Oliver the Kitten

I have just completed the watercolor book, Oliver the Little Kitten.

I started making from a watercolor notebook that Sue gave me for Christmas. The hand made paper and the the binding were made in India. The paper is so rough and absorbent that making color changes in the watercolor washes was pretty easy and really fun. It was a little more difficult to make scenes that were realistic.  The book by virtue of its media became pretty impressionistic.

What is really fun with this book is that the aspect is pretty extreme about 4  by 9. The 9 inches is the height.

In 51 pages the reader taken  from a decidedly little kitten of about 8 months old to becoming a little more adult at a year and a half.

I have written commentary for the book. It outlines Oliver's favorite activities and how he has integrated into the colony with a couple of human adults and two other male cats.

I have grown as an illustrator in the process of doing this book. Unlike most books that are illustrated after the story is written and the quality of the illustration and the writing are even, this book was made over eight months and there  are some pages that are not very good from the the illustrator's prospective. There are also some pages and illustrations that I am very proud to be the illustrator. 

It was really fun to do a diary of sorts of a nonhuman animal. I also cut my chops on how to do background furniture and day to day situations when painting Oliver in his day to day activities.

I showed the almost completed book. My dad was pleased at the voice I gave the little kitten in the story. 

The illustrative style for this little book is a pen sketch done with a watercolor wash over it. I used .5 lines in the sketches that are made from unipen pens. They are permanent and do not lose their point easily in the illustration.

Most of the pages use a common watercolor palate of yellow ochre, Quin gold and Paynes Gray. Payne's Grey is a combination of lamp black with Ultramarine blue.

Olilver is a tuxedo cat with yellow green eyes.

Each page as been scanned is will soon be sent to my niece and sister who have shown interest in making it into an E-book.

I think that I will take the scans and print the results on a color printer and see if a canvas like paper will work for it.  It might me fun to have as a printed book as well as an E-book.

: ) Pat

1TB The New Floppy

I recently added a new addition to the back up arsenel. Its a 1 Tetra Byte Seagate goflex portable hard drive.

Its about the size of the small external floppy drives that we used to use with computers in the 90's. When macs came out they revolutionized the industry with a hard plastic shuttered floppy made by Sony. Computer enthusiasts would spend hours pushing in the floppy and pulling out the floppy as it wrote to this external disk of 400k. They started out at 10 dollars each. We cheered as the price went down and they became double sided. We even didn't have to turn them over. Imagine that!

Flash to the present. The new floppy is a on TB on a go flex. They sell for about 100 dollars at all the major stores from Target to Best Buy. They do not need a separate power source. They use the the power from the USB port to drive the backup. My what back up. I bought the Seagate version. It is easy to but on your Mac Network and dump off all the data and photos you need. When done, you take the hard drive to the trash. Then unplug it from the USB and store it away. It does not need to be up and running on your network at all times. Pretty cool.

It is true that you really need at least 3 back ups of all your original work. I have two hard drives on my network as well as a personal cloud network away from the usual attachments.

My latest project... well its taken over 8 months.. is a watercolor depiction of our little kitten's life an adjustment to the Merced home. It is painted in an extreme formatted East Indian paper watercolor book of watercolor paper that absorbs watercolor paints like crazy. The current page count  is 47. I think I will ended it at 49 or 50. Each page has been scanned and straightened in photoshop. I am pretty excited that it is almost done.  I think that last page will be a family portrait with Oliver in the middle. He has to share the spotlight with the two other older cats.

This 1 TB portable hard drive is the last piece of mind I have in making sure that the pages of Oliver the Kitten survive. Cammie and Mikie think that it might make a great e-book. 

It seems a little ironic that we were backing up our tiny files that we thought were so precious so many years ago, yet now many people that push so many pixels around the screen fail to back up to a couple of spots. Save those family photos in at least three places.

Take it from one with experience in these matters... hard drives fail. Don't let them be the end of your work!  I am just saying..... : ) Pat