I think, for whatever reason, back in my art school days, I wrote off gouache as a viable medium.  Watercolour was the way to go, its transparency being somehow superior to gouaches relative opacity.  Poor naive me.  Missing out all these years on the thrilling roller coaster that is gouache.  I may be exaggerating, but truthfully I didn't realize the colours were so vibrant, or the surface so appealingly matte.  Just look at that owl's hot pink outline!  Zing!

P.S. Those little pink legs at the top of the image belonged to a hot pink deer.  I was cruel and cut the paper clean across it. 

My partner B and I have a table in the living room that used to be my grandfather's.  It has a hinged glass top and we use it to display our considerable collection of... stuff?  Childhood memorabilia?  Things from outside?
Anyway, B has this mouse that he has kept in a sucrets tin for many many years.  The mouse was never alive at any point in their relationship, I feel compelled to add.  So B found this mouse when his family lived on a farm; it was long dead, and had dried out so much that all that remained of it was an almost complete skeleton and a partial covering of delicate mouse leather.  It died in a rather elegant position, which B has maintained by carefully protecting it in the aforementioned tin.  And one day I drew it.  So many tiny ribs and vertebrae, what a pleasure..

Happy New Year!  Above you will see some ruffly tissue and paper forms that are destined to become pinatas.  I had the pleasure to work with the company Rethink this past November making holiday pinatas for their website holiday card.  They were a bit untraditional though, for pinatas anyway, as they were in the shapes of a burnt turkey, the inlaws, a fruitcake and a parking meter.  They were great fun to make.  You can check them out at the Rethink website or just look below...  My favourite is the poor fruitcake, he takes a cane to the eye and all his guts/candy spill out of his face.  Tsk tsk.