paintings prints and stuff

This weather is too hot for me - and the cats. Here they are flaked out on the patio in the shade of the evening. I've been offline for a few days as my husband cut through the phone line while massacring my lovely climbing rose :( On googling my name (to see how my website is doing - it slipped right down the ratings when I didn't update it for a while :( ) I found a school at Menahga in Minnesota has me as the artist for the students to look at - curious! I'd love to know how they found me. They are doing colour theory.

Artichoke flower in coloured pencil and a red flower, not sure what kind this is. I like the slightly more oblique views of the flowers better than the direct views like this, this is more of a design.

A CP of a tree paeony from my garden. It has huge beautiful flowers about 9 inches across. and playing with abstraction, CP's are probably not the right medium for this. I needed to be working larger and layering oil paints but it was fun to experiment. I just hadn't got time to get all the paints set up.

Last year I saw artichoke and cardoon flowers and seed heads for the first time. They are a beautiful sky blue, the cardoons towered above my head, the artichokes much shorter but the seedheads of both are huge. These are a couple of coloured pencil drawings from the photos I took. This one is on black paper - another first for me as I've never used coloured pencils over black paper, the whites didn't go quite light enough, the image is a little too grey but I do like working over a dark background. and on white paper It has been suggested to me that this would make a good coloured etching and I think it's a great idea - I may do that, or else a collagraph. Either would be suitable and both different . Oh for more time and energy so I could do more painting and printmaking.

I've been playing with ways forward with the poppies and this is today's effort. 8 inches square in watercolour, coloured pencil and oil pastel. I don't normally use quite as much oil pastel when I use this combination .... but got carried away trying to resolve it. :) I do like working in mixed media as I can select the medium I want to create the marks, subtlety or vibrancy, transparency or opacity, fine or coarse mark, whatever, that I want. I forgot that I'd decided to moderate comments before they appear - I had someone spamming - so sorry to anyone that I ignored and didn't answer - I've only just realised there was a queue of valued feedback from you :) thank you all.

Paddy's hip dislocated even with the sling still on, so amidst a great deal of growling and swearing he had the sling taken off. Because of the problems with his airway they can't operate yet and we have 3 options to consider. 1 leave it alone and the muscles will take over 2 operate and remove part of the femoral head so that the bones can slide against each other 3 a new untried operation to create a cage at the top of the bone that is wired in so that the hip can't dislocate again we go back next week to see how he's getting on and maybe make a decision. 2 and 3 are of course expensive :( Meanwhile he's desperate to go out to play but can't.