a boys first dog

A while back we were at Walmart and they had one of those adopt-a-pet deals going on and we just let the kids go pet a few- and I had made mention that if they ever ran across a full-blooded beagle pup to give me a call. Never thought I'd get that call- until yesterday. So we ran down to the animal shelter to check out the 9 week old pup that they got that morning, and it was a done deal. Cute as a button.

So this is Jake's first dog and like Brooke and Rosie- we allowed Jake to name him. It was between Chopper or Copper and Jake chose Copper from the movie Dog and the Hound. As you can see from the photos and the lease line wrapped around Jake and Copper- the poor mutts in for it. It's a good thing the pups not hyper.

What was really cool tho was we built Copper a little dog house (Jake got to use the nail gun) and strung up a running line and tonight when we came home we went out back to check on him and Jake (flashlight in hand) bent down to tell Copper good-night and the pup climbed up and licked him in the face.

There is nothing like your first dog.

Finally...it came together

Finally...I finish a painting (the third in this series of small paintings) where I feel that I got it right. Everything works. One of the things I really needed to work on was a fluidness and ease of painting that shows in the finished product- and I finally feel that I got the water to look like water. This was an easy painting and it started with a good photo, and I did a lot of work on the underpainting- especially on the details in the water- and the first lay-in of color went extremely well -and it all paid off. Very happy with the end result and I felt that over the course of the three paintings that I learned a lot which carried over to the next painting.