A New Direction

Today would have been Chance's 4th birthday. We really miss him. You don't know how much life a being puts into your own life until it isn't there any more. He was lively, almost more than I could physically handle at times. But when I pulled a leash out of it's hiding place in the back cushions of my chair yesterday, Cody only went half insane with delight. It seems way too quiet around here. We're missing our live wire.

One of the things I've always wanted to be able to do is to draw animals. I've long admired Roz Stendahl's Daily Dots, the daily drawings she'd done of her Malamute, Dot, for years. I admire lots about Roz but her Daily Dots were my introduction to her work. I can draw. I know that the more I draw, the better I'll be and that the only way to learn to draw animals was to go Nike and Just Do It! (To see Roz's Daily Dots, go to her blog and then to her website. I really enjoy her blog as much for what she's been drawing as for her thorough, methodical, and logical technical reviews of art materials.)

I'd watch Chance and Cody, sleeping on the floor near me and wonder why I didn't pick up a pencil and my sketchbook and get to work. Because if I'd moved so much as a little toe to go get the pencil and sketchbook, Chance would have been there wagging his tail wanting to know where we were going to go now. So when we got the indescribably horrible news that he had cancer and that there was nothing they could do for him, aside from making him comfortable, I decided that I'd better get busy. So I put a sketchbook and pencil under my laptop table where I could reach them without moving!

The first picture in the last post shows a typically Chance pose. He adored that blue bone The Sports Fan brought home for him from the pet shop where he buys the dog food. He just knew that Chance would love it. He did. He was on his second one when he died, having torn the first one to bits. At the end, it was the only toy he played with and he enjoyed sleeping with it. Using my Pitt Pens with a brush (B) tip, I tried to get close to realistic on colors.

I decided to try working from photos which I normally enjoy. In one of my groups, we're doing a round robin deco called the Pet Project. When my friend, Keri, saw the ATC sized drawings I'd done of Chance, Cody, and her dog, Tia, she wanted me to do one of her black lab, Bailey. I was flush with my first success at drawing animals in a way that pleased me, despite it not being absolute realism. But I was daunted at the prospect of drawing a black dog because of the negative space, shadows, and light. I sat down with a picture of her bad baby Bailey on my screen and drew. I erased a lot at first but by about the third drawing, I was happy with what I had.

Journal page from my 2009 Personal Journal.

You can see I'm having fun doing these because I even enjoyed drawing two of JoAnn's cats, Kitty and Punky. Since I don't have cats, I'm not that familiar with their features and the structure of their skulls. This was a really enjoyable learning experience for me as I tried to get these drawings to not only look like real cats but to resemble Punky and Kitty as well as to show their personalities as portrayed in the photos JoAnn had posted.

It's a new direction for me.