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I bought this large card (or small poster) featuring a black cat at Gallery Koppelo. The exhibition showcased Tuuni Turula’s charming cat paintings, with cat-themed graphic art displayed upstairs. This black cat is strutting along—perhaps on a sloping surface—and casting a red shadow. The cat is staring with narrowed eyes; it’s best not to get too close.
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I am starting a new, fairly large (50 x 60 cm) mixed-media piece. The view of Pispala forming the base has already been printed from two linocuts, and a linocut of an orange moon—with a touch of the darkness of night on one side—has been added to the sky. Yet, in my mind, the sky is already red pastel.
Linopiirros blobkalasta on nyt vihreä. Mietin vaan, miten vihreä kala sopii siniseen veteen, mutta ainahan kalan voi vedostaa mustanakin. Aika vihainen kala tämä on ja isokin: 15 x 25 cm. Hyvin voisi sopia kahdestaankin lyhtykalan kalan samalle paperille. Taustan se vain vaatii.
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The linocut of the blobfish is now green. I’m just wondering how a green fish will look against blue water, though the print can always printed in black instead. It’s quite an angry-looking fish, and a large one too: 15 x 25 cm. It would actually work well paired with an anglerfish on the same sheet of paper. It just needs a background.
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The title of Michael Weigall’s photo collage is *Cairo Cat*. The black-and-white cat is wearing an Arab headscarf, with the pyramids rising in the misty background. There is a mystical quality to the cat’s eyes, and its expression suggests it is a ruler of some kind.
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The linocut of the Pispala log-floating tunnel seems to be finished now. I colored the light streaming from the tunnel entrance yellow. At the top of the Pispala ridge stands Suur-Voima, the only apartment building. The other houses are small wooden ones, each unique. It is particularly enjoyable to carve the details of the roofs, windows, and wall cladding. Carving that little playground was fun, too. I plan to extend the image to the left with another linocut featuring a fairly large house by the shore. The size of this picture is 30 x 40 cm.
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The linocut of the Pispala log-floating tunnel is finished, though it still needs a little fine-tuning. I plan to color the light streaming through the tunnel yellow. I ran into some issues with carving and printing the sky. In this latest print, only a small amount of "noice"—or clouds—is visible in the sky. I tried various approaches. At first, I carved a few clouds into the sky, but they looked far too dark. Then I carved the clouds to be light, but the result was poor. In one experiment, I carved away a lot of sky but there still were too much "noice, so I wiped away the "noice" from the sky with a damp cloth, but the sky looked bad then, too—it was completely blank. I settled on this version, where I carved the sky to be quite "empty," though not entirely white.
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Oh look, a bud on Cobeana Scandensd vine—which has been sitting under the table at the cottage for ages—has opened. The blossoms look really funny when thay have blossomed, too. And over the course of the summer, the vine has turned the balcony into a cave.
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In the watercolor painting, a cat sees its reflection and gets startled. The fur on its back stands on end. The artist is Sarah Maycock, and the back of the card features William Wordsworth’s poem "The Kitten Playing":
"See the kitten, how she starts,