“You don’t sit at the table, unless you’re properly dressed!” I’ve already made one or two drawings of this lady and her dragon. This one is on gray carton; it’s back side of a drawing paper block and it turned out to be a bit too rough perhaps.
I have used the same sketch (first scene of “The Wind In The Willows”) to check other possibilities of getting a strong texture to the walls of the hole. Some scrubbing, some sprinkling, lots of untypical operations!
Here she is. The creature to the left is baby Moomintroll.
Now most of the holiday mess is over – here in Poland Christmas Eve is the most festive day. You know: the whole family at one table, presents under the tree and lots of traditional food (my family isn’t too happy about this culinary tradition, and my younger son just hates it! but Grannie wouldn’t be satisfied without her special set of dishes). When it’s all over, you can just sleep, eat and enjoy your presents. Or visit relatives. Me and my husband have gone cycling instead, because the weather is great. Like March, not December. 22 km by bike and now the next family dinner, planned for tomorrrow, is not so scary any more. Perhaps we will be able to eat at least half of the food our moms expect us to eat. Before it all happens, maybe I will finish a drawing. This will be a night scene with many strange small animals and I’m just planning them, one by one.
This is Mole cleaning his underground house, first scene from “The Wind in the Willows”, and probably my last drawing before Christmas; I need to do some cleaning myself. I’ve made some very queer operations to get the texture. I hope there’s no society for prevention of paper abuse yet; this piece of watercolor paper really suffered a lot. On both sides. I’ve used this side, because the other is textured to death.
Wrong timing; I’ve made my paper house just before Christmas and now everybody wants to get one (i.e. everybody who expects to get a present from me, not the whole planet’s population). At the moment I work on paper motorcycle workshop for my husband.
First sunny day from… I’m not sure, a week or longer. Both mares went out to have their breakfast and they were very happy. I meant to take picture of Basia having her morning hay – she was just shining with happiness – but I was late and there was no hay left, when I went there again with camera. Now Basia looks as if she’s eating snow. In reality she was looking for last blades, Basia is very serious about her food.
The children poems book is taking a real shape; I’ve just finished cover illustration. The title is “Różne dziwadła” which means, literally, “Various strange creatures”. Translating titles isn’t so easy, though. The world “dziwadło” means a person or animal (something alive, anyway) being strange in a positive, funny way, while for example “odmieniec” means exactly the same, except that you don’t like him/her/it. I suppose in English words also have their values in positive-negative scale, unfortunately I can hardly see the differences.
Letters are written, now they can only stare at the fireplace: will the Santa go out of the chimney or not? Animals need lots of things to survive winter, so they have good reason to wait. This is probably last picture in Christmas series this year, now it’s time to think about real Christmas; not much time left.
Ink & Paint 