Watercolor Painting a Buffalo in 4 Parts

I would have done this as one video but the app couldn't do more than a couple min at a time.

Buffalo 1 

Buffalo 2 

Buffalo 3

Buffalo 4

The Watercoloring of the Birds

A Quick Bird Sketch

The Skinny on My Sheep Thing

"Sheep Portrait" 2002

People ask me why I draw and paint sheep so often. I doodle and watercolor and photograph and render them on the computer.   The answer is that I love sheep.  My family and good friends know this and I'm lucky enough to be remembered with sheep gifts at holidays and birthdays:  I have sheep key chains, sheep magnets, sheep bookmarks, sheep figurines, sheep socks and even a sheep scarf.

 The following story, tho kinda long for a blog, tells the true --- and what I hope is an entertaining -- story of the beginnings of my obsession with sheep.

When I was 11 years old I was walking across my yard and was suddenly roughly upended and shoved to the ground. Breathless and startled, I pulled myself to my elbows and cast my eyes around for the culprit. The answer stood behind me in the form of a now docile woolly mass: A sheep chewed slowly on a mound of lawn and nudged me gently with his nose.

The fluffy offender was my sister’s sheep. It wasn’t the first time he’d ambushed someone and it wouldn’t be the last. I reached up and patted his white face.

About a year earlier I’d learned my sister was getting a sheep. I was incredulous. And although I’d never considered it before, I bleated “Why can’t I have a sheep too?”
“Because she joined the 4-H Sheep Club.”, my mother explained patiently, as if I were a little slow and it were the most normal thing in the world for a 13 year-old girl to adopt a large farm animal.

I might add that this was a 13 year-old girl who’d never before expressed interest in farming, did not have a barn, and whose experience with barnyard animals was limited to once visiting the petting zoo downtown. And it wasn’t a fun visit either. The memory of my mother and sister and me backed against a fence,  hungry goats and sheep with hooves on our chests vying for grain handouts still haunts me.

                 Mom & Kathy at the petting zoo right before the animal mugging.

We’d had lots of other animals around our house through the years. We had the usual family cat and dog, a few gerbils with some fish sprinkled in occasionally; mostly normal pets. My brother found an orphaned baby squirrel once and brought it home for a while. Until it got mean and he had to let it go. But a sheep was a whole new level of animal. Sheep were barn animals. Sheep were big.

“It’s just a baby sheep. A lamb.” Mom said, now sounding like she was trying to convince herself more than me on the rationale of this decision. “And she just has to raise it, then it goes back to wherever it came from.”

“Um, that would be a farm, Mom. Where farm animals belong.” I said, barely restraining the “Duh.” at the end of my snotty pre-teen reply. Clearly I was jealous. Sibling rivalry dictated that, if I couldn’t have one I didn’t want her to, either.

I wandered out to the yard to ask my father where we would keep a lamb. I saw he’d built a little fenced-in corral for it in the garage. He also attached a small gated outside area to it. He stood with his arms crossed, seeming pleased with it. I crawled in and out through the little door he’d put in for it, and the idea of getting a lamb was actually starting to seem fun, even if it weren’t mine.

 I was beginning to look forward to meeting the little fella. I had images of Christmas cards in my mind where the shepherd carries the little lamb on his shoulders and cartoon lambs bouncing through fields of flowers and of course of the famous Mary’s little lamb who followed her to school.

                                                            "Sheep Dreams"2015

A few days later, the lamb was ready for pick-up. Dad, my sister, two brothers, and I hopped into our old station wagon—a long, low-slung car with fake wood painted up the sides, and drove to the farm, just a few miles away. Dad parked the car in front of the farmhouse. We all piled out and looked around. A few sullen- looking cows grazed in a nearby pasture. Just visible up the hill, about twenty sheep stood unmoving, like yellowy-grey shrubs in a field. A huge rickety unpainted old barn was slung behind the house.

“There he is!” Kathy said and pointed. We stood watching as an old farmer in droopy jeans and big black rubber boots came out of the barn.  He was leading the biggest lamb I had ever seen. Its wool was about 5 inches thick and looked to weigh more than me. The farmer stopped in front of us. The round, fat animal looked up benignly as we all gathered round to pat it.

  

I don’t know why my father didn’t ask about its large size right there, but instead made small talk with the farmer, as if picking up a sheep were something he did regularly. Looking back on it I now think Dad realized he was way out of his element. Chatting nervously about the football and the weather he proceeded to load the hapless sheep into the back of the station wagon.

When you put any other animal—say a dog, or a cat--in a place that’s a little low-ceiling for them, they know enough to lower their heads, maybe bend their legs and crouch down. Not a sheep. That animal could not understand the concept of, or would not try to conform its too-high body to fit inside the back of that wagon. Its legs were stiff sticks. In the end Dad had to lay it on its side and slide it into the back of the car like a loaf of fluffy bread into an oven.

“Is it a boy or girl?” Dad asked the farmer, straightening up, sweating and wiping his hands on his jeans.

“Girl,” the farmer said looking at him out of the side of his eye with a voice that implied “Duh.”.

In the car on the way home, the sheep lay silent and confused in the back of the car and slid around like a giant sponge at each turn and stop.

Kathy named her new pet Trixie. Sheep make unusual pets. Trixie was no exception. Petting a sheep is a lesson in curl care. A sheep’s hair can’t be petted one way or another like a dog or cat’s. It grows straight up and curls into little oily knots. And Trixie's was deep, oily and thick. So we to just gave her a rub or a pat rather than a pet.

                                                                             Trixie

 But it really didn’t matter. Trixie didn’t seem to appreciate our affections. Though docile and relaxed, she didn’t seem to care whether people paid her any attention. As long as she was fed, she was content and was sweet, but I always felt she was somehow disconnected from us.  A dog or a cat will gaze straight into both your eyes and you may feel a real connection there, a sort of soul inside the animal.

 But sheep’s eyes are on the sides of its head so it always appears to be looking into the distance and has to turn its head and look at you with only one eye at a time. When an animal can only look at you that way, it feels like she distrusts you; maybe thinks you're weird.. Or there’s somewhere else she’d rather be. So Trixie would stand and let us pat her and she'd gaze out at the yard or seem to peer at us suspiciously out of one eye or the other. It was sort of like the look the farmer gave Dad when he inquired about Trixie’s gender.
                                       
The reason for the farmer’s funny look was revealed about a week later. Dad went out to the garage to check on Trixie and discovered her lying in her stall with a newborn lamb! We kids squealed and shrieked with excitement but Dad just stood there shaking his head and grumbling, rocking on his heels, his hands deep in his pockets.

This astounding news to us was not at all a surprise to the 4-H leader, who received an immediate, panicked call.. She assured my parents that Kathy was told she would be bringing home a pregnant mother sheep, called a ewe, and was supposed to keep them both until the lamb was raised and weaned.
“How else could she raise a lamb?” the leader chuckled. “He needs to be fed.” I’m sure another “Duh” comment was implied here.

So now our non-farm house with its non-barn garage was housing two sheep. Someone in the family---I think it was Dad --- named the lamb Punk.

Kathy & Punk

An uncle was soon called who had a real farm of his own. He informed my father that Punk’s tail would need to be docked. I learned then that “docked” means “chopped off”. It seems their tails grow too long and fuzzy and present a hygiene issue—that is, they get poopy. So Uncle Dan arrived to help Dad perform the operation.
                                 

We were all horrified about the operation and to learn later that day that Dan had used our kitchen pairing knife for the task. That black-handled little sharp knife ended up back in the kitchen drawer but was never again used by my mother or any of us kids and was always referred to ever after as The Knife They Used to Cut Off Punk’s Tail. I think it’s still there today.

But no one uses it.

But that little lamb was the most adorable thing on four legs and charmed the whole family right away with his cuteness and playfulness. His fleece actually was white as snow. His tiny legs had huge knobby knees and he had a perpetual smile.

When approached, Punk would stand perfectly still, except for shaking his now shortened tail. With his head lowered, he’d smile at you. He’d let you pat him. Suddenly he’d leap in the air like he’d gotten an electrical shock and charge around the yard, bucking and jumping every few feet. Then he’d come back, still smiling, bump his head against you and allow his ears to be scratched or his head to be patted again.  When Dad mowed the lawn, Punk would be an adorable bright green by the end of the day from rolling and playing in the grass.

"Green",  2015

“I like having two sheeps!” my little brother said.
“Sheep,” sighed my father. “More that one and you still say ‘sheep’. Many sheep. Like the word fish, you call them ‘many fish.’”
“But what about fishes?” said my mother.
“Oh. Yea,” said Dad, rubbing his head, suddenly seeming tired. “Okay, you can say many sheeps”. And he pronounced it sheep-izz, like fishes. We were about to learn that sheepizz, like fishes, were not very smart.

Punk liked to bump his head into things. We'd started a game with Punk in which we’d encourage him to “ram” his head against our outstretched hands. He seemed to love it. He would bang into your hand, back up and do it again. It was really cute when he weighed about 12 pounds. But as Punk quickly grew and grew, he never grew out of his love for this game. A lamb butting you is cute and entertaining. A full grown sheep with curly horns is quite another thing.

                                              "Irish Sweaters" 2016

After ending up on our back in the mud more than once we eventually learned to look carefully out the door and around the yard for Punk’s whereabouts each time we left the house before making a dash for the car. Sometimes we'd get halfway there and see Punk, a big woolly train, barreling across the lawn towards us, head lowered, smiling. Many times he’d chase one of us up onto our cellar door and trap us there, dressed for church, or a date, or for work.

Punk didn’t have any malice or ill intent. It was all a game for him. But if he caught you, you were going down. Hard. Then he’d just stand and smile at you, nosing around at the collar of whatever outfit he’d just ruined until you got up out of the mud or grass and gave him a scratch behind the ear.

Punk presented other troubles. When we first got Trixie, she’d stay around the house and happily munch on the grass of our one acre or so of lawn. But Punk was a wanderer. He took to roving the neighborhood without regard for neighboring borders and Trixie would follow.

 Dad would get a phone call and have to go fetch them from a neighbor’s garage; or worse, from someone’s decimated vegetable garden. On the way back from rounding them up, cars would slow and people inside would point at the strange sight of Dad, still in his tie and dress clothes from work, leading two sheep down the street on a rope.

                                                          "Sheeps"  2015
For a while we tried keeping them in their little pen, but they seemed unhappy in there. So we set up a couple of stakes in the yard, got some long ropes for each of them and tied them up. If you chain up a dog like this, he may run and lunge and choke himself a little the first couple times he tries to get away. His legs will slide out in front of him and he’ll stop. It was different with Punk. He never seemed to learn where his rope ended.

Though we no longer had to dodge him so he wouldn’t butt us, we now had a far sadder situation. Punk would run, head down toward us, get to the end of the rope-- and flip over like a spongy yo-yo. He’d land on his back, legs sticking up stiff and still. He’d lie there still a few moments, breathing hard. Slowly his stick legs would start spinning in the air like knobby white clock hands. The spinning would cause enough momentum for him to roll over and get back up. And, if he caught sight of you, he’d do it again,
And again.
It was sort of funny to watch but also heartbreaking.

In the end we brought Punk and Trixie back to the farmer. We kids missed them, and to this day I still have what my husband and son refer to as a suspicious love of all things sheep-like. Dad acted as if he was glad to see them go, and I’m sure in many ways he was, but for the rest of his life he never ate lamb-chops. I think he really liked those sheepizz.

"Happy Hour" 2012

Watercoloring for a Friend

So doing commissioned artwork can be a weird thing:  I get an email or a phone call from a stranger.  They send me pictures of their home or their dog, or their alpaca. And I'm asked to create a painting based on a flat, 2 dimensional image.

It usually works out fine, especially if the client sends me several shots of the same subject and I can really get a feel for a place.  If I can't get a good read on a subject, I'll ask for more pictures or politely decline the work.

While painting I think a lot about the people who live in the house, or who own the dog --or the alpaca or the horse-- and I wonder about them:  What are they like? Did they play soccer or bacci ball in this yard with their kids like we did with ours?  Did the dog know any tricks or have any weird habits like my little basset hound, Roxy does?

The cool part about creating a painting for a friend, as opposed to a stranger,  is that I'm usually pretty familiar with the subject.  I've been to the house, explored the yard and petted their dog.  I have a more personal feel for the place or the animal.  And if I haven't seen it in person , I know the owner and often have heard stories about the house or of their beloved pet.   

This is a coworker friend's home and the resulting painting I made for her.  I don't know her that well, but I feel much closer to her after having rendered a watercolor of something beloved to her.  I've found it's true with many friends for whom I've done home or pet portraits:  I pay close attention to all the details of their home or of their pet and come to a more profound understanding of what's important and dear to them.  

It's a lovely keepsake for a friend and also a gift to me to have learned more about her.