Doodling...

 Two days ago, I finished another two wedding gown drawings purchased from my Etsy shop (yay!!)

Before that, I was working feverishly on the Queen Anne's Lace painting I wanted to hang over the dining table.  It's been weeks of working hard on projects, and I wanted to just unwind and play without the pressure of a "perfect" final piece. 

I was in a shop a few weeks ago and there was a little girly backpack that had a pattern of cute little cartoon cats on them.  I fell in love with the little cats but I didn't want to buy the backpack so I took some pictures so I could play with the pattern.

The 4 little pencil drawings are sort of copied from the cat pattern, but I refined them a bit. The larger one is a doodle I tried to make from a painting I did of my own cat. I love the bottom two the most, so I played with those some more. These doodles were pretty small...

So I enlarged them....

...and made stamps! The stamps didn't come out quite as "perfect" as I wanted, but oh well. We're just playing today. They're still really cute, I think.  Then I did them with watercolor.

That's all for the cats today.  I love them though, they're so stinking cute! I can't wait to think of things I can use these for.

Last night, I was playing around a bit too.  I was given a Japanese tea set several years ago as a gift from the mother of a girl I used to babysit.  The mom was a karate master who had her own karate school and had studied in Japan. Their house was filled with beautiful Japanese crafts.  I love this tea set, but with moving around a lot the last few years, the tea set sat at my parents house unused.  When we came to Scotland, I packed it and put it in a box to ship here because I wanted to use it.  It was a little cast iron pot with 6 ceramic cups. Simple, delicate, beautiful.  Well, I packed it badly and when it arrived, all but one of the cups was smashed.  I was devastated.  The surviving cup has a chip and a crack, so it can't be used, but I won't throw it out.  I've been wanting to put it in a still life, so I started sketching it last night.  I was trying to do the cup and I was at it for about an hour and just couldn't get it symmetrical. Then, I just dove in with the pot and sketched without caring about the outcome at all and I was pretty impressed with what I did! Especially the handle, it was amazingly correct! The back part is a little lopsided I guess, but look at the handle!! :-D Again though, this was just going in without trying to make it perfect and I surprised myself. :)

Then I started doodling my wine glass and the Eiffel Tower and decided it was time for bed...