This is Koko. We rescued each other years ago. She was my buddy for about 7 years. She was almost 16 when I had to put her down. I was so sad for a long time. She’s been gone about a year now and I still miss her every day. I use her photo quite a bit in my art work. I loved her eyes and ears and her companionship! She was pretty young in this photo and did not like to have her picture taken!

I made this small quilt of Koko back in 2015. It definitely didn’t do any justice to her beautiful expressive eyes in this quilt and I’ve always wanted to repair that. I just didn’t have any experience in facial features so I kept putting it off.  I want to change the value of her fur, too.

This winter I decided I needed to take some drawing classes so I could someday fix the eyes in this piece. The internet has so many wonderful classes available. I joined up with Matt who teaches via The Virtual Instructor.  https://thevirtualinstructor.com/ and took his class, Portrait Drawing the Smart Way. Wow! Did I learn a lot! The course was very interesting as we just used a graphite pencil and white charcoal pencil on grey toned paper. I learned a lot about value and shading and I also learned that smoother paper works much better when using graphite pencils. I still have much to learn!

Here are some of my attempts at facial features…definitely need more practice!

I am also learning from an internet site called Willowing Arts with Tamara Laporte. I joined her Life Book 2020 course. I was really attracted to how Tamara paints eyes on her lovely whimsical drawings. https://www.willowing.org/

This is my eye work from some of her lessons.

Another instructor on Life Book 2020 was Effy Wild. I did her lesson using Koko’s face.

This was a collage I made of Koko while I was taking Gail Harker’s Level 3 Art and Design course. https://www.gailcreativestudies.com/ Easy eyes for this one!

So I think I’m about ready to try my hand at repairing her eyes on the small quilt I made of her so many years ago. I may try fabric eyes or I may try painting onto fabric which I would then fuse onto the quilt. If I get it done by my next blog, I’ll post it for you to see.

I don’t know about all of you, but I am very grateful to be able to lose myself in creativity during these crazy times we are living through right now.

Stay safe!

Tesi Vaara