Husb and I have been visiting friends and today it poured with rain, so we mostly stayed in and chilled out with the cat. I had a bit of a scribble. She looks quite different to my cat, really. She stayed still for a few moments while I tried to do a portrait, then she got bored and turned her back on me and went to sleep. Just like my cat. Really.
Sometimes I want to do something, keep my hands occupied, but I’m arted out, so I settle down to do a bit of crafting. Art is hard work for me, crafting, like baking, is very relaxing. I made a stack of origami lilies which will end up on a string of LED lights as fairy lights. I got the instructions from the new BBC series, MAKE! Craft Britain where this guy demonstrated a couple of different origami models. Just after I photographed them, Sparta Puss threw them on the floor. Because that’s what cats do.
In times of stress and worry, I retreat into my home. It’s my cave, my fortress, my refuge and my comfort. I close the door on the bad old world outside and batten down the hatches to weather any storms that life throws at me. My chubby cat, Sparta Puss is an integral part of my home comfort. She sits and purrs and brings a feeling of peace and calm and normality.
I work part-time for the homelessness charity, Crisis, as a fine art tutor and I really appreciate how lucky I am to be able to go to my own home which is safe and secure and warm and dry. I am lucky that I don’t have to endure living in a war zone or a refugee camp. The insecurity and stress of not having anywhere to call your own, not being able to close your door onto the outside world and feel safe, it is awful.
To find out more about the work done by Crisis, please click here.
Still tired and not done any new art this week, so here’s one from the archives (that’s a posh way of saying the big cupboard upstairs that my sketchbooks are in). Here’s Sparta Puss hanging out on top of a cupboard, likes cats do. Sparta is a naughty Tortie. A very naughty Tortie.
It’s been a very busy, frantic, few weeks and I’m really tired so haven’t done any artwork, not even a quick scribble, for a couple of days, so here’s a sleeping cat. Normal service will resume soon 🙂
I’m having fun colouring in my sketchbook drawings. I’ve been scanning them into my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and using an app called Markers to colour them in. It’s like being a kid again, I used to love colouring. This is Sparta Puss, she’s used to taking over whatever piece of furniture takes her fancy. This was my chair. It isn’t any more.
I had fun yesterday digitally colouring in a line drawing, so I did another today. It’s an old drawing of our little Ming The Merciless who died last month, aged nearly 18. She always liked to sleep on top of the biggest pile of cushions and I used to stack them on top of a large pouffé next to the radiator. Maybe she was just a little bit spoiled. Just a little bit. I downloaded the drawing into a free Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet to colour it in. There are more sophisticated drawing apps, but I’m too miserly to pay for them.
I draw into my sketchbook almost daily but rarely do anything with the drawings, I don’t know why, it just doesn’t occur to me. So this evening I uploaded yesterday’s sketch into the free Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet and did some colouring in. It’s not great art but it was nice and relaxing.
My cat, Sparta Puss, has taken my laptop tray away from me. It’s one of those trays with a beanbag underneath and I left it hanging around with the beanbag side up one day recently, and since then it’s been hers!Here it is scribbled into my little notebook by Peter Pauper Press.
Our scruffy little cat, Ming the Merciless, had her final visit to the vet today. She’s been poorly for a while now and Husb had to make the decision to let her go.
We rescued Ming when she was just a tiny, starving scrap about 10 months old. She was extremely ill from neglect and after 4 nights at the vet’s hospital, touch and go, we brought her home and she promptly went to sleep stretched along Husb’s legs. We had three older cats and she was very scared and reacting aggressively with them but she obviously felt secure when she was with Husb. We had her for 17 years and up until quite recently she still cwtched up to him on the settee. They were pretty much inseparable and she brought so much fun into our house, it was worth all the effort to save her. Her illness left her with weak lungs and one eye and we were lucky to have her for so long.
Ming the Merciless and Sparta Puss hanging out together
Coming up in August – I’m running a weekend printmaking workshop inspired by Frank Brangwyn , one of my artistic heroes. An outstanding draughtsman, painter, printmaker, muralist who exhibited with the Viennese Secession but unlike Klimt and Schiele, Frank had the mis/fortune to live to a ripe old age and fall out of fashion; he’s due […]
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