“Are You an Artist?”

Do you ever wonder why I’m always taking close up pictures of Foster?

(Besides the fact that he’s cute, I mean?) Well it all goes back to “New Friends”, where he asks why I never draw him. I always think, “I need to try drawing Foster” and so I take close ups upon close ups. But knowing how much trouble I have getting cats to look real (especially their eyes) I had been putting off trying for a while.

That is until I was looking at a drawing book and saw these instructions. I had always sort of thought this would be “cheating”, but I was intrigued with the concept so I gave it a try. First they have you draw a grid on top of a photo of your pet. Then reproduce the grid on paper (I used graph paper). The blank graph can be any size you want. Then it’s just a matter of taking the grid, square by square, and trying to recreate the part of the picture that is in each one. It wasn’t too hard once I realized I had originally started his ear out in the wrong square.This was a job for iced jasmine tea...(no chocolate muffin this time though). I try to take my drawings somewhere at least once a week and work on them while enjoying a snack. While drawing at Mark’s chemo or whenever he was in the hospital, I discovered that people are drawn to artwork in progress. So many interesting conversations were started by people commenting on my work, often asking the same question: “Are you an artist?” It happened recently when I was working on the dolphin for my ABC Animals in the cafe at Barnes and Noble. A man sitting nearby asked, “Are you an artist?” (I always think I should say, “It depends on what you want to consider an artist,”) but I end up saying something like, “Well, a wannabe artist anyway”. So I showed him the first three animals in my sketchbook and he liked them a lot. “Maybe you could publish them,” he said, which I thought was nice of him. The other day it occurred to me that I could carry around some of my Zazzle cards and when people ask about my work I could whip them out and say “I just happen to have these for sale!” But I don’t know if you can do that in someone else’s place of business, like Starbucks for example. I would hate to get arrested and hear them say on the police radio, “First name phonetically, David-Edward-Baker-Robert-Adam…”
Anyway back to the subject. I still don’t know if it’s cheating or not, but I was pretty happy with the results. However you will be stuck with lines going through your drawing and you have to figure out how to get them off without ruining your work.