Asian Pear and Bosc Pear (detail)
collage with Neocolors II, eraser stamps, and acrylic medium on 90lb Stonehenge paper
9 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches
I didn’t mean for this to be quite so busy! That patterned vase on top of the checkerboard stamp looks like really bad Op Art. I’m blaming the cold NyQuil. I’m also not happy with the way the Asian pear turned out, though I do like the bloom on the Bosc.
Goldfish (and some other types, as well) suck up small rocks from the bottom of the tank and spit them back out again. Carp are bottom scavengers, and what they’re doing is looking for leftovers. That’s great, if the aquarium has gravel at the bottom. I use glass marbles though, instead of gravel. That doesn’t faze the fish a bit. They don’t care that the rocks they’re hoovering up are as big as their heads. They try to suck them up, anyway, sets off a ruckus of plinking as they root around in the marbles and try to inhale them.
Anyway, that’s what they’re doing in the two heads-down pictures. They’d just finished their supper, and were scrounging around for leftovers. Plinkety-plink-plink-plink.
One of the grounds guys is out back, pulling down ivy. We chatted for a few minutes, and he explained that the ivy had to be removed, because it was damaging the esophagus. The what?! I just let it go. I’m all hopped up on cold meds, and it took a moment for my poor, addled brain to register what he’d said. And then it took another moment to figure out what he meant: soffits! Yes. Yes, indeed, ivy will damage the soffits.
And, I expect, it wouldn’t do one’s esophagus any good, either.
Bosc Pear and Asian Pear (detail)
I like the watercolor bloom that happened when I did the undercoat, so I left as much of it as I could.
The Asian pear in the photo was upside down, because Harriet knocked it over. I put it back in the wrong position and didn’t notice until I went back to painting. At least she didn’t leave bite marks in it, this time! The banana she swiped off the kitchen table did not fair so well. I came back from taking out the trash to find it squashed all over the kitchen floor. Brat.
This is the first pass, using a very wet Q-tip to blend the watersoluble crayons. I kind of like how it looks just as is, so I thought I\’d better take a photo of it, in case I wreck it.
One of these days, I’m going to manage to get usable shots of them doing their gape-mouthed FEEDMENOW routine. They’re like two orange, aquatic piglets! Whenever they see me near their tank, they come to the front, near the waterline, to tell me their tale of never-been-fed woe.
It’s weird that I got several shots of just one of them alone, because they are usually joined at the, um, fin. They’re companionable, gregarious little guys.
This is straight from the camera, with zero fiddling in Photoshop. The sky was just gorgeous earlier in the morning. The clouds piled up for a bit, but now they’ve strung back out, and are mostly just wispy patches of cirrus. Still quite pretty. And warm, too, at 51F.
It’s 5:49 ayem and they are still cranking the oldies next door. I’m a little less amused by it now than I was last night.
The Bumpasses are totally rocking out to the Bee Gees. At 11:30pm. I’m more amused than disturbed by it, though, because I almost never hear a peep from them.
What makes me cranky is the Claritin commercial with the stone carver who is not wearing a freaking mask, much less a respirator. Because if you have allergies, the last thing on earth you need is to breathe a bunch of stone dust. The stupid, it doth offend!
Harriet
Elliott
These are old, probably from 2003. They were in the case with the camera I found, so I know I had to’ve tested it ages ago. I thought they were kind of fun, especially the Harriet whipping her head around, so I scanned them.
red paper boat 