A Piggy Tale

"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves" - William Lowndes

Wow what a week!

A sick child at home with a tummy bug and then an allergic reaction caused by the same illness and also Hubby home with a swollen infected leg. As you can imagine life has been a little busy and distracting so I've only managed one journal entry this week. 

It's that time of the year again when the IRD send you strange nonsensical letters about your taxes just to scare you before they tell you they made a mistake and they owe you money, fingers crossed anyway :D 

It's also council rates time grrr, so not really my favorite month.

Anyway I spotted our terracotta piggy bank high up on a shelf in the kitchen and thought "mmm I wonder if there's anything in there?". 

Short answer "No".

This got me to thinking about how many other empty piggy banks could be languishing in the back of people's cupboards and shelves around the world in this time of global financial unrest. Could the cute little piggy bank soon become nothing more than an empty ornament as governments gradually drop small value coins as prices go up or as we eftpos everything and therefore never handle money? Could our children end up with nothing to jingle in their little piggies?

What a horrible thought....

While working on this with some new black pens I discovered that they weren't as permanent as I thought they were. I suppose I should learn to test these sorts of things out before I start a drawing? Anyway this opened up a whole different way of shading as I just added water with a brush to see what they would do. Then I just finished with some burnt sienna watercolor paint and a brown colored pencil.

I also discovered something weird, when I started trying to draw this pig with pencil I just couldn't get it right. I erased bits here and there, redrew the pig twice and in the end chucked the pencil and picked up a pen. It came out pretty much how I wanted it straight away. No erasing, no second chances. It's like my brain said "Right, this is it, no chance to fix anything so get it right!" And it worked! The scooter from the next post was drawn straight off with a pen too. I think I might just lose the pencil for a while and see how things go ;)