Cats, sleeping babies and painting

Above: this curious cat belongs to our friends Doug and Jen; I took the photo in low light conditions with my Sigma 30/1.4 lens. We were visiting D & J recently to see their new baby. I held her (the baby, not the cat) in my arms for a while until she fell asleep. There's nothing more peaceful than watching a baby sleep, in my opinion; the rest of the world just falls away. It's been a while since any of my nieces or nephews were this small, and I found myself just staring at her the whole time, marveling at the tiny fingers, the small movements of her mouth as she slept.



Paintings in progress.

Last night I discovered the best time to go holiday shopping at a toy store -- dinnertime! At least our local toy shop was almost empty, and it was packed with people earlier in the day.

I went to Cafe Pleiade (currently my favourite restaurant in Toronto) for dinner afterward as a treat to myself, then went home to paint. It's been a busy week and I've been letting myself get sucked into the whole pre-Christmas crazystress: too much to do (in terms of workstuff and Christmas-stuff), and not enough days.

So I decided to take some selfishtime for myself and do some painting. I'm still finding acrylic painting incredibly relaxing and totally absorbing.

One major difference between painting digitally and painting with real life acrylics is that you have to let paintings dry between layers, and that takes time. I found this frustrating at first but now I'm finding it one of the relaxing aspects; the process forces me to take my time, to pace myself.

Which is why I usually work on multiple paintings during a session. While I'm waiting for the white to dry on one painting, for example, I could be adding white to another.

I'm starting to move up to 6" x 6" canvases instead of just flat 4" x 4", mainly because our local art store is out of 4x4 canvas boards. Painting on a bigger canvas is more fun, I find, because I don't have to paint with such tiny strokes. Hm...I'm already eyeing 8x8 and 10x10 canvases now. :-)

The girl with purple hair is painted on a new canvas shape I'm experimenting with - 4" x 4", but 1 3/4" thick. Jeff found this, and I asked him to get a bunch because I was so intrigued by the shape. You can stand the canvas up to display it instead of hanging it, though you can still hang it if you want.

I hope to finish these this weekend and put some of them up for sale on my Etsy shop.



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