Rainbow Rocks

Down the street from me there’s a cute little fairy themed rock garden that I pass by while walking my dog Louie. On a block next to the garden are the painted words: “Take a rock, paint a rock.” There are a few painted rocks here and there, and I think there used to be more but the weather has faded them. Since we moved in well over a year ago I wanted to paint one, so I picked one out and took it home, cleaned it, primed it white… and let it sit on my desk collecting dust for more than a year. Nick and I are really looking forward to moving soon (as soon as we find a place!) so I decided it was finally time to paint that rock! I went back and forth on what to do for the design, but finally I decided to start with using metallic paint pens to paint multicolor wavy stripes on one side. But I didn’t love that so instead of continuing it on the other side I covered it in a lot of bright neon pink, letting it drip down the sides and cover a bit of the design on the back. Then I added my website, a couple daisies, my classic peace, love and happiness symbols, and some funky random designs. Then I topped it all off with a nail polish called unicorn top coat! I love the shimmery, iridescent look that this nail polish adds.

After finishing that one and adding it to the rock garden I still felt like the garden needed more color. So I grabbed 3 more rocks and thought about which colors to use for the base of each of them. I came to the conclusion to do the primary colors: blue, red and yellow and to make a rock each for the peace, love and happiness symbols. But then I thought, why not do a full rainbow and grab 3 more rocks for the secondary colors? So I grabbed 3 more and primed all 6, painted the rainbow of background colors, and started to think about what design to do for the secondary colors. Since I wanted to do peace sign, heart and smiley face ones, I figured I could use 3 more simple symbols and each could have a word for inspiring people to do something: the peace sign can inspire relaxation, the heart love, and the smiley to be joyful! For the other 3 symbols I was inspired by the 3 symbols my cousins and I chose for our tattoos we got together. Mine is a flower and my two younger cousins have a butterfly and a sunshine. For my symbol I wanted to inspire others to create, and I chose celebrate for the sunshine and grow for the butterfly because those both felt very fitting to me. I topped each of them with more shimmery, iridescent unicorn topcoat.

Now there’s a whole rainbow of more color in this adorable fairy rock garden, and I hope it makes the kid who started the garden happy and inspires more people to create! Maybe it’ll even inspire more people to add to the rock garden. No matter what, just like with all of my art, I know it will at least make someone smile- because it makes me smile!