9-29-10 Start of airbrush painting of "Kitchen Tarot Café" ... and some puppies!

I've been slowed down in my studio work: both by my birthday celebrations for turning 60 yesterday, and by catching Dog Fever! First I'll show you some pix of me airbrushing the starting painted drawing for my piece "The Kitchen Tarot Cefé: 4 of Wooden Spoons," aka "4 of Spoons." I started this painting on Sept 23rd, and I think there's too much going on, with the birthday stuff, to get back to coloring in the painting til next week! Yikes! Good thing I only have one 60th birthday! I'll do a blog of all the partying, once it's all done, by mid next week. Jeepers, sorry!

I did a few more drawings on paper, before I started painting though, so here they are. In this one, I went back to thinking about Denny playing a violin, for elegance!

Then in this one, I shaded the drawing with my bic pen. I added our cats and Denny's, and got Denny back to helping me hold up the tray of the KT suits. I like having him writing about the KT on the table, with some cards laid out.

I'm including my 2nd drawing again here, because in looking over all the drawings, I liked a lot of what was going on here. But you'll see that I really only kept the lamp from this sketch.  :)  It's hard to decide, and sometimes I wonder whether I might be better off just drawing the first thing that comes into my head, like I used to do with my big pieces.

Here you see that I've got my big fabric panel sewn together, to be something like 86"h x 79"w, and that it goes out onto the floor, which is bad for ease of painting. But I don't want it to be shorter, so I'll have to hike up the bottom part, each time I work with a different color of paint in my airbrush.

This is the big colored sketch you can see on the floor above, and I really liked referring to it, while I was freehand drawing my black lines onto the big cloth piece.

Here's the start, tho I didn't shoot the very start. I think I began with the table top this time. You have to settle on something to draw first, and that image's size will set the scale for the whole piece. It's a little scary sometimes, but I wasn't so scared this time that I had to go get me a tad of wine!  :)

Jimmy was sick that day, so I took most of my pix myself, so this is the only picture I have of me painting the drawing for this piece. Usually Jimmy stops on the way to his own studio, grabs my camera, and shoots a few pix for me, of me working on each stage of the airbrush days painting.

Here's the drawing, after I hiked up the bottom to draw in the images down there. This involves pinning the whole bottom part up higher on the piece, making a big tuck out of it.

I squeezed in the fringy lamp, a couple of the café windows, the palm trees, and the big café curtain at the top, but I ran out of room for some things.

I didn't draw faces on the spoons yet, but I got all the suits images into the tray, which coulda been bigger, but then I wouldn't have had room for the floating windows.

See, it's the 4 of Spoons!  :)

You can see I need more time with our future puppy, so I can draw her better! she's kind of a pinhead here!

But on Monday, the 27th, we went down to Yesteryear Acres, below Newark, Ohio, and spent time with Renee and Darwin, the owners, and played with 4 girls from the six week old litter of 8 Double Doodle puppies.
Their mother Lola is a golden doodle: half golden retriever and half poodle. Their father Tigger is a labradoodle: half labrador retriever and half poodle. So the puppies are half poodle, one-fourth lab and one-fourth golden retriever. They should be very smart, friendly, and shed very little.

There are 3 people who'd made deposits on girls from this litter before we did, so we had to choose 4 girls, one of which we'll get to take home on October 8th. So now that's only 9 more days away! We've got a new cage and a gentle lead collar and a big beef hank bone, all set for our Baby Girl! We'll find all of Hattie's dog toys and wash them up. We haven't had a dog for three years now!

Enjoy watching the little video I made of the 4 girl puppies yesterday! Thanks a lot, Renee and Darwin, for raising such wonderful dogs!


I think now I like little Green Collar Girl the best! She has some blue yarn hanging down in front, so it's confusing, but she's the little one, who says goodbye at the end here! OK, I will be very happy with any of them.

Here's my Jimmy holding little Green Collar Girl.

You can see all the puppies in this litter at Yesteryear Acres here. Be sure to scroll all the way down the page, since Renee keeps adding pix of the pups as they grow older. At six weeks, they have lovely little portraits.  :)

I'll let you know, when we know, which one we'll be waiting for!

Love, Lucky