put a bird on it

Inspired by a postage stamp of a many - colored bird. Marker, watercolor, hand carved stamp - all in a little nature journal I made last week. The little feather is from the belly of my mean parrot Winston.
I'm just gluing in things I like and working on whatever page appeals to me at the time. A way of working that I've decided suits me much better than one thing at a time, or a given thing on a certain day, like icad.
I'd been mildly agonizing that I wasn't doing much art but, like most things, my desire for it comes and goes and eventually returns again. Wandering around thru this journal is perfect.

Dlp2015 week of 6/13

Can't even remember the prompt, something about routing your travels, and too lazy to look it up. Pic of my dad's mom on a bench and me in a lake. She was a wonderful grandma, the only one I remember much of. We visited at Easter and I was fascinated by all the lizards in their covered parking area.

Postcard sketching

Still slogging away on DLP2015 but a few weeks behind now. Ah well. Sometimes the prompts just don't grab me. But I have these old postcards sent to my mom's mother and decided to draw one of them. I clearly don't posses the sketching gene but it will serve the purpose of reminding me of the real postcard from 1912.

baby animals! (lots of pics)

Various baby animals I've been around lately. Lots of foals out at the ranch. Wish my legs were that long.

zzz zzz zzz   Every now and then he'd sigh and groan. 

There are a ton of babies - somewhere around 80.
Field after field of mares and foals.

Love how the mares just stand over their baby while it's sleeping.

Hen and more chicks than I could count cause they never held still.

Had a batch of 5 kittens for a week while their real foster mom was out of town.
Five is one too many, couldn't keep track or defend myself lol.
Have another batch of 4 coming tomorrow or maybe Thursday.
Not sure how long they're staying.

Not sure I took any clear pics cause they were always in motion.
All 5 in this pic.

Here's all 5 again, you just can't quite see the 5th one buried in the pile.
Two were identical right down to the spots on their bellies and the lines
on their faces. If I was going to have them for a while, I'd put blue food
coloring on one's head or something. The orange one was a biter.

Maggie meets the kittens. She was fascinated, they didn't much care.

dlp2015 week 15 acrylics

Ok, finally back to a medium I'm comfortable with. Started with a painty piece of under-paper, did my usual collage, paint, doodle thing and wound up with a page I like. What a surprise. Found some nonsense words I liked and stitched them on, then glued the whole thing to my journal page.

In case it isn't obvious, or maybe I forgot to explain, I'm doing dlp2015 on individual sheets of heavy watercolor paper 9"w x 6"t. Tore 9x12 sheets in half. Left edge has two holes to fit into a little binder thing I have. Will put them all in when done and have a dlp2015 book. wa-la

The watery triangles are a stamp I made, using watered down black
acrylic to stamp with. Love the softness as opposed to the hard
edges of a stamp done with an ink stamp pad.

dlp2015 13 & 14

Still catching up posting my dlp2015 pages so here's a couple more.

The prompt was to make a custom element. I have boxes of family
photos that I'm determined to use up before I croak, so I tore my mom
out of a set of studio shots she had done when she was 20 or so,
around 1944, cut some strips of gelli print in my fave colors,
found some pearl cotton and made an element. The background is
black gesso, which is so wonderfully, emphatically *BLACK*.

The technique was watercolors. I did quite a bit of stamping with
ink that turned out not to be waterproof. Oops. But then I kinda
got into it and encouraged the drips with more watercolor paint.
This one is dark and weird and isn't on my top ten list.

a (clean) joke!

Found this when cleaning up my puter and still think it's pretty funny. I take no credit for thinking it up, but also have no idea where I got it. Someplace in the interwebs...

A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest. 

After a moment or two, the vet shook his head and sadly said, "I'm sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away." 

The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?" 

"Yes, I am sure. Your duck is dead," replied the vet.

"How can you be so sure?" she protested. "I mean you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something." 

The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head. 

The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room. A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room. 

The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck." 

The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman.

The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!" she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead?" 

The vet shrugged, "I'm sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it's now $150."