Any of you have any interesting stories, jokes, poems or anything to share?

I’m sure something interesting will happen here at some point today, but for right now, I got nothin’. Jeez.

Help me out here, wouldjya?

I can’t remember the species of this lil chimp, but boy was he something special. We walked over to their cage and when he saw us he came over to us right next to his cage and sat down. He seemed to be relating to the Chickeymonkey, she was in her stroller and her hands were tucked into her coat pockets. He tucked his legs up under his chin and wrapped his arms around them, interlocking his fingers in the front of his knees.

He looked so sad, but I don’t know if he was sad because Jay looked sad (freezing), or if he was sad because of what I am seeing here in the reflection of his eye. The full pic of this is really nice and good enough to paint from, but the middle of his face is blackened out by his cage so I cropped it up to his eye.

Look at these fish.

Translated from the page (portugese to english):

The animals of the photos had been below brought of the deep one of the sea for the Asian Tsunami. They had been taken for centers of research, and give credit that many of them had been never seen.

I was wondering what kind of fish were thrown overboard with the Tsunami. Now I know. Oh my. (No, I’ll never go deep sea fishing, thankyouverymuch.)

I just finished Rusty’s underpainting. I’ll be completing this portrait tomorrow! BTW, here is what he will look like when he’s completed.

And in your spare time, watch this: Flash Sketch of a Woman

It is incredible.

Did I ever tell you guys about our peony saga?

3 or 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to have our own peonies so went and picked up a 3 pack of baby roots. Mark followed the instructions and started digging, to this day we are sure that the instructions read to plant them 21-inches down. Yes, 21 inches. We were confused, but that’s what it said, so that’s what we did!

Needless to say, we didn’t get peonies the following year. Or the year after that. We kept hoping they’d make their way to the top, and his dad still teases us that we probably have large beautiful peonies growing a foot under the soil. hehe!

Well I decided to pick up more, so I planted 3 more while Mark was gone. About 6 inches down. Now we have 4, because one of our 21-inchers actually made it up to the top! You can imagine after waiting several years for my own daggone peonies how excited I was this morning to see this:

YAHOO!!!

We stopped over at our zoo for a little while today. It’s cold and uber windy so we didn’t stay too long, we’ll go back when it warms up a bit!

I’ve been tossing around having a June sale since the month is wide open on my schedule.

I’d like to expand my monochromatic gallery, as well as paint s’more custom wildlife pieces. (Maybe even enough to build them their own category!)

What do you guys think? Time for all of you quiet peeps to speak up! I’d really like to know if this is something that my readers would take advantage of if I were to book the entire month of June with custom paintings. That’d be 22 painting days, and 15-20 potential openings. Is it a good month for you? Bad one? Did I miss all the birthdays and anniversaries? Too early to think about holiday gifts?

Of course I’ll be sure the price is right for everyone’s budget, just keep me painting wouldjya? (Couldjya?)

Are you ready for this?! ONE MORE TIME, I will show off my newest masterpiece. Man-o-man. 3 hours to scan, my computer kept misbehaving so I called Dell for more virtual memory. (That’s right, another gig of VM just for the lion!) Then I had to reduce my scans by 50% just so my programs wouldn’t crash out on me. More memory will arrive tomorrow, then I can piece the original full size scans together and it will be large enough for a near-full-size print.

I thoroughly enjoyed painting this guy, and hope many more people consider custom wildlife paintings. It gives me a great opportunity to broaden my gallery and get to the zoo for some photography sessions!

Click “read more” for all of the detail images. There are plenty, and they rock! (Toot, toot, toot - it’s so unlike me, but this piece does deserve it!)

Lion
16×20 Oil Painting
Gallerywrap Canvas
© 2005 Leanne Wildermuth
All Rights Reserved

So far this morning I’ve varnished my Lion painting (you will see scan details soon!), done a load of laundry, made scrambled eggs for Chickiemonkey and sunnyside-uppers for Caitibug, loaded and started the dishwasher, took out the trash and Swiffered the floors. Then, since I had 5 minutes left before the Bug took off for school, I decided I had plenty of time to work up the background on Rusty! An hour later…