Animals in the Desert

I rather enjoy watching the animals around our place. I saw these crows in the yard and wondered why they were hanging around - until I went out to water my apple tree. They had pecked apart every apple and torn off many of the branch ends! Couldn't they have just eaten ALL of a few apples and left everything else alone?

The bunny is so cute sitting in the shade of our tree. I'm sure he didn't expect to see me come outside with my camera but then they've surprised us a few times too. We now surround all new plants with chicken wire because the bunnies decimate them. They have even chewed off many lower branches on our oleander bushes but drop them when they realize they are poisonous. Once my husband opened his car hood to see why the car wouldn't start and there was a cute little bunny who had chewed the spark plug wires!

I still like watching all these animals. I don't know what to do about the apple tree. We built a garage to keep our cars away from the rabbits and rats. I have foil strips hanging from my tomato cage which is up on our porch away from the bunnies but evidently not the birds! I sure hope I get a few of the tomatoes.

Journal Page - Celebrate?

I was clipping words and pictures out of a magazine that I thought I could use for journaling and ended up making a quick page. I thought I'd share it with you. This is just some cut and paste work but is a lot of fun at times.

C is for Color

I got the new book The Journal Junkies Workshop. Using a few of their ideas I made this page. I've previously done a page for the letter A and have started (barely) one for B so I decided to do C here. Since this uses mixed media I decided to post it on this blog even though it is also on my drawing blog.

I used watered down acrylic for the watercolor looking background hoping it would somewhat seal the page. This is done on drawing paper and the paint was watery enough to soak the paper and bleed through to the other side almost ruining my page there. Adding watercolor pencil lines, I had to rewet the paper to blue them out. Then I let it dry and stuck with drier stuff like a photo I took of a flower in my daughter's yard and some butterflies from gift wrap. A little inkwork and I called it done at least for now.

I think my next journal will only have watercolor paper in it. I like painting on the 140# but it's so thick you can't get so many pages in a single journal. Could any of you tell me how 90# paper works for doing wet backgrounds concerning bleedthrough to the other side? I don't mind buckling as it flattens some when the book is pressed close.