We came home from running errands this weekend and saw a neighborhood dog carrying something in its mouth. At first, we thought that it was a mother moving a puppy. No, not the mother. This was the big male. The body it carried did not struggle and it did not move. It hung limp. A cat. He dropped the cat on the grass in his yard and nosed it. It was dead.

We were shocked. We've had issues with this neighbor and this big dog before. And now, a cat was dead. The loose dog was reported to animal control. The cat was taken away. All I could think of was the final moments of the poor, black cat - full of fear. That's not something a being that is 95% tiger should ever feel. A tiny predator. 

I hope cat heaven is better than life in this neighborhood. 

​Remembering Neighborhood Cat, Name Unknown. 

I have quite a few projects to finish before the end of the year, and I find myself struggling with prioritization and overwhelm. I have 8 weeks until the end of the year and 52 days until Christmas. I have home renovations starting again (a small phase that should be easily completed) next week. All of these tiny little things - cleaning rooms out, working on commissions, finishing a wedding gift, planning for Thanksgiving, checking things off of the Christmas list - seem like they're floating around, hard to manage and organize. 

I saw a really great idea of writing down one to three things that have to be accomplished TODAY. It helps with prioritization. Ok, sealing a gift and getting it ready to mail is definitely a greater priority than wrapping a Christmas present (even though the Christmas present feels more pressing in my brain). Yes, working on a commission is important, but it's deadline is a little further out than this weekend, so I need to clear off my dining room table and prep it to move into a different room for the renovation that starts on Monday. 

So here are my top three priorities for today: 

-Pilates (so I'm moving my body and getting out of my head)
-Charging my iPad for some concept sketch work (not working on the concept sketches yet, just charging my iPad - which I have been forgetting to do for days)
-Transferring a design to a canvas (not painting it yet, just getting started). 

​Doable. 

This piece is called "When Peccaries Fly" - and I'm pretty delighted. It's a digital, mixed media piece and I'm really thinking about putting it on a canvas. 

I've decided that I wanted to start doing some stuff with clay. And I don't know anything about clay. So I decided to start with a simple project: air dry clay and a paint palette. It's imperfect and that's ok. My husband reminded me that we're everyone is a beginner at something new. And that the important thing is that I had fun - which I did.  We'll see what happens in a few days when it's dry. I'm going to paint the thistle and then seal everything.  

I thought about Don McLean way too much while I worked on this painting. My mom said it's got "shades of Vincent Van Gough." 

I've been working on this canvas since my son was born. Maybe a little before. So it's been about a year. In that time this canvas has had at least three different rabbits and at least five different backgrounds. When I started working on the background I couldn't help but think about the skies at night over the Big Bend area - it's an international dark sky and you can see the Milky Way! Initially, I'd wanted to paint this rabbit in front of a sunset, but when I came in to work on it and began working on my starry sky, this felt right. 

I became worried that with a sky that was so vivid and detailed having a detailed landscape and a very detailed subject were going to be overwhelming. I did, though, still want some different dimensions in my landscape - which I accomplished with purple tones, dark grey, and black. The jackrabbit also needed to be muted. Yes, he's the subject, but he can't be so colorful that he clashes with the sky. The sky is...a lot. 

I also realized that I had a serious problem. The brown that I love using when I paint rabbits has been used up. It was a devastating realization. So, I mixed my own browns from different yellows, oranges, blues, and black. I'm please with the colors. When it came time for me to mess with the tail I realized that it was part of the old rabbits showing through and I left it alone. It was part of a leg, once, and it is so perfect the way that it is in this piece (and I like that it's a nod to the past bunnies of this painting). 

The sides of the canvas are gold. I think it's perfect with the stars. One of my friends said that this painting made her think of the story of the Velveteen Rabbit, when the fairy took him into the forest and he looks up at the stars before he becomes real. I love that. I've decided that I'm going to hold onto this painting for a little while. I like the idea of staring at it in my living room. It's very nice to look at. 

I've been trying to clean up my studio for a little while and today it happened! I haven't really made any physical pieces of art in a while - I've been working with mostly digital pieces since the birth of my son. It's so much easier to use one tool (a tablet) to create something than it is to have to set up in a different space, find a canvas, get paint, etc. Today I sat down and sketched out a crow. I thought that it would be a really cool piece of art. But then, I really thought that it would be better as a physical piece of art.