BirthDAY? Bah! Boooooring!!!

My very lucky wife got something special for her 40th Birthday (August last year). Not a BirthDAY... but BirthWEEK! A week... yes, that would keep her busy reminding her how special she is to me.

The Days were divided into themes and with those themes came a drawing. I wanted them to be perfect. So, it happened, that I shredded one at 1 am, sat in the bathroom (no idea, why that motivated me) and finished it by 3 am.

DAY 1 - The all mighty start of my wife's Birthweek

The gift was time. In advance I booked a cleaning help and we went off together on a wonderful day.

DAY 2 - It tends to take over a lot of day

So let's make the fitness torture a bit more pleasant with some pretty and useful sports gifts.

DAY 3 - All about the hobby

You geocachers might feel this situation. Well, it is the price to pay for not being prepared.

Common, run guys! Only 240 meters to the northwest! *Battery less than 10% left*

DAY 4 - When she is not busy working her bones

Relaxing and putting on something really nice & fancy after a warm bath. Cost me a fortune but worth it every penny...

The bar is set high now... buddy!

The Owly Illustrations

Recently, my wife worked on a 12-pager concept about child's care. To give it a neat touch, she asked me to do some illustrations. The theme, or how she called her hypothetical group of Under-Three-Year-Olds, was 'The Owl-Nest'. The painting below is the finished front cover. It was done with watercolor pencils and wet brushes.

Here are the very first sketches from imagination with the help of some internet pictures of owls and their babies, to close in on their basic structure. See... even at this early stage of the process, some of them made it into the final picture.

This is the tight comprehensive pencil drawing I used for tracing the composition right onto the watercolor paper (you might still see the marks). A tight comprehensive is a detailed sketch which will be used as the ultimate reference for the final painting. Of course, since I handle my wife's request just like a job, she had to approve before diving into the full color finish.

I knew, there would not be enough time to do more colored owls. So... as it goes, the last evening before putting the whole concept together, ready to be submitted, I quickly doodled a couple of stand-alones with a brush pen to fill in some blanks.