Waterfront & 1-2-3 Cats

 I sat across from the ferries to Fire Island down by Brown's River Road and sketched.

I did another Sketchbook Revival lesson, this one with Este' Mac Leod. She had us doing 1-2-3 Let's Draw Cats. They must be the most popular animal...at least in these lessons. Each cat was drawn incorporating a number from 1-9 in the design. #3 and #8 had to be on their side. It was fun to try to figure out how to get the number in the design for the cat's face. Can you find the number in each face?

30 in 30 - Day 16 - Bandolier

My Day 16 painting for the "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge is from a reference photo sent to me by my cousin, Mary Jo Greco. This is Bandolier, her son Rudy's cat. I painted the cat in watercolors, added some ink and then did some strokes of oil pastel to give some light fur marks.

If you're curious about what the other artists are doing for the challenge, you can see the other paintings here: https://www.saetastudio.com/30-in-30-blog

Those of you who follow my blog regularly know I don't do still life paintings very often. My Wednesday night sketch group has use of a meeting room at the library for the winter this year so we decided to do a still life this week. Everyone brought along something to add. Since it was a group of about 10 people we set up several to choose from. I brought along the items in this painting. People loved the bright colors so several of us sketched it. I guess I had cooking on my mind. lol

30 in 30 - Day 13 - Maggie (SOLD)

Here is my Day 13 painting for Leslie Saeta's "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge. Maggie is the third cat that belongs to my friend, Rhea, and was painted from her photo reference. I have now painted Rhea's entire feline family. This was done with a watercolor base, watercolor pencils and black ink.

Don't forget all the other artists that are taking part in the challenge. You can view their work for today here: https://www.saetastudio.com/30-in-30-blog

I have quite a collection of pens of all sorts that I have been keeping in a regular pencil case. Of course I can never find the pen that I want and half of the time I end up dumping out all the pens and pawing through them before I find what I was looking for. So I started looking for a way to keep my pens more organized. I found this pen case on Amazon (under $10) that looked like it might work. 

This is a LIHIT LAB Pen Case that measures 4.7 x 7.9. What I like is that it has sections where I can put the pen and they actually stay there. Here are a few photos of what it looks like. Why orange? To be honest...it came in several colors and I liked the green the best, but that one ships from Japan rather than directly from Amazon. The reviews said people waited for a while for it to arrive, but the orange was available in two days with Amazon Prime. That was a no brainer. I figured the orange color would make it easy to find in my backpack or carry bag. So far so good... I will let you know the final results after I use it for a while.

(I am not getting anything from this company for this product review. I just though you might like to see a bit of how I carry my materials. )

My small palette fits in the large front pocket.

Two sides hold a lot of my pens.

The left side has small mesh pockets and the right has a mesh pocket that can hold pencils,
my water brush, and my travel brush.

30 in 30 Challenge - Day 8 - Daisy (SOLD)

Daisy is another of the three cats owned by my friend, Rhea. It is Rhea's reference photo that I used for today's Day 8 painting for the "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge. This time I used mostly watercolor pencils (chocolate, gunmetal and ultramarine) along with touches of watercolors. So far that's the best I've found to do the textures and colors of the fur on the light colored animals.

Here is a link to the other paintings for the challenge: https://www.saetastudio.com/30-in-30-blog