I’m still getting used to the new editor on WordPress, It’s been around for while but I’ve been using the Classic option which seems to have disappeared. I have to say, I very much dislike this block editor.

Anyway, I’m still missing Sammy. I think I probably always will. My sketchbooks are full of small sketches of him. I turned one into a small embroidery.

While I’ve been crocheting more than anything, I have also been having fun collecting Victorian drawing books. Many of them are out of copyright and some companies have been reprinting them or pieces of them. I love looking at the old drawing prints. I tend to leave a good bit of white space or implied backgrounds, you know a few squiggles here and there. It’s a bad habit. The Victorians are the opposite, looking at their prints reminds me to fill things in, not every thing but some things.

I started this, which is a fairly small drawing, in a fairly small sketchbook. It’s a tree, thought I’d tell you that in case you didn’t recognize it as such. (I think I’ve using emojis too much, I so wanted to put a little face with it’s tongue sticking out there.) (oh no and then I wanted to follow that parentheses with a rolling eyes emoji!) Anyway, I digress, this tree is enormous, It’s one of the biggest trees I’ve ever seen. You can see in the background what I mean by an implied background, a few squiggly things here and there. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s only that I tend to do that every time.

I’ve also been on twitter too much this last year. Now it’s not what you think, I do occasionally get sidetracked by the political drama for sure but mostly I follow the museums and archeologists and such. They put such fascinating things out into the twitter world. Lately I’ve been looking at old Roman coins. It’s interesting how modern and stylized the designs are.

This is a drawing from a coin that was minted in Lyons around 330-337 BCE. It’s the Wolf with the twins Romulus and Remus (the founders of Rome who as infants were sent down the river in a basket to drown, instead they were found by a wolf who suckled them and a woodpecker who fed them until a shepherd arrived and took them in as his own).

I’m going to make an embroidery out of this as well.

I hope you are all safe and healthy.

©Virginia Spencer, thepurpledogpaintingblog.com, 2021