Miauw miauw…in 2007 we want better quality food, more food, longer massages, regular manicure and pedicure, better grooming….etc, etc.
I have made sketches of them over and over again but I have never shown their photo’s on my blog. So here they are. I had 8 cats on Januari 1, 2006. This year the gang has only 6 members. Pirozjki has been living with her new owner in Hilversum for a year now and sent her love (via the owner, see bottom picture). Red passed away last spring.
Joseph Guy (Joe; Joey). Ex-male. Type: Maine Coon. He’s the boss at home.
Bacardi (Bac). Ex-male. Type: Ragdoll. He takes 2nd place in the ranking.
Wasabi (Blobp; Wasaaab). Ex-female. Type: Housecat/European shorthair. Can get really catty to the others especially to the ex-males. She suffers from chronic renal failure.
Salami (Fatso, appropriate name seeing the size of her body). Ex-female. Type: Housecat/European shorthair. Always runs screaming throughout the house, but is relatively friendly to the ex-males.
Koolrabi (Koolcat or Kool (o pronounced as in owner)). Ex-female. Type: Half Norwegian Forestcat, half European shorthair. Very sweet, likes to sit close to us or on our lap. Will sit on your chest when you sleep.
Gurami (Gui). Ex-female, sister of Salami, but then the skinny version. Type: Housecat/European shorthair. Very hyper cat, tough to approach, but can also be close to us.
Joey vs. Bac. Sleep boxing.
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Pirozjki or Pi (below) enjoys her new home in Hilversum very much, according to Madelon, her new owner. We are very happy to hear that. Madelon sent this pic of Pi to us along with the Xmas card. Very sweet. We still miss her.
It is one year ago that I picked up drawing/sketching (again). Since then I’ve been drawing pretty regularly. So let’s see what I have done so far.
I think that I am doing pretty good so far. There have been times where I was really productive or really lazy and being uninspired by anything. I have promised myself several times that I would draw every single day. Well, I found out that that one promise is really a tough one to keep. I am still not able to fulfill that promise. However an easier approach is to not blog everyday (to post drawing) and use the time to draw instead. I find this approach gets me a lot closer to achieving the goal ‘draw each day’. So that is the reason why I upload my drawings only on Sundays now. I give the post the same date as when I do my drawing. I safe so much time to draw more or do other things, which is really great.
Within one year, I filled about 4.5 sketchbooks/journals with bad and good drawings/sketches. Filling in every single journal page with a ‘good’ sketch is very hard for me to achieve at least at this moment. However I do notice that I am getting better at sizing my subjects and therefore I lately get them right on the page the first time. I also notice that the smaller the sketch book (e.g. that journal with the medieval Utrecht map on the cover) the harder it is for me to get the scale of my drawing right. I almost always miscalculated the size of my subject and the size of the paper.
I notice that my style is looser. I like that a lot. However, I often have difficulties in finding what to draw, eventhough there are actually many possibilities. That I hope/want to change in the coming year.
I have been playing with various medium. But so far, I haven’t used acrylic and oil. I think I’ll try to use them this year.
Composition is something that I have to study this year as well. I usually don’t think about composition when I am drawing something. It’s just usually trying to get whatever I see in front of me on the paper. Often, I am not very satisfied with how my drawings turn out, eventhough the drawing itself is good. Paying more attention to composition will help, I think.
Back to sketchbooks, photo above shows the sketchbooks filled with drawings from the past year. Only one of the spiral bound is half filled. It is only filled with my sketchcrawl and vacation sketches. I keep that sketchbook as my ’side’ sketchbook.
Below is a photo of a new journal, which I am going to use starting tomorrow.
I am threatening my new journal to co-operate here. 
And I hope it will.
Queen’s day falls on Sunday (tomorrow) this year. And the government does not allow the country to celebrate it on a Sunday, so the celebration is today. Every year on Queen’s day, people sell what they have and want to get rid of (read: junk) on the streets. The cities are usually packed with people. Everywhere, there will be (loud) music, drinks (mostly beer), food, and the color of orange (Dutch national’s color).
I was very excited this morning. I was already thinking of what I wanted to buy and so on. However, we went too early. We were there at about 10.30 a.m. and people were just started to take their stuffs out. After a couple of hours, the sky did not co-operate. Rain and ice poured on to the streets. Yes, ice! People covered whatever they were trying to sell with plastic. We couldn’t see anything and got really annoyed. We decided to go home, empty handed.
Then one way or another we ended up at IKEA and bought lamps for our bookcase. Queen’s day this year didn’t turn out as we expected.
There has been a discussion or a request in the Everyday Matters Yahoo! group about sharing one’s weapons of choice for sketching and drawing. These two pics show mine. Actually, I have more art materials hidden in my cupboard beside these, since I am addicted to art goodies. However, the goodies shown on the pics are my ‘core’ drawing/sketching materials that I use 85% of the time.
The materials:
- Derwent ‘Drawing’ Pencils
- Derwent ‘Graphitint’ Pencils
- Caran d’Ache Pablo coloured pencils
- Winsor & Newton Coatman sketch palet 12 half-pans
- Bruynzeel coloured pencils
- Moleskine sketchbook
- Basic black sketchbook (no brand, from a local art store)
- Rotring XONOX 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5
- Rotring Rapidograph 0.25, 0.35, and 0.5
- Chinese brushes
- Lamy ‘Safari’ fountain pen with F/fine nib
Phew! What a busy monday! I’ve been sick for a couple of days (got a nasty flu) and now I’m still recovering. Now that I’m back to work, I have to catch up with what I had left behind last week. So it’s been a very busy day. Just like any other normal person, I’ve got one head, two eyes, and two hands. Today I felt like I needed 4 heads, 4 sets of eyes, hands, and preferably 4 mouths as well. In other words, I need 4 clones of myself!
So to cheer myself up tonight, I browsed through some old pics of my cats. Look what I found. This is Bacardi or just Bac. He is a seal point Ragdoll and one of my 8 cats. On the pic, he was 8 weeks old and looked fluffy and ruffled. He is still super fluffy now and 6 kg heavier! As a true ragdoll, he ignores most of the things happening around him or when he is pushed around or away. He has one bad habit: he always lies in front of door openings waiting for us to trip over him. Cute!
We’ve just downloaded our holiday pictures from our digital camera. The holiday itself was already way back in the beginning of the year. After downloading, we took a quick look at the pictures and surprised at what we’ve recorded with our camera.
The fishtanks with huge crabs and lobsters were standing outside a seafood restaurant. The tanks attracted many people’s attention, both tourists and locals.
Yesterday I went to visit the Keukenhof for the first time with several co-workers. All of us have never been to this park, also the one who was born in Holland.
The park was nice, but we were just to late in the season. We should have visited the Keukenhof sometime in the middle of April. Now they have chopped off the lots of the flowers’ head. So only the green stems and leafs were left. The flowers with their heads on had some kind of frost bite, so did not look very fresh either. The flower field was totally green; the heads have been cut too. Dissapointing!
I heard that every year they put different kind of flowers and the lay out will be different too. So I might go back next year and possibly rent a bike too to explore the surrounding area better.
