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robertsloan2 — ACEO High Red Desert
Published: 2007-11-18 01:05:07 +0000 UTC; Views: 1933; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 34
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Description
ACEO 2 1/2" x 3 1/2" Derwent Drawing Pencils on buff Canson Mi-Tientes paper (same color as Osprey background, still using that sheet).Sedimentary red rocks worn by the wind tower over a landscape of low twisted conifers, drawn from a reference in Artist's Photo Reference: Landscapes and my memory of many trips out West seeing the Old Red Sandstone layered like a book on its side describing the Mesozoic and earlier times, a place that was once a shallow sea and became a high desert. I'm having fun with the new books and the new format, working this small is great.
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Comments: 58
Absolutely grand. I very much enjoy the thought and detail you put into your landscapes. I too have been on trips out west and have seen places like this, and you captured the feel of them exactly.
k
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Thank you! Those trips really stuck in my mind. I most often went when I was a kid, but also did a couple of trips West as an adult and always looked at everything trying to remember it.
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I love the warm tones. It's a lovely composition.
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Thank you! Oh wow. Composition used to be my worst weak point, so I feel thrilled and honored!
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Heh, your welcome, you should be very proud.
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Nicely done. Lots of that in AZ mostly central and north.
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Cool, thank you! Yeah, I've seen landscapes like this on trips when I was a kid, and the memory never really faded. I think because there were dinosaurs involved.
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Hee hee yep. Especially sabertooths. Ari has rather long teeth for a Siamese. Sometime in some science fiction novel I'll postulate them evolving again out of housecats and have Siamese stabbing cats -- the form emerged four different times in evolutionary history on different cat families and it could happen again...
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My beloved angel, Munchkin, my feral black part Siamese, had such long canines that the tips hung below his lower jaw. He had two dips where his lower lip had deformed out of the way of his canines. He loved to look at people by turning his head upside down. He did this to one of my stall cleaning kids one day. The kid said "It's no wonder you never find teeth marks in the mice he kills. He just smiles at them and they have a heart attack!"
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LOL yeah! I think that tendency, especially the indentations, is just the subtle trait that could breed up again into full-on stabbing cats. Not all of which were very large, the smallest stabbing cats were maybe like lynxes and so on -- it would not take much. It would take exactly the type of thick-skinned prey that stabbing cats specialize in. I may do it in some far-future setting or as an accidental environmental glitch in terraforming a new planet. Just to be able to draw pointed sabertooths!
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I don't know. Did the indentation come with the long canines rather than being a separate gene? I can tell you that he was the only cat I've ever owned that you could clearly feel the tips of his canines if you rubbed your finger sideways under his chin. He would slightly open his mouth after you started rubbing to pull his canines back out of the way since he loved his chin rubs - the side of your finger front to back under his chin. Maybe it is too bad I didn't leave him whole and try to find a female with the same trait to breed for sabertoothed cats.
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Yeah, really! I just petted under Ari's chin to see if his long teeth -- which do show when his mouth is closed -- actually extended down under his chin and they don't. He got confused and flapped his ears at me for rubbing my finger sideways under his chin and feeling his teeth. (Dad, what are you doing? Wrong place to scritch. Little farther back and the other direction.)
He started purring when I turned that into a chin rub just as described, Ari loves those too. It would've been neat to breed for sabertoothed housecats. They'd probably treat it as a new breed like Scottish Folds if anyone did.
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I'm sure they would consider it a new breed. Oh, well. Opportunity long gone now. Poor Ari was probably confused by your unusual feeling up of his chin!
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Yep. Oh he got seriously confused by that. He relaxed as soon as I stopped being weird and petted him under the chin properly front to back the way he likes. He's gotten very snuggly lately and spends a lot of time on my lap when he's not romping around jumping and playing. He got bouncy lately too!
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Yes, I'm sure Ari thought you'd lost it. However, you could feel Munchkins tips even with your finger '
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Wow, that is so neat about Munchkin. Oh, Ari has been so much healthier it's amazing. His fur turned shiny and got much more copious, and silkier -- he is back to having kitten fur again. It's something about him that he has the most amazingly soft fur for any adult cat I've ever known, and on this food it gets really super soft. On the cheap food he was starting to get coarser hair and I thought that was his aging, but it was the Meow Mix.
The ads are horribly deceiving. If someone wanted to do a super nutritious cat food, they would process whole mice into it. And most humans wouldn't think of buying it for their cats, no matter how much the cats would thrive.
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I've noticed that the ads are so aimed at what humans should have in their own diet rather than what is beneficial to cats. Dogs as omnivores can get along on our diet fairly well. Cats, being true carnivores, cannot. Yet the ads pitch veggies, herbs and other ingredients a cat itself would never eat. Aimed at humans. Yes, we discussed mice before - little tins packed with mice like a can of sardines. My Aussie has very soft hair for an Aussie. One of my clients who bred racing greyhounds wanted to know what I fed him as he said it was the best Aussie coat he'd ever felt. When he read the ingredients, you could just see him light up with approval. Of course, his dog food was made to order rather than a store bought brand.
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Yeah, you're right. It's weird how ignorant they expect cat owners to be -- the rice and vegetables get billed on the ads openly and people do not get it that the cat's a pure carnivore.
Hehehe oh that's cool about your Aussie. Neat to know. I love Ari's kitten fur, it's one of the special things about him even if it gives him hairballs. And he grows more of it now, it's thicker year round.
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What is worse is the air fresheners are now touted to have essential oils. Because a cat is a true carnivore, they do not have the liver enzymes to metabolize essential plant oils most of which, even ones we consider to be benign, can be lethally toxic to a cat. Spray from a plug-in is right at cat level and will stay in the carpet and furniture unless washed out. What ever happened to CLEANING your house to get rid of odors? Pine based cleaners have been responsible for a number of known cat deaths from licking their feet after walking in areas where it was used and left on.
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I never realized that. We don't actually use air fresheners. Once in a while Kitten will light some incense, especially if it's on an occasion, but most of the time we just keep the house clean. That's scary with the pine based cleaners, I used to use those a lot. But I always rinsed it off after using it, so I guess that's why my cats never got sick.
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As long as Ari can go somewhere where het doesn't have to breathe the incense, he should be OK. Yes, rinsing is critical with most cleaners. The kind you leave on can have adverse effects on cats because of their bathing.
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Oh, he can, he has the run of the whole house and she usually only lights it in the living room.
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That is usually OK then because they can get away from the smell and breathing too much. That's how I do it when I burn incense so BK can choose where he wants to be. I only keep the junk bedroom door closed so he's got the rest of the house.
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Neat. Ari really likes having such a big house to roam in. We spent so many years living in small single rooms that he now delights in rambling everywhere. He'll go play in the kids' rooms or go upstairs and hang out in the crafts room. He did that so often that the kids put an extra litterpan for him up there since he sometimes got shut into the crafts room by mistake.
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I can imagine Ari's delight at lots of space. Cats adapt quickly.
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They do. He explored the entire house, upstairs and down on the day we moved in. I was in bed but he explored his new domain and came back to lay on my chest and purr and tell me he likes it here. He gets so much more exercise now. Between new food and more space he's turned into a silky, athletic big cat.
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As he should be. Because he got good food all his life or nearly so, Munchkin didn't really start showing his age until he was 16 but the real deterioration set in just after 18 and I had to have him pts 6 months later but part of that was because we had to extract 2 cracked teeth and I'm sure the anesthesia did damage to his kidneys.
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Awww that is so sad. Still, he lived longer than poor Jessie, who had kidney and other trouble at thirteen to the point I had to take her in for euthanasia. I didn't know anesthesia could damage their kidneys. In a way I'm glad I didn't have that to worry about when he got neutered, or I'd have been crawling the walls for weeks -- but he's had no urinary or kidney problems since then so I guess it didn't hurt him. And it will prevent his getting prostate and other trouble too.
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In younger cats, as in kittens for neutering, the higher probability is brain damage from overdose. It seems only to noticeably effect kidneys after 10-12 yrs. but most cats tend toward kidney disorders in older age anyway. I'm guessing that it is probably due to bad diet at least to a degree. Their bodies trying to metabolize veggies, coloring, and all the rest of the artificial garbage. I usually wait until at least 6 mo. to neuter but vets and shelters are now avocating as young as 8 weeks except in breed with known long bone problems. My jury is still out on that one except for give aways and other instances when people are unlikely to neuter on their own.
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Ari was actually two and a half years old when I took him in for it, so I guess that means he wasn't at great risk. He never bred though. The one time he had the opportunity and met a young queen in heat, he got scared of her aggression and ran away, trying to come on to an older neutered male. So I got the impression Ari was gay and respected that. I've known a large number of neuter male gay male cats who seem to really enjoy each others' company, but it's not as intense.
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I wouldn't be surprised if he came from a cat dense environment. It's a well studied phenomena that overpopulated rat colonies have ever increasing homosexual activities as the density rises. It stands to reason that it would be true of other animals.
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Hmm... no, he didn't. His first six weeks were with his mom, siblings and some dogs. He came to me at six weeks old and his first year we were all alone, which taught him to be quiet because I hardly ever vocalized but would watch him. He likes other cats though, when we moved and had housemates with cats he settled in and was happy. I think it's just a quirk about him, and it's neat.
It does stand to reason that overpopulation increases the chance, but I guess the chance is there even if there isn't any overpopulation.
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Yes, but it goes up geometrically as population increases, not linear. Yeah, like who cares when it is a pet since you are not trying to raise cats. No problem.
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Interesting and it does make sense. He's not fertile any more so if it's genetic it's not passing on through him, but common enough it won't go away. Makes sense it'd go up geometrically with the population pressure.
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Thank you. Oh cool, I like your green haired icon.
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Nothing better than big, green hair! Merry Christmas Robert!
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This is a very impressive work! Thanks for letting us all see it. You are very talented!
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Thank you! The longer I do this, the more I get into it. Those pencils almost demand and create a realistic muted palette for nature, either animals or landscapes.
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This is amazing. You're making me crave that reference book! I love landscapes like this, but I've just never been able to pull them off like you have here. This is a lovely scene, drawn just right. I love the colors.
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I love these reference books. They're tremendously useful. With what you do most of the time, the two you'd use most would be Landscapes and Flowers. There are so many good backdrops for scenes in the Landscapes book that I've barely begun to touch on them. There's also the Artist's Digital Photo Reference: Landscapes that I ordered and paid for but still has to arrive. Hopefully they are new pictures, though I think one was of a similar scene to the cover of Landscapes.
Thank you so much! When I looked at the photo, it was one of those recognition moments about the pencils. I knew this one would work best in Derwent Drawing Pencils. They have such a soft natural palette that very often they're better than other colored pencils for doing a landscape or animal, they're all earth tones and soft grayed greens, blues and violets. I sometimes think I should have used a bright yellow Coloursoft on the cockatoo's crest, but he came out so neat in Drawing Pencils anyway that I didn't feel bad about it.
I've been sorting out my gallery since they added the new gallery software, setting up subgalleries by medium mostly -- colored pencil realism (to distinguish it from things that are just fooling around like the holiday cards stuff), pastels, Derwent Inktense, Graphitints. I realized I haven't used the graphitints at all since I did that big spate of Graphitints pieces and maybe I should do some more in those too, they look so cool and when washed they come out so spooky!
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