Big Catch-Up Post Part II

Tonight's drawings are all from New Hampshire, where my son Mike and his family live outside a village on five pretty acres of woods, creeks, and old stone walls, with a couple of paddocks for their horses and a large chicken house for their free-ranging flock to retreat to at night and when it's as cold as it has been lately.  On the left is a quick and incomplete drawing of 5 year-old Barnaby, who was playing chess at the time and moving his arms and hands.  On the right is one of their two retired racing greyhounds.

Nine-year-old Luca likes to draw, so we were drawing Bagan, the sleeping greyhound, together.  Then Luca did this drawing in my notebook of my soup, and I told him he could be a guest blogger and do one of my 10,000.  He is really good at drawing what he sees instead of what he thinks he sees.

Below is a drawing of Barnaby doing something on a laptop while Bagan dozes next to him.

One day I spent a lot of time in the chicken house drawing the hens.  I love the colors and sounds and even the smells of the hen house.  Mike said he seems to be running a rescue operation in that around half of his 35 chickens have been given to him by friends who need to offload a hen.  As a result, he has a wonderful variety of chickens.  He has one tail-feather-less rooster who was a gift from the man across the road. 

On the left above are some messing-around attempts to draw Luca (with Barnaby at top left) that I quickly abandoned when I spotted a gorgeous red onion half sitting on the kitchen counter.  Andi had just sliced it in half, but I had time to draw it before she finished chopping it. 

Along with horses and dogs, the menagerie has recently expanded to include two really cute kittens.  On the left is Smoke sitting in a box.  On the right is a quick sketch of the house where P and I stay when we're visiting.  You can see it from the living room window, across the backyard in the twilight.  It's a vacation house for a family that lives in another state, and they very kindly let us stay in it since Mike helps care-take it when they're not in town.  This sketch shows the load of snow from the roof after it had been slowly sliding down toward the porch roof all day in the balmy low-thirties.

On the left is a little Lady of Guadelupe reproduction that was on the wall of a restaurant we went to.  And on the right is the amazing sight of four of the moons of Jupiter.  One very cold but very clear night Mike set up the telescope, and we stood in the driveway and looked at this crystal-clear vision.  There were millions of starts all around us.  After the moons, we got to see the Pleiades, perfect!

One day I went out to the backyard with the three boys and drew them while they played in their tree house on top of the mounds of snow that covered the floor.  Luca is standing up drawing the chicken house;  Barnaby is eating some snow;  eleven-year-old Tallis is down on the ground digging in the snow.  And on the right, more from the hen house.