Today was evidently National Dog Day. I didn't know this until sometime around mid-morning when someone mentioned it at work, and then I began seeing posts about it. Being a cat person, I'd never heard of National Dog Day, and most likely really wouldn't have cared much anyway.
This little story begins last week.
My co-worker, Kristina, was having a bad week. I'm not going to invade her privacy by saying much about it but she had a difficult week last week. She said something on Friday about her dog, Finn. He's her baby. Previously, she had been praising my recent pen & ink drawings of draped urn cemetery monuments. So I asked if she had a picture of Finn. I've never drawn a pen & ink dog before, but I have drawn some cats. She told me she'd send a picture of Finn to my phone at 5PM on Friday.We hugged goodbye and went home. Shortly after I got home my phone pinged and there was a picture of Finn! He's cute!
On Saturday afternoon, I spent approximately 2.75 hours drawing Finn. I'd recently bought about a dozen different colored inks, plus a bottle of white ink. Originally, Finn was going to be just black and white with various techniques used for shading lighter areas (he's mostly black with some white and golden brown- the colors you'd see on a beagle, but he's not a beagle.) So, I got out the new colored inks, sampling them on scrap paper. I chose canary yellow and peat brown, laying down the yellow and then putting the peat brown over it to give the areas a golden brown appearance like the real life Finn has. It looked pretty good.
When finished, I grabbed a black 4x6 frame that I had on the dining room table and framed Finn. I snapped a picture, put it on facebook with Kristina tagged in the message. She posted that she was happy with it.
This morning I put the framed pen & ink drawing of Finn on her desk so it would be there when she got in. Again, I didn't know it was National Dog Day. I just wanted to make a friend who is going through a few things smile and know that someone cares.
I got two hugs, but her smile was the real reward because that's why I did it- to make her smile.
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