Daily painting #436 pen, ink and watercolor (for postcard art group)
We have arrived safely at this little piece of heaven on earth! We have spent a large portion of our day in the car today and so finding time to paint was a bit difficult! We have recently had postal strikes in South Africa and this has affected both outgoing and incoming mail. I belong to a postcard art group where we regularly share hand rendered (in any medium) postcard size pieces of art. It is an international group and I am the only South African. This week piles of postcards started arriving much to my delight...they have obviously been held up during the strike. I now have a long list of people who I need to reciprocate to and so I decided to pack my watercolor, pen and ink materials this week in the hopes that I could make some little postcards to send off to the postcard art group. Because I will be spending this week in the bush, a few typically quirky South African images might be fun to send off...
On our arrival this afternoon we backed some celebratory refreshments and went off to have sundowners at the fence bordering the Crocodile River. We saw water buck, hippos, buffalo and 2 large elephant cooling themselves off in the river in the late afternoon heat. My son Ross suddenly shrieked with delight and we all sat upright looking for the source of such excitement thinking he had spotted lion or even better, leopard...but we soon realized he had his face towards the ground and he was following something moving with amazing speed along the ground. He had found to his delight a very large dung beetle rolling along the ground with a neat ball of dung(animal poo). Dung beetles are hugely important for the eco system and are amazing little creatures, they can roll giant balls of elephant dung up to 50 times heavier than themselves.
Tomorrow we are heading off at sunrise into the bush...hope we see some interesting sights. On our top lookout list this holiday is cheetah, wild dog and jackal. There are also lots of babies around with spring just past!
I promise to keep you updated. We have no wifi and my data connection is weak, slow(for loading images) and at times non existent...but I will continue to paint daily (I did pack my oils paints too) and I will have to hold thumbs when it comes to sharing online....
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