Wednesday, January 8, 2020

A New Year, A New Decade...so much ahead!

I've had a pretty big number of things on my mind, as well as in my schedule, since I last posted here. We went to Boston for a truly awesome family holiday trip, then to Denver for more of that, bringing home a couple of our grandkids for the most of last week.  We've also celebrated holidays here with our two Dads. Through all that, we still missed Gus, our cat of 11 years. So.... with our grandkids, we visited one of the local cat rescue places, to look for an older cat that would coexist happily with Booker, our big old Golden Retriever. However, when Booker went in, all the older cats disappeared, and these two kittens stayed to check him out. 

A sign at our vets office




These two little ones, Ringo (the grey tabby) and Poe (all black) were affectionate and playful, and not at all worried about Booker, so, with a great deal of encouragement from our animal loving teens, they have become a part of our family. They are entertaining - and distracting - us, and we have rapidly fallen in love with them.



I did this little sketch of them, with Poe on my lap most of the time.


While we were in Denver, we went to the Natural History Museum there, and I sat and did an ink sketch of the two moose in this diorama. I have been thinking a lot about Illustration, and about how to take a sketch from my sketchbook to make it into an illustration. Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the original ink sketch.


Yesterday, I did paint a bit with gouache over the sketch.


Then today, I scanned it into my computer and did a bit of manipulation of it in Photoshop. I am not sure I would, at this point, consider it a successful illustration. However, I did learn a bit from the processes I used, so maybe this will be something I will be pursuing more as the year progresses. I am fairly competent in Photoshop, but it has a lot more capability than I use on a regular basis, and I hope to get better at it!


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