Collage.

I started out drawing a bird with my brown Micron 01 pen. I had intended to keep work in my little 'art' book in sepia and earthy tones. Just seemed to be the thing, but once again color won. While working on the bird I started finding it very boring, although I did try to move away from drawing a bird from the side. Then, you know how it goes, I pasted in some postage stamps because the pages are 5" by 8", and don't allow for anything very large, and from there I grabbed a magazine and color started seeping into the work and it turned out into a little collage. I cut out half of the bird, so that its wing came free from the paper, which in my eyes, gives the impression that it is breaking free from the collage.

EDM Challenge 125 - draw a bird.

Listened to a nice little historic mystery while doing this:  
Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on-his-luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. His arrival in Deva (more commonly known today as Chester, England) does little to improve his mood, and after a 36-hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner. Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk and can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now he's living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next. Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the conquerors? It's up to Ruso (certainly the most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire) to discover the truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own. 


.....and Audible.com is letting you download an Elizabeth Peters' book for FREE. If you like mysteries  then you will like this easy to listen to and humorous mystery book set in Egypt in Victorian times.

Just in case the picture I posted made you cross-eyed, I am posting one that was taken a little further away. 

Rice paper and powder.

Several years ago I found a little box at the drugstore, which quite amazingly was empty and yet for sale. It was a pretty box and I have a 'thing' for little boxes, so by the time I walked out the door, the pretty box was mine. It was an ideal container for the nibs for my ink pens, but in reality its purpose was just to be pretty.

I have always wanted to draw the picture on the box and now I have.

If I ever thought I had found a treasure, then I was wrong. I have since discovered that the box is an ordinary commercial item and still being sold. When opening the box it should have contained little sheets of rice paper with rice powder to blot a shiny nose. Still, I am perfectly happy with my box, empty or not, because every time I look at it, it feeds my imagination.

These are more the real colors. The scanner made some changes of it's own. 

Paper: Strathmore Bristol smooth 260gsm

Paint: Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache, Micron 01

Brush: No. 6 Loew-Cornell

Technique: Gouache, crosshatch shading

Level of enjoyment while making: high

EDM Challenge 185.

When we bought a house in France we didn’t realize that the purchase price included 15 cats. There seemed to be cats everywhere: snoozing in the shade, under one of the many rose bushes, sitting on the wall blinking in the sun or making a dash for it as we approached.

I had never thought about cats as anything else than pets and had no idea that half-wild or feral cats existed.

It also took a few days for us to understand that this was an enormously incestuous little clowder. Down the road lived a stringy tom who was the granddaddy of them all and who would make his rounds to his harem several times a day. Our own (neutered) cat only watched from a safe distance or came indoors with a disgusted air that said, “I want no part in this”. It was all a little too uncivilized for his taste, I believe.

After the second litter had arrived, I decided that it was time return all the cats and whenever there was an opportunity I would put on ‘the gloves’ hoping that I would be successful at catching cat and putting it in a box to take it three villages down to it’s owners. Every so many days I would make the journey with a box containing a snarling, scratching cat on the seat beside me and show up at their door.

It was a cold, wet and windy April night when I looked out of the window and saw a cat crawling out of the neighbor’s basement and making a wild dash to our side of the road.

When I later went to look in the laundry room that we used as a potting shed, there were three kittens in a corner on a sack, their eyes still closed. This was the litter that stayed, although their Mother Mimi was later delivered to her rightful owners, who managed a sour smile, because I don’t think they really wanted me to return their cats and were wondering when this would stop. Mimi was the last.

My brother adopted the two males and called them Mad Max and Dirty Harry, I kept the little gray female.

In the drawing Dirty Harry and my little gray kitten share a basket. She was with me for 19 years.

Challenge 185: Draw a cat. 
I decided to try the dreaded watercolors again, and ended up using them as I would gouache. Not quite the intention. The paper is 300 gsm, cold pressed Fabriano watercolor paper, which contains 25% cotton. For a brush I used a medium Niji waterbrush.

The watercolor paint is Pelican. For watercolor I prefer a box because tubes of paint can dry out seeing I do so few watercolors. Seeing that the paint isn't really very transparent I must have the box with opaque paint. All Dick Blick.

Listened to "Staying On" by Paul Scott, author of "The Jewel in The Crown".
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.Staying On won the Booker Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.

EDM Challenge 293

This is not recent work but I had recently scanned it. It is made on gesso layered with Indian Ink and scratched out so that you get a negative effect, which works very well for something made of glass.

EDM Challenge 304

Just a quick doodle to draw a bow and to use the watercolor pencils I have had in my drawer for as long as I can remember. "Everyday Matters" makes me want to do things I have not done before, and I think that this is what it is all about.