Daily Sketch Reprise: Laundry Day

December 18, 2018 Bernadette

sketch with watercolor of cat in laundry basket — “Laundry Day”, 6.5″ x 5″, graphite drawing pencil and watercolor pencils © Bernadette E. Kazmarski

Today was a busy day around the household with several weekends taken up with activities and busy weeks in between recently. Though I’d planned some yardwork when warmer weather was forecast for today, it turned out cold and rainy with dangerous roads in the morning, a great day to do an extra load of laundry, take care of some cleaning and make a pot of soup and bake a couple loaves of bread, all of which warmed up the kitchen, steamed up some windows and kept us busy for hours.

What’s a kitty to do? All that activity and then a warm kitchen with neatly folded laundry warm from the dryer? Mimi couldn’t believe her luck. A few others tried to join her, since she only takes up about one-sixth of the basket, including Smokie and Giuseppe, but in the end Mimi had a really good bath, made a nice nest and curled up for a long afternoon nap. What an inspiration.

I knew I wanted watercolor in here somehow but wasn’t sure exactly how, so I sketched her in pencil on watercolor paper. Later I pulled out my watercolor sets, but then remembered my watercolor pencils which I haven’t used in a while, since I found a few other sets of watercolors that I like a lot. But I wanted to continue with the pencily feel and just brush some water over the watercolor pencil areas to blend the color. It worked just as I had envisioned.

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Peaches' Nap Spot, pencil with watercolor, 11″ x 7.5″, 2008 © B.E. Kazmarski — Peaches’ Nap Spot, pencil with watercolor, 11″ x 7.5″, 2008 © B.E. Kazmarski

Peaches was a perfect model, even when she wasn’t sleeping. Her markings always fascinated me—I was accustomed to torties in Cookie and Kelly, and even the calicoes I had fostered had smaller spots and clearly striped areas. Peaches’ dilute peach and gray and large clearly outlined shapes reminded me an older two-color wall map on cream-colored paper, slightly mellowed with age, where each of the countries were filled with a different color so you could distinguish them at a distance.

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All images and text used on this site are copyrighted to Bernadette E. Kazmarski unless otherwise noted and may not be used without my written permission, although links to your site are more than welcome and are shared. Please ask if you are interested in using and image or story in a print or internet publication. If you are interested in purchasing a print of an image or a product including it, check my animal and nature website Portraits of Animals to see if I have it available already. If you don’t find it there, visit Ordering Custom Artwork for more information on a custom greeting card, print or other item.