As someone who strives to be organized, working on a messy desk tends to drive me a bit bonkers. While I do not entirely clear off my desks – I have two, one for my computer and one for drawing and painting – everything on them has a spot. I tend to group and pile things… I’m a piler. Before starting on a painting, I make sure to just have a minimal amount of stuff on my desk. Only the essentials belong on there – brushes, paint, palette, paper towel, paper, reference photos. Not extras, like a cat or two.
But it’s always a good sign when the the mess loses its potency. It either means that you’ve gotten into a state of flow and are laser focused on whatever project or art piece you’re working on… or that you’re under a deadline and can’t waste any time cleaning up. If your desk isn’t messy at all by the time you finish the project or painting, then perhaps you need to loosen up a bit.
This is what my drawing/painting desk currently looks like:
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was working on a holiday card design for our kitties’ vet. The concept was based on the Twelve Days of Christmas, in hopes that the clinic will be around for at least another twelve years. So this year, instead of “a partridge in a pear tree”, it was “a Poppy (kitty’s name) in an ornamental tree”.
Here’s a look at the entire image inked:
Here it is with some of the lighter paint additions:
Here’s a peek at the nearly finalized version on my messy desk:
This is what the final exterior of the card looks like:
The original watercolour painting looks slightly different since I added the clinic’s logo in PhotoShop. I will be matting and framing the original so will wait to show photos of it.
I also printed all one hundred cards on my workhouse of a printer at home.
This also meant I had to score and cut them all as well. Thank goodness I still had my trusty bone folder picked up years ago from this amazing store (similar one) and a heavy duty OLFA knife!
Yesterday, I delivered all the printed cards to her in box I repurposed from home.
Coincidentally Cemaine opened up her clinic right around the same time we moved to Saskatoon. And not only that, I also happened to go to the same high school as her when I lived here many moons ago. After reconnecting all these years later, I’m honoured that she asked me to design the card she’d be sending out this year. Of course, Canada Post is still on strike, so these will be hand delivered rather than mailed.
An update on our tree situation at home too: You can see from the photo above of Zesty on my desk that our tree is now naked. Too many kitty climbing attempts occurred that I decided to remove all the tempting ornaments. My plan was to completely take down the tree and wait until a few days before Christmas to put it up again, but I just didn’t get around to it yet. So plan B is to move the tree to our family room and see if it fares better there.
The kitties got to open and enjoy one of their Christmas presents early. I hemmed and hawed about getting a cat tree for a while and finally gave in on Black Friday. Matt kept saying he would build one for them, but with all the projects he has going on, it would probably be a while before the kittens had something like this. He did build a better and sleeker version of the cat pole we had up, using stall bars that he also DIYed.
Of course, they all fight to be at the top of this and the cat tree. But mostly, they seem to want to be close to us.
Happy Friday the 13th! Have a warm and cozy weekend!
