Pet Portraits and Wildlife Art

Well it's 5 o'clock in the morning and I feel as though I'm going mad, really it's only 4 o'clock but we lost an hour for the great British summertime (hopefully it will arrive this year). I sometimes suffer terribly, I wake in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep, sometimes I switch on the television, sometimes I wander around the house or garden but I've given up on both of those and after being awake for several hours I've decided to use my brain, it's too late to go back to sleep really, I get up at 6 to feed rabbits, guinea pigs, birds etc so if I drift off now I'm sure I'll be lost in space all day. Luckily I am finishing work early today to collect the new truck and I intend to sleep all the way there!!! Anyway, back to the important stuff, this is where I've got to with my leopard, it only looks a small update but the portrait itself is really very big, A2, in fact completely covering the sheet so I am actually making quite good progress! The colours on here are a little better than the previous shot, I've read comments about difficulties taking images, however I'm not sure if it is actually the taking them, or if it's my lack of photo-editing knowledge which may be letting me down. The thing is if I start a course or learn how to use it, it becomes another thing which takes me away from my art, so I'm stuck with it for now.

I'm also very pleased to say we have 2 possibly 3 broody geese, so we built three nests for them yesterday afternoon and made them little areas where they will not be disturbed, not knowing which of the geese will be best (usually Mildred sits for about 2 months, she's like an old lady now but for the past few years her embden eggs have been infertile and she sits until they explode underneath her, bit smelly! But she is relentless with her sitting and mothering so may yet do us proud with the toulouse eggs) so we have split the toulouse eggs (17 now) between them. If they all hatch it'll be bedlam in the goose pen!!!

And dear Willow was a bit manic yesterday, she did an extra hour at work to try to tire her out but still insisted on rolling around the lawn with Gypsy after work! I need to build her up for the summer as it'll be too warm to let her have a sleep in the truck and it is actually cooler working underneath the trees plus usually there is a brook or stream for her to get into, it's just trying not to overdo the exercise, she seems to want to do more so perhaps a half hour extra every other day for the time being will build her up. It's hard to believe she's only 4 months old, she's nearly as big as Zac the spaniel now and he's a big dog, she can floor him already by copying Gypsy' technique of biting feet! I'll get a new photo of them tomorrow and you'll see how big she is now.