Something Old, Something New

"Something old,
someting new,
something borrowed,
something blue."

The old saying usually applies to brides, but the past couple weeks it has applied (mostly) to me. The old part was our calico cat, Sophie. I got her from my hairdresser eighteen years ago, after having to put my first cat, Buster to sleep. I thought I'd never find a kitty I loved as well as Buster, but Sophie turned out to be a sweet cat, and her death on Good Friday left us both teary eyed for days. There were all those last things, putting away of bowls and toys, disposing of cat food to the Humane Society, tossing of medicines from her recent illness. But most of all it was the absence of the cat. She wasn't sleeping by the heat register, standing at the foot of the stairs waiting for her morning food, begging in the kitchen when supper was being prepared. It was, and still is, hard to lose the old girl. We're still pretty blue, although we're planning to get another kitty from the Humane Society in a few weeks.

The new part is my experimentation with monotype printing. I've been taking a class once a week from an artist friend, and when she demonstrated printing from an acrylic plate with water based paint, I felt like a little kid. It was fun, fast, and it was agreeably unpredictable. When I got home from class I decided to experiment with creating an image that would portray Sophie. This is it. I tried to make the cat image stand out by going back into the print with colored pencil in the background.
I like the results, and I look forward to experimenting more.

I enjoy my usual methods of creating images, watercolor and colored pencil, but I'm happy to try something new. I miss my old kitty, but I'm looking forward to bringing home a healthy playful young cat. Making art helps me feel less blue. Sometimes you have no choice but to move on.

As for the borrowed part, Mary Ann, I promise to return your board as soon as I get around to finishing that watercolor!