It Is With A Heavy Heart

that I tell you little Avery has lost the battle with SMA.  Heartfelt condolences to her parents, family and friends. 

A New Blog - Pray That It Keeps On Going

I just stumbled upon a fairly new blog and want to share it with all of you as it will tug at your heartstrings and also give you pause if you're of child-bearing age.

Many of you know that I have two beautiful nieces who were born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy or SMA as it's called.  It's a genetic disease where the muscles eventually lose all tone and because the heart is a muscle and the lungs are powered by muscle, death  is the result.

The new blog I found is that of a baby named Avery who has been diagnosed with SMA and is chronicling her bucket list as she has been given only 18 months to live. 

Please go take a look at the blog and be aware that many of you carry this horrible gene and may not even be aware of it.

I'm sorry if this sounds choppy and disjointed and I'm sorry if you were expecting something about art.  Just please take a look and say a prayer for Avery and her parents.

http://averycan.blogspot.com/

Foxy - WIP

This is Foxy, a cute little Pomeranian I'm in the midst of painting.  I have two nieces with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a genetic disease and I donated a gift certificate for a portrait to a fund raiser to help find a cure.

The lady who won the portrait sent me photos of this little cutie and so far the painting is going very well.  I had initially planned to paint her in gouache or acrylic ink but my fingers instinctively reached for the pastels.

This is just the beginning of laying down of the base colors and I have a lot of refining to do.

I'm using the new ColourFix Suede in the Kangaroo color.  It looks pretty gray here and in the color swatches online but it has a bluish tint to it.  The owner of Foxy said she wanted a steel blue as a background color and this seemed fairly close to that color.  This is only the second time I've used this support (& I still haven't finished the first piece!) and I like it ok.  It's similar to PastelMat by Clairefontaine but doesn't seem to have the flaws I've noticed in the PastelMat.  It seems to work the same as the PastelMat in that blending is pretty difficult until the layers are built up. 

Oh, as an aside, the pipe insulation blenders I wrote about in a previous post don't seem to work well after the initial layers and tend to remove the pastel instead of blending it.  I may just need more practice with them and the paper though.  Much as I dislike the feel of the pastel dust, the fingers are certainly the best blenders for nearly every pastel painting situation I've come across yet!

Anyway, I hope to be  able to finish this by the first of next week at the latest.