Arabic Blessing

I recently got an order from a family friend to create a 'blessing' for her home. Their family is Christian but she loved the look of the Arabic script and requested that the blessing be written in Arabic. I was excited to do this painting, and got straight to work. I started to google some well known blessings in English and came across one that said 

"God Bless This House and All Who Enter It". 

I can read and write Arabic, but I can't really understand it fluently. A few words here and there maybe, but I can't translate sentences. So, I turned to my trusty friend, 'Google Translator'. I plugged in the phrase through the translator. There were a few words I could understand, so I knew it had to be somewhat correct, but to make sure I sent the translated sentence to my cousin Kayla who is studying Arabic in college, and she confirmed that it was right. 

So then I was off into painting mode. The woman who ordered the painting said that she wanted one similar to a red one I had made before: 

She saw this one at my house, and immediately loved it. I told her I would try and make one similar to that design. The thing about art, however, is that when you try and replicate something you've already done, it never turns out as well as the original. From my experience anyway. You're always holding yourself to a certain standard of what it should look like, which greatly limits your creativity. 

I like to use the original as an inspiration piece. To do something similar to it, but not replicate it. I am also always evolving as an artist, and when I made this painting years ago, I was at a different stage in my development as an artist. So in the new painting, I also wanted to use some of the techniques that I am using now. 

What ended up happening for the new painting is that I started off doing something completely different. I was really in the mood to play with detailed borders and I had to come up with a design for the new calligraphy. So this is the first one I came up with.

Both this and the original painting are done using acrylic paints on a 15x30 canvas. This is a more detailed image of the painting. 

I really loved the detailed border and the overall look of this painting. The color scheme is also something I had not done before. But then I quickly realized that this, apart from the size, was nothing like what the client had ordered. So I decided to do a second one, and let her choose which one she preferred. The second painting is closer in design and color to the original that she had liked. 

This one uses some colors more similar to the original, and also uses the same 'frame within a frame' idea. I added some gold accents using metallic paint into this painting as well. I love the way the gold glitters different in different lights. I was able to capture the difference in lighting more prominently in this image. 

You can see in this image how at certain angles the gold can be seen more or less readily, and shines differently in different lights. These two paintings were both a lot of fun and interesting to create. It gave me a challenge to try to rethink an idea I had already done, and update it to what I am doing now.