Kitty on the Velella - A Peek inside my Watercolor Journal

These pages started with a pencil drawing of the little kitty that is traveling with Prescott (my nephew) and Meghan, on her sailboat, Velella, as they sail their way from Seattle through the Panama Canal and over to the Atlantic Ocean.  We spent a weekend sailing with them in June as they have docked in L.A. for awhile to regroup.  This kitty did, as kitties do, the cute curled-up-into-a-soft-warm-ball-time-for-a-nap, as we sailed to Catalina Island, giving me time to sketch her.

I am finally getting around to working on and finishing these pages by adding watercolor washes, gold gesso, and water-soluble stabilo pencil.  I have been anxious to incorporate pages from the used Japanese paperback book that I bought at Portland's fabulous bookstore, Powell's.

I love how the kanji characters (the Japanese alphabet) flow gracefully downward.  They remind me of branches of a weeping willow tree hanging over a pond.  I used pages from the book to make the houses then painted a light watercolor wash, stabilo pencil and doodles over them.