Dodo Au Go-Go

In September 2024, while I was on the west coast of Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, I saw an unidentified flying object (UFO). My LittleOne and I were on a rooftop balcony. We were staring idly above the tops of the trees to the west, where there was still the faintest leftover pineapple glow in the sky. Then, we shifted our gaze slightly to the same tops of the trees, but in the south-west, where the sky had already darkened to a soft, purpley-crimson.  There were three stars in the sky. One of the stars, just above the tree line was smudged. As though it had a faint mist around it. The other two stars, by contrast, were perfectly clear. In the above photo ( not taken on the UFO evening), if you look closely, you can see two stars. The third, smudged star was to the left of these two stars. I pointed out the smudgy star to LittleOne and wondered out loud 'why was it smudged?' There were no clouds in the sky. As we stared at it, we realised the smudgy star was actuall...

I wrote a tiny snapshot story  a while ago and did an illustration to go with it. This was the final drawing. It was a surprisingly long journey to get to this final image. This was where I started. A rough sketch of the image in my head, hand-scribbled in a scrapbook with my watercolour brush pens. I got LittleOne's help to add water to the image. (Shout-out to LittleOne for the skill in making the puddle look so reflective!) Time to play in the phone photoshop express app. Do I like the mud splotches? Not sure yet. Let me try without. Actually, let's feel free and experiment. Interesting, but not what I want. Oooh, I remembered I can draw in the photoshop app now. Can I get the sky to be the shade of dark I want? Yes, I think I can. Let me try darkening the figure. Adding more detail to the dogs. While I'm at it, let me get rid of some all the white/uncoloured bits. Make the vineyards more...