Creative Tuesday: Holidays

It's a holly jolly Tuesday, it's the best time of the year!!  Yo ho ho it's a holly jolly creative Tuesday!!!

I was excited to dust off my pad and break out a new box of watercolor pencils to see what would come out for this week's Mr. Toast's Creative Tuesday's assignment!

The theme this week was Holidays - ho ho ho!!

This is another tough theme if you ask me, because golly... this could be anything.  Here us what popped out of that zany brain of mine.

I started by flipping through the mountain of holiday ads for inspiration and saw a cute little bear ornament with a red nose and bingo! I had my inspiration.

A bear, a mouse, a snowman - oh my!

Don't you just adore new sharp pencils!  They are sooo pretty!  I had begun playing around with a tree just to get the hang of them.

These are probably a basic set, but I couldn't pass them at the Michael's black Friday sale and I didn't want to commit to a bigger set in case I didn't care for them.  So here we are.

I filled my doodle in with ink and erased my pencil lines.  Oh my goodness, the bird and the mouse just tickles my cheeks!!

And voila!  A few watercolor pencils and Christmas songs sung later and I have a piece I am really proud of.  I scanned it in to capture more of the color and rough lines.

Wishing you and your family the most warm and sincere Christmas, Hanukkah, and every other festive celebration this season.  Hug and kiss the ones around you and continue to be thankful for every laugh that fills your ear!

Cheers to the creative juices flowing in your favor today!  You can check out the other artists or join us here.

Puppy opening package

So, you know I have this dog. 

She's a peach. 

She got us up early on Christmas morning and I just had to share how much our furry kid enjoyed the morning.  We've been encouraging her to learn how to open presents on her own and this year she had it all figured out ... which is a blast to watch for sure!! 

Here she is posing in front of the tree looking very serious and probably thinking about how much I am going to torture her before I will let her have a wrapped goodie.  Told you... she's a peach!

"Mom, can I open one now?"

Of course she can.  She took the package very gently and look at me and then at Mr. Happy.  A sort of double check to make sure everything is a-ok.  When she was satisfied she began to nip the corners and got to work on the opening!

Then the gentle golden was gone and out came the wild child!!  She whipped that package around and flung it around a bit!

Still working on it... and you can see she's moving around like a maniac (hence the blurry pic)... but we heard a riiiiip!  Look the paper is giving away! And you can almost start to see something peaking out!

Give it a good karate chop to get that sucker opening faster.  Hiiiii -- yaaahh!  Ha, and you can see the paper flying!

Oh my goodness!!  A leg emerges!  At this point you can practically feel Katie's excitement!  A couple more good wiggles and the paper really began to drop off!

Chomp!  "Look Ma, it's a Christmas Moose!!  Mmmmm and it's so tasty!"

"Phew, that was a lot of work.  I think I will just lay down for a quick moment and hold on to my Moose so as to make sure it doesn't escape after all that paper ripping!"
I love it.. you can see her Christmas bow in these pictures too! 

Yup, I love my little horse.  She's all sorts of spunk and 'ttude all in one cute furry package!   If we all were able to appreciate one present as much as this pup... the world would be a better better place!