The last two weeks, I worked on a series of six iPad paintings to honor and celebrate the life of our amazing non-human kin, Artemis Cat. We miss him so much and our hearts are broken.

I’m not sure if I’ll work on anymore paintings of him for awhile, now that we’ve had to say goodbye and having him near me while I was painting him was part of the draw for me.

I love how these turned out. Like in The Windy Path, I collaged my own photography into the paintings to surround him with flowers and bring in the dirt he was rolling in, but Artemis is all hand-drawn strokes in each one. I haven’t done portraits before and it’s exciting to me, after making 78 tarot cards over the last many moons, how my skills as an artist have grown and how I continue to learn new things in the same program. I use a basic painting program called Sketchbook. There’s no generative features on this app, and there’s not even pop ups to try to get me to use it. I appreciate not being distracted by that AI nonsense that they’re always offering on Adobe when I’m trying to design postcards and stuff and have to constantly close out those offerings and struggle how to just turn all that off.

Sketchbook is very simple. I mainly use the brushes, import photographs and erase a lot, and I love messing with opacity and blending. I can change the colors of objects by painting over them or manually adjusting HSL and color pigments for things that I’ve already drawn, creating a new mode for them.

Enjoy and please let me know which one is your favorite. I’m thinking of getting a few prints made based on requests from my writing group.