8 guinea pigs

I just finished my most recent rewatching of Grease (possibly my favorite movie of all time), which may sound like a pleasant thing, but alas, it typically means that I’m up late at night with something ailing me.

More often than not, Grease gets put on at 2am when I’m sitting up alone, drinking tea, and praying that the magic of Sandy, Danny, and the rest of the musical gang will lull me to sleep. It’s one of my top comfort movies, and it usually works pretty well — this time I dozed off and completely missed Danny singing alone at the drive-in. A tragedy, I know.

I’ve hardly gotten any good-quality sleep in the past week due to a persistent (and very tickly) post-nasal drip that has me continually clearing my throat and excessively swallowing. It’s stopped me from being able to comfortably lay down (pretty much torture for someone who greatly enjoys the pastime of laying down), which has made the nights feel endless. At first I thought I was getting ill again (just after I had recovered from my previous illness last month), but now I’m wondering if it might just be more allergy goodness (yay).

So it’s kind of ironic that I’ve been busy painting eight guinea pigs, when having one single guinea pig in this house may be giving me irritatingly-dramatic respiratory issues (how can I have developed allergies to animals now, after I spent my entire childhood surrounded by pets!? I plan on getting to the bottom of this…with my mother’s help).

Anyways, these little piglets had been waiting in my queue for a hot minute. The task was a daunting one, and I was sure that I’d be absolutely sick of painting guinea pigs by the end of it. But the work went surprisingly quickly and easily, especially with the help Milo Ventimiglia on the TV in the background (I know I’m late to the This Is Us party, but it was finally added to Netflix, so the binge-watching — and tears — have commenced).

Originally this project started out with seven pigs on a 9″x12″ paper, but when a new addition joined the family, me and my lovely customer decided that it would be best to turn the one portrait into two 8″x10″ portraits instead (that way we didn’t have to downsize the pigs to make them fit).

The best part? This is a surprise gift from one Instagram friend to another — from the US to the UK — brought together by their love for their piglets.

So these eight babies are currently on their way across the pond to a family of pigs who have a whopping 10.4k followers on Instagram. Let’s hope that my work meets their gifting standards

on the subject of work:

I’ve just added a few 3″x3″ canvas portraits back to my Etsy shop (at a slightly higher price) to see if I still hate painting them or not.

I switched over to the paper portraits a year or two ago because I was tired of the canvases for a multitude of reasons (having to paint the backgrounds, make sure I can get quality canvases, and pay more for shipping are just a few of the reasons). But I still get asked about them to this day by repeat customers, so I thought I’d give it another shot.

They may or may not stay available, so if you thought that you had missed your opportunity to grab one, this is your chance!