Angel Water

Here's a recent drawing a did of my cat Josie, having her morning Angel Water. This small statue sits out on my patio, and I have always filled her basin as I water the flowers - a kind of offering to the flower fairies. Don't laugh. You just never know.

I think Josie accepted this as her "princess" bowl of water that gets filled every morning in the spring and summer. Flower fairies aside, I now fill it every morning for Josie.
 

Here are a couple steps along the way.

I did her whiskers by drawing them (pressing in) with one of my inkless pens before applying the colored pencil. The colored pencil won't go down into the furrows created unless you press really hard. Just be delicate about it, and you can create fine hairs, whiskers, grasses, etc - all those tiny lines that are difficult to draw in later.

Below is my inkless pen collection. You can have your own by buying Bic pens 

and using them up until the ink is gone! Haha! 

Someday I hope to come up with a brilliant idea on how they can be used in an art piece,

Thanks for stopping by.

Tux

This is my grandson Tux. What a kid! I had the pleasure of spending a whole week with him recently when he flew home with his mom. He is four years old and can name dinosaurs and reptiles with an accuracy I would have to study up on for weeks, possibly months. Yeah. Probably months. I know easy ones like T-Rex and rattlesnakes, but this kid was schooling me on saw-scaled vipers and titanaboas.

Titanaboa - an extinct (thank goodness) constrictor. 

I pulled this image from simple google search to share, because I thought you might like to add the knowledge to your brain bank in case you run into Tux somewhere. This is his favorite snake.

I was reading to him a page from a reptile book about Gila Monsters, incorrectly pronouncing it with a hard "G" sound. He politely corrected me, and I now know that it is pronounced Hee-la monster.

Speaking of being polite, he came downstairs one morning and said "Good morning, Grandma. How did you sleep?" Four years old! But . . . he is a boy. He was also found here with his cousin Tilly:

And he wasn't very polite about having to bathe. Haha!

I think this is the only photo I have of the three boys together, 

mostly because the little one on the right (Novan) never sits still.

The image at the top of the page is done in oils. While his mom was here visiting, I couldn't NOT show her and give it to her in person. It is an image that will go in the family calendar. The one in the calendar won't look exactly the same, so it will still be somewhat of a surprise. I dropped it into Procreate and did magical things with it that I'll share here in January.

The process:

I didn't even draw this one out. I just started painting (on gessoboard).

 I have to say, I was getting very excited about the way it was turning out at this point.

Putting in a background, after the image is painted seems backward. I don't recommend it. Like I said, I just jumped in and started painting, from a photo his mom Ashley had sent. As I tried to figure out what I was doing back there, I had to keep touching up the edges of his image. Just backward. 

But until his image was done, I didn't know what background I wanted so . . . ? hmmmm.

I tried a couple ideas. The one I ended up with at the top of the page, made him look,

in my humble opinion, the most animated and three-dimensional. 

Plus, I was tired of touching up edges!

I have to say, I get a lot of amazing photos from his mom and he is such a character that I could most likely make a career of creating images of him. Just look at this guy! Haha!

Love you so much Tux!