Sweet Basil
colored pencil on Bristol board

Basil is all grown up now..he's my granddaughter's cat.

I started a watercolor demonstration here...autumn leaves scattered on the ground......it was fun...started out with the sketches, cut up all the leaf pix and taped them in various positions ...arrangingarranging...then the time consuming task of taking the pix...lighting wasn't good...and on and on...finally I ruined the actual watercolor.....well, I whiled away an afternoon...haha
My art room is downstairs...and when Jack asks me where I'm going I usually say, "downstairs to ruin a picture"

What I should have done is posted the whole thing and then showed a different picture at the end...that's how it goes a lot of the time anyway...but I wasn't amused at the time, and didn't come up with an amusing ending.

I tried to do it too fast...I was just reading PERPETUAL CHOCOHOLIC 's blog, where she is giving a lesson in colored pencils...drawing an apple...and she said it was too daunting to put the whole lesson on at once....should have read her blog first.

Now I'm going to do it backwards....have the final picture in my hand before I show how it came to be. That's what they tell you about writing too....have your ending before you begin...good advice for me...I can think up all the characters...all the situations...but never come to a conclusion....maddening.
Speaking of writing reminds me of when I was still in my twenties...I had a few articles published in magazines....one was of a neophyte trying to ride her too-much-horse-for-her article..(true story) .....Another was an article on breast feeding. It was back when the saying "Happiness is...." was popular and my article was called Happiness is a Fifth of Carnation...published in a Carnation milk publication....a house organ.
It was written in an article writing class I was taking at Clark College in Vancouver, WA. I had no idea what I was going to write. Your grade was based on you writing an article, and sending it in....if it was published, well you aced the course.
Week after week I listened to the teacher and couldn't come up with an idea...but a gal in the front row was bugging me to death. She went on and on about her article which would be on the benefits of breast feeding...how wonderful it was....how you couldn't consider anything else. Week after week she obnoxiously yammered about the poor children who were denied this treat...making it sound like they would wind up in reform school with rickets.
Well...my children weren't breast fed. It wasn't even talked about....I came out of the anesthetic already bound tightly, and I unquestioningly swallowed my meds which were drying up pills...(I was so innocent it's unbelievable)
But I figured my kids were as healthy as hers and finally I had had it with her....I was going to write an article on Not breast feeding.
I was really jazzed about it...and started researching....ha! Nothing out there to support my theory...well, almost nothing....so I shamelessly began dirty tricks. If a doctor had a quote saying, "Breast feeding is best for babies, but in the event that isn't possible, formulas are great."....I would dissect his quote and come up with, ".....formulas are great."
Oh my....I filled a whole article with this kind of writing...I had a lot of funny things in it, too....and it just flowed off my fingertips onto the typewriter keys. Sent it in....had it published...Carnation was only too glad. Not a lie in it...but oh, the fudging.
Miss Obnoxious in the writing class never wrote a single word.....she just talked the talk.......as a matter of fact I was the only one published.
What's the moral?...hmmm...
no morals in this story...haha....
or don't tick off Pat...
or better yet, don't believe anything you read.