Now that husband has seen his birthday surprise, I can share! It’s been a while since I’ve done something I feel belongs in my website gallery, which I’ve also combined into a single, more compact page. In the future I’d like to redesign it so that the gallery images are also a wee bit bigger.

These are portraits of our cats, Pandora and Pi (respectively) as Victorian ladies. The flowers behind them are their birth flowers. Yeah, we’re those kind of cat people.

The images were lined in sepia ink and then painted with watercolor… on cardboard. For anyone tempted to paint watercolors on cardboard, my advice is, don’t. For some reason I keep forgetting, but it has a peculiar habit of randomly repelling the watercolor in spots, which makes what can be a temperamental medium just that much more tricky. I did use the odd behavior to my advantage, however, by just letting it do its thing for the faux-aged edges.

To my credit, there was a sentimental reason for using the cardboard. The circles had been cut out of a box they were having a lot of fun with when I “upgraded” it for them.