An Ending and Hopefully a New Beginning

Since my last post I have had to say goodbye to one of my collies, Chelsey, who was only three years old. From start to finish her illness only lasted about ten days and right until the last moment we never thought it was life threatening. But once she became distressed the right thing to do was give her release.
As I had never bred from her I didn't have a post mortem done but the vet thinks she had some sort of acute liver failure.

I had planned to mate Roma at her next season and after a lot of deliberation we took her to visit the dog we had chosen last weekend.
Roma thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience and in fact escaped from the run we had put her in to rest and went back to the scene of her mating, perhaps hoping for part two.
Here is a recent photograph of Roma , she is still naughty but maturing nicely. We have got our fingers crossed that we will have the patter of tiny paws in due course.















On the painting side I am almost finished with Gabby the Norwegian Forest Cat, she needs a little bit more work on her shadow and a little bit more work on the grass. This is mainly coloured pencil but I have added tiny hairs of acrylic. I will post a close up of the fur so anyone interested can see how I've done it.

Back to Art

Since my last post my son has had major heart surgery to repair coarctation of his aorta. We discovered he had the condition almost eighteen months ago and he finally had the operation. This meant a couple of days in intensive care, followed by several days on an ordinary ward. The care he received in hospital was fantastic but now he is home I can finally return to my neglected art.

I am carrying on with several projects.

The 3rd Norwegian Forest Cat is now coming together after a phase of looking 10 foot tall, I hope she will continue to shrink as I start work on ther back.
I did the path by laying down several colours of pencil then blending using the Zest It Pencil Blend Solvent, this worked really well in giving a less defined look to the path. I might well go back and define a few foreground stones.


animal art
coloured pencil
Norwegian Forest Cat
Zest It
Unison Pastels






The Zebra's continue to move forward, or backward depending on the viewpoint. I am nearly ready to start putting the forward facing Zebra in. This one is all coloured pencil on Arches Hot Press Watercolour paper.













The Lemurs have not moved forward but I have purchased the Light and Dark set of Unison pastels which I am finding really useful. I will hopefully post an update later