Moo!

On our first trip West with the kiddos (age 3 and 6, they're now 23 and 26), the youngest saw cattle grazing alongside the road and yelled, "Look! COWS!".
It goes down as one of those crazy road trip tales as the driver took that to mean, "Look out!" and proceeded to do some crazy road trip driving.
We can laugh about that now.

Now our homestead is nestled in the foothills of the Bradshaw Mountains and our little hamlet is entirely "open range."

THAT is FUNNY!

That means ranchers can let their animals roam anywhere. That means we can wake to the sound of cows mooing as they graze on the prickly pear cactus just the other side of our fence. It means we often get dangerously close to very large hamburgers with feet while night driving.

I don't know if you can see that; I tried to approximate what it might look like driving head first into a steer on a country road.

What does any of this have to do with art? It's the EIM this week, "cow."

That's from a child's search and find puzzle book that I found in my stash of piles of magazines. (Yeah, yeah, I need to do the dishes!).

Elsewhere, the objective is a lot of hearts for Saint Valentine's Day. For IAST 182:

For the Diva 303, my Valentine to you (I followed Laura's lead and went with the Hefty Hack method:

And I revisited 302 as I realized that I didn't have the hang of that tangle. At. All.

(The central tangle reminds me of Mummenschanz, which I saw at the Wang Theater, once upon a time. Have you ever been? They're still performing!)

I think that's about it, for now. Thanks for dropping by. Be sure to check out all the other artists' blogs, there is so much creativity in the weird wide web.
Hope you have a brilliant day! And watch out for cows!

Putting My Heart into It

I was kind of ahead of myself, again, last week while I was speaking of "rain" before the EIM this week. The week before last we had rain and have had none since. This is our rainy season; we should be getting rain.

Instead, this is what we're getting:

We're not even getting virga, also known as phantom rain--it doesn't even touch the ground!

I'm not so secretly praying for rain as we're tinder dry and forest fires are a reality. So far, so good.

Other than that, this is what I have to give to you, my world, this week:

It's a collage specifically for the Two by Two. And a personal statement and challenge to do what I must.
What is YOUR "must?"
Have a brilliant day!

From Here to Eternity

I don't know about you, but I'm ready to move along from all the hearts, even if it's to shamrocks, chickens and bunnies that are poking up on the calendar. It's not that I'm a real curmudgeon, just we're both under the weather (what a silly concept, since it's sunny and 80s--absolutely glorious!) and it took a lot of effort to be all lovey-dovey.

Three Heart  Bijoux for
IAST 131

I met the love of my life 12 years ago Monday and it has been such a thrill! And while we were all so peachy over the weekend, we ventured out to spread our germs, er, ah, go shopping for meaningful exhibits of our love. Cards and flowers were bestowed upon me as were white chocolate-covered long-stemmed strawberries he made. Awww!

The man bears striking resemblance to "The Most Interesting Man in the World," has a resume to match the fictitious biography and when he drinks beer, he prefers Dos Equis. Dark.

Jonathon Goldsmith aka
The World's Second Most Interesting Man

Which is the perfect segue to the EIM theme for the week: Beer.

Beer

What we have here is Emilio Estevez in the grocery store pouting a beer on the floor from the movie "Repo Man," my modest attempt at recreating the logo from a Billy Beer can, a line drawing of a frosty mug of beer and a small portion of the lids from Dos Equis, which can be measured in pounds, that we just can't seem to part with. For the record, I stick to wine!

In between putting these images together, I knitted a swatch that I wanted to make for "sweater," the TwobyTwo challenge from last week. I just kind of eye-balled it and was surprised to find out that it indeed was a two-inch square! That's the most success I've had knitting a sweater ever!

That's what I have so far this week. I'll be back to doodling before the week is out, I'm sure. Thank you for stopping by.

Update 02.18.16: The link to this week's Zentangles is here.