Just a couple of short notes

DOGS:  The house acquired a new decor item thanks to my sister Lynne's present of what is supposed to be a bath mat, but which the Hounds decided had another use.

I mean, it is rather perfect for a dog food bowl mat.  Pippin already had his own mat for his bowls, so this was clearly meant for Truman.  Pip may be a bit jealous, however, since his mat doesn't have his likeness on it.  Ha.

ART:  During the weekly Thursday Zoom sketch meeting, we chose to draw from a photo that Tina took of a watermill in Rhode Island.  I really liked this picture, and had a great time doing an ink sketch.

As for painting -- yes, I did another picture from Good Omens.  This is a scene from the beginning of the angel and demon's relationship, which started on the wall of Eden -- Aziraphale raises a wing to protect Crowley from the oncoming rain.

Acrylic, 9" x 12"

This is the first time I've used what's called a "gallery wrap canvas" -- you paint the top/bottom/sides, too, so that it doesn't require framing.  Sweet!

That's it for now!

In Which I Prove Handy with a Hammer

So, art projects have mostly been either Not Happening or Happening Badly, with one exception (posted at the end).  Bird watching occurred, but it was the usual birds, such as pelicans and Osprey, which I already have a gazillion photos of, so nothing new to say about that.

Dog walks have been short and unexciting.  We have to go out by 8am nowadays, thanks to daytime highs of 95-105.  Yay.  And then we hunker down with the air conditioning on full blast.

But I did get one thing accomplished recently -- I put together a bookcase! 

This is a deconstructed bookcase after it comes out of the big cardboard box that landed on my doorstep and which weighed 65 lbs.  Actually, there were two boxes, because I ordered two bookcases, but I've only put one of them together, so we can safely ignore the other one for now.

There were a lot of parts.  Thankfully, I've put these bookcases together before -- I have two of them, in a lighter oak color, in the library room.  I got those over a year ago, and my memory of the process was a tad hazy, but the instructions were fairly clear and all went smoothly.

Pippin tried to offer assistance, though not of a terribly useful kind.

There was much hammering involved.  Lots of hammering.  So much hammering that my shoulders are still sore, which is why I'm not going to put the second one together right away.

They are very sturdy bookcases.

The fun part was putting the books in, of course.

This one was put in the living room to add some height to the overall decor scheme.  The second one will go in the library. 

That was a rewarding project.  And here is the only other rewarding project that turned out this past week -- yet another Good Omens portrait of the character Crowley, in his trademark sunglasses, done in watercolor:

Finally, in other art news, I am going to get a portrait of Pippin painted by Vivian Swift!  Vivian is the artist/writer who asked her blog readers to volunteer for a special task last year -- taking a painted rock from Stromness, Scotland on a tour of the U.S.  Eleven of us volunteered to host the rock, and take photos of it in various local spots. 

Here it is at Gingko Petrified Forest in Vantage, by the petroglyphs:

See:  http://mizmak.blogspot.com/2019/11/a-little-scottish-rock.html for the full story of the rock's visit to southeastern Washington.

The Scottish rock has now made it around the country (over 8,000 miles) and back to Vivian's home on Long Island, NY.  As a thank-you to the hosts, she will paint a pet portrait.  She's a miniaturist, so it will be small, but her work is wonderful and I'm excited to see the results. 

Since I already have a fabulous painting of Truman, I decided it was Pippin's turn, and I sent her these two photos and gave her the option of choosing which one she most wanted to paint.

Such a handsome boy!

That's it for this week. 

Note:  if there is no post on a Monday, it means nothing happened that was worth posting about.  Which is not a bad thing at all, these days!

Not Done with Good Omens art yet...

I had so much fun painting the mural on my dining room wall (see previous post) that I did a couple more pieces from the miniseries Good Omens that would be more portable, in case I ever moved. You can't move walls very easily, I believe.

First, I tried a watercolor and colored pencil portrait of the angel and the demon characters, who are supposed to be enemies but who wind up becoming friends during their lengthy tenure on Earth.  One of the episodes showed various snippets from their long history together in different eras, and my favorite was from 1601.  In that scene, they met up at the Globe Theatre during a production of Hamlet.  Their costumes were wonderful:

I used photos like this for reference, for a close-up view:

Sadly, the first time I tried it, one character turned out well but the other one didn't, and the second time I tried it, the reverse happened.  And it was nearly impossible to correct or erase mistakes, so I gave up and decided to cut and paste the two good portraits together.

Didn't really work out as well as I wanted it to.  But I still wanted to do a piece with historical outfits, so next I decided to try painting a scene that was never filmed.  It was set in 1800 in London.  The angel character (Aziraphale), who loves books, opens a bookshop then, and the demon character (Crowley) brings him a box of chocolates for the grand opening.  

This scene got cut from the script due to time constraints, so I had no photos to go by.  I looked up menswear from that time, and found illustration like these, which are from the Regency era:

The Regency didn't actually start until 1811, but what the hey.  I liked the outfits, it was close enough, and it was solely for my own entertainment, so why not use them?

Next, I cut and pasted various pics of Aziraphale and Crowley onto outfits until I got something I liked:

Then I tried posing them inside the bookshop:

But that looked way too complex to paint.  I wanted to keep things simpler, so I put them outside the front door instead:

Even then, it turned out there was no room for those pillars, and I wound up simplifying it even further by just including the front door only.  Then I added a box of chocolates and figured out where the arms and hands should go.  

Next I copied the finished draft onto an 11" x 14" canvas board.  This time I used acrylics again, because I wanted to be able to correct mistakes, and that was a wise choice, as I had to redo the faces several times, and had to redo a couple of the hands, and fix all sorts of things along the way.  

I'm much happier with this piece than the 1601 picture.  I wanted it to have an old-fashioned look, as if it had been painted in 1800.  

It's now framed and on the living room wall.  Yay.

Perhaps it's time to move on to more original art work, if I can think of anything new to paint.  I've been using ink and watercolor for so long that it was a revelation to use acrylics -- I can change stuff when it goes wrong!  When you make a mistake with ink or watercolor, the piece is usually unfixable.  Working with acrylics on both the mural and this smaller painting made me remember why I used to love them.

So that's my next project -- figure out what to paint next with acrylics, and to have a good time painting over all the stuff that doesn't work!