Gondolas, eyes and some little blasts from the past

It’s been a busy weekend at my cousin’s wedding party, and fortunately I just finished the picture for them on time.  They both love Venice and got married at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas (half way between their parents, one set of whom is in the UK and the others in New Zealand.)  So you can’t NOT paint gondolas in that sort of scenario, can you?

On from gondolas (or is it gondolae?), I meant to post some sketches last week but didn’t. 

This is to replace the terrible eyes from the self portrait from a couple of weeks ago.  Maybe I should have photoshopped them together, but that probably would have looked dead weird.

Below is a page of random stuff.  I started off trying to do self portraits with different expressions to see if it’s possible to break out from the horribly serious face that you always end up with.  My conclusion is: no.  First I managed to turn myself into a 70 year old woman, then I made myself look about 30 lbs heavier, so then I gave up and drew dolls again.

Lastly, I had an unexpected text from my neighbour early this evening asking if I’d go over to the Cats Protection shop this evening (she has keys – we used to be involved.)   I’ve been asked to take home a load of paintings that I donated after our exhibition for them, as there’s a clear out going on and they didn’t want the paintings to get thrown out by accident.  I didn’t really expect them to sell, given that it’s a charity shop, and after I saw the prices they’d put on them I wasn’t too surprised!  It was nice to see them after all this time anyway, and hey, I can recycle the frames.  It was also a bizarre coincidence, given this.

Before I de-frame anything though, my neighbour and I are going to try to get in touch with the new owners of some of the cats featured and see if they would like them. 

Here are 3 of them.  2 are done with that gouache masking technique I talked about earlier.

Charlie asleep on the back of the sofa

Charlie with ball

Sorry about the colour cast on those – I’ve about had it with the scanner so I’m back to photos where I can!

This next one was my favourite of all of them, and the one I’m most pleased to have back.  It’s the expression on the black kitten’s face.  Yes it did look like that.  No there wasn’t a car coming towards it.  Captions welcome. 😀

Tilly with kittens

Right, I’m off to try to find places for 7 more picture frames in corners of my spare room.   I think I’m gonna need a bigger house…

~ by Rachel on January 26, 2009.