle Hall of the Temple of Karnak. The 69 ancient Greek bronze statues of Olympic victors that once graced the sanctuary of Olympia. The menorah from the Second Temple, which was stolen when the Romans sacked Jerusalem; then it disappeared from Rome. The Imperial Seal of China.

Pinkie, pastel, ~6X8, $435 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Whole cities have been sacked, like Athens, Constantinople, or Kaifeng. Their art was destroyed with them. Insurgency and war destroy art, as in the French Revolution. Conquerors loot and lose it; Napoleon and the Nazis are just two examples.

This fall we had a massive fire in Port Clyde, ME. It destroyed several historic buildings and paintings by Jamie Wyeth and Kevin Beers. They were gone with sudden finality, and we were shocked and grieved.

There are spasms of iconoclastic fury that convulse humankind. The Beeldenstorm of the 16th century is the most well-known. The Reformation wanted to purge Northern Europe of Catholic ideology. What better way to attack it than through art? In England, 90% of religious art was destroyed. The percentages were probably similar in Germany and the Low Countries.

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Occasionally, great works are saved from iconoclasm by very brave people. The Van Eycks‘ Ghent Altarpiece, is an outstanding example of Early Netherlandish painting. It was already famous in August of 1556 when the Beeldenstorm hit Ghent. The first attack on the Cathedral was repelled by guards. On the second try, the rioters used a tree trunk to batter through the doors. But by then the panels and the guards had been hidden on a narrow spiral staircase within the tower. They were eventually moved to a new hiding spot in the town hall, but the original frame, itself a work of art, was destroyed.

To put that in context, imagine trying to stop the Taliban as they blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyam.

Art isn’t even above fickle fashion. It’s easy to date paintings because every era has its tropes. Right now, we’re in a long period where color is ascendent over detail. To the next generation, that will look as old-fashioned as leg o’ mutton sleeves look to us.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I told my daughter that when I die, AI should be able to reproduce me well enough to go on teaching my classes without me. “I won’t do that,” she said. “Your paintings will go up in value when you’re dead.” That is probably, true, but I’m not painting to impress people after I’m gone. Nor should you.

Our job as artists is to speak to the living. The Beeldenstorm happened because Protestants knew how powerful art is. The Nazis destroyed ‘degenerate’ art for the same reason. That’s what motivated the Taliban.

Of course, art can reach across the centuries to speak to us. Consider paleolithic cave art and its makers. We know almost nothing of their culture: we have no dishes, spears, firepits, foods, dwellings or traces of language. All we have is art: figurines, bone carvings, a few decorated tools and lots of cave paintings from all over the world. These speak to us powerfully but wordlessly. I don’t care if my own painting lasts 500 years, let alone 35,000 years, but I’m sure glad their art has.

Until the first of the year, you can use the discount code THANKYOUPAINTING10 to get 10% off these or any other painting on my website. Shipping and handling are always included within the continental US, but I’m afraid I’ll no longer be able to get them to you by Christmas.

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Monday Morning Art School: feel the love

Susan Lewis Baines is an artist, gallerist, and the wrangler of a gorgeous and goofy half-grown puppy-in short, an all-around good egg. I had an idea for a Christmas exercise, but when I saw what Sue made, I asked if I could share it instead. It’s far more exciting.

Sue’s project is called a puzzle purse, and it is a craft with a long and storied pedigree. Tato (flat paper envelopes or boxes) date from Japan’s Heian era (782-1185 AD). They were used as portable storage for small items like buttons, pins and needles, or stamps.

Valentine Puzzle Purse, Anonymous artist, British or American, 1826, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

How they got to Europe, I don’t know, but by the early 18th century, puzzle purses were being used to exchange romantic messages in both England and America. Meanwhile, immigrants brought a distinctive calligraphy from Germany called fraktur. They applied this to puzzle purses to create highly complex love letters (liebesbrief) and envelopes.

Because I’ve never made a puzzle purse, I’m sending you to the Origami Resource Center for detailed instructions.

Love Token in Fraktur calligraphy, c. 1800, possibly made in Harrisburg, PA, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

A variation

A very elaborate cootie catcher, 2006, made and photographed by Paul Blais.

If you were a kid within the last century, you’re familiar with a paper fortune teller, or ‘cootie catcher,’ as it’s called in some parts of the US. This simple piece of folded paper also has deep roots; while it was first described in an 1876 German book for children, it resembles much older fortune-telling frameworks. Although it looks like Japanese origami, it’s European in origin.

In my childhood, adults had no part in making cootie catchers. Today you can find instructions for them all over the internet. Predictably, these adult-suggested fortunes are dull, like “signs point to yes,” or “doubtful.” I remember them as being far goofier, like “You’ve got cooties!”

Why not marry Sue’s idea for a holiday puzzle purse with the cootie catcher? Just replace the colors, numbers and fortunes with similar little illustrations to Sue’s. For anyone who ever used one, it would be a charming surprise, a twist on a happy childhood memory.

In case you’ve forgotten, this is how to make a cootie catcher. Courtesy Michael Philip.

What you need

Sue did her puzzle purse in colored pencil, but you could also use watercolor. Use any foldable, reasonably lightweight hot-press paper (cold press will be more difficult to fold). If you have a bamboo or bone folding tool, it would be a nice refinement, but it’s not necessary.

Enclose an ornament hook and your puzzle purse or cootie catcher will become a treasured ornament.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t go with Plan A, which was to have you draw the packages under your Christmas tree? Now, get to work. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!

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