It's Always Something

Poor Truman.  Don't worry, he's fine.  But he is missing some teeth.  Quite a lot of teeth, in fact.  

This is Truman last Wednesday morning, before I dropped him off at the vet's for a dental cleaning, when he looked calm and unsuspecting:

Pippin gave him an encouraging send-off:

A few hours later I got a call from the vet informing me that poor Truman needed TWELVE extractions!!   TWELVE!!!  Mostly in the upper front, with a couple in the back.  This was not expected by any means -- he had shown no signs of bad teeth other than some tartar buildup, and even the vet was surprised by the X-rays.  I felt so badly for him!  

This is poor Truman shortly after he returned home that evening:

Such a sad face.  Sigh.  He had lots of pain meds and nothing but soft food and now, five days later, he is feeling more himself but he definitely misses his upper front teeth.  Poor little guy.

Next month it will be Pippin's turn.  Yay.  I do hope his teeth aren't that horrible!

Well, onward to the art portion.  This past week we had fun with birds.  One of our sketch group members shared some fabulous photos of many colorful birds, and I had a good time with them.  We found this purple and white bird quite attractive, if a bit improbable:

I drew it in pencil and then painted it with watercolor:

The color bothered me enough that I went to Google to search for purple and white birds, and discovered, as I suspected, that someone had used Photoshop to change the color of a non-purple bird.  This bird, in fact -- an Azure Tit.  They just flipped this pic and altered the hue.  For shame!

I mean, really -- that's a perfectly lovely bird with its original coloring, if you ask me.

The American Kestrel is a perfectly lovely bird too, and its coloring, unaltered, is quite striking:

Having recently seen a kestrel out and about here, I decided it would be fun to do a sort of "extra credit" bird painting on my own, and tried tackling this in acrylics:

It was a bit rushed -- I only spent about two hours on this painting, and I didn't really enjoy working with the acrylic paint, but it turned out okay.  

For our other group art session, we opted to do this very fun bird with a bug, which I felt had a lot of character:

I had a blast with this one.  Back to my favorite medium - watercolor.  I was especially happy with how the eye turned out, and how pleased this bird looks about snagging that bug.  

So that's it from here.  Too much doggie dental work, lots of fun birds to draw.  I also got out for a 2-mile walk on Saturday, when it got above 50 -- whee!  Soon I hope to be complaining about it being too hot instead of too cold.

In the meantime, as it's still officially Winter, I bought some fake flowers to make the patio more cheerful:

Pippin gave them his seal of approval:

Have fun wherever you are and may Spring be just around the corner!