Greetings!

For the past few months I have been a member of the Sketchbook Skool Kard Exchange. For Christmas, Valentine's Day, and Spring, they sent out lists putting us into groups with four or five other people, for whom we make and send a card. (No, I'm not going to spell it with a "k.") I almost missed the Spring deadline, which was April 30, but managed to get them in the mail on the last possible day. Two are here in California and one is in Ohio, but the other two are in Germany, and in the Philippines, respectively, so they won't get theirs for a while. But I thought I'd share what I did here, since I spent most of a day on them and haven't done much else in the way of art for a while!

Here is the first. I made a mistake and picked up my blue pen instead of the black one I had intended to use to draw this, but I ended up kind of liking the blue, especially because it's not QUITE waterproof, so it bled into the pink and green here and there and gave some unexpected but nice effects.

Here is the next. I wasn't completely pleased with my rendering of this lamb, who was much cuter in his photo than in my drawing, but I couldn't resist the picture of him cozying up to the daffodils like that.

On this one, I tried something, but didn't quite pull it off; my plan was to do a "negative" painting, but I didn't do enough parts to leave them showing through, and it ended up just a bunch of snowdrops with a REALLY dark background—possibly a little dour for spring? But I love snowdrops...

I couldn't bypass the opportunity to paint our native State flower for one of the Californians...the saying inside reads "Happiness held is the seed; Happiness shared is the flower," courtesy of someone named John Harrigan, who I discovered when I googled "flower sayings and puns."

And although the lettering for "FLOWERS" is FLOWing downhill, both on its baseline and in size, I had fun with decorating this saying. The rest of the "poem" (inside) is "From earth's lips spoken without sound," and is attributed to Edwin Curran.

I reflected, after I finished all of these, addressed the envelopes, and scrounged up the postage, that I possibly could have felt more productive had I spent the same amount of time painting just one big painting from the multitude I have been promising myself I would undertake; but it's nice, occasionally, to do something that will bring a little sunshine to others, and I'm also enjoying being the recipient of cards BACK from my group (two of whose have already arrived—they obviously got "on it" much earlier than I did).

Happy Spring!