Wilma

Meet Wilma!

Wilma is a basset hound and a total sweetheart. Wilma is with Mike. Sometimes. They are not an immediate family, more like cousins. They visit. It’s complicated!

Wilma is amazingly talented. She can rotate her tail in a circular fashion when she is happy, which is most of the time when she is not sleeping. She also works as a vacuum cleaner wherever she goes, free of charge. You don’t have to worry about your food falling on a floor when Wilma is there, it will be vacuumed spic-and-span without you lifting a finger.

Wilma has a past. She is a hurricane Katrina rescue. She doesn’t like to talk about it, and we don’t know what her name was before she got separated from her previous family during the Katrina mess. We do know that she survived for a year on her own in Louisiana forest and swamp. When she was found she was completely feral. Her new human wanted to call her Katrina at first, but then thought the name would remind her of the unhappy past and called her Wilma (also a hurricane) instead. Brought back to civilization she took time to adjust, for a while she was stealing food and grabbing it from her human’s hands and plate, not believing that food is no longer a problem. But she got it after a while and now is more civilized and has better table manners than some humans I know. Still… she chooses to work as a vacuum cleaner when such is needed.

I am practicing my new cross-hatching technique for quick drawing, Wilma’s portrait took about 2.5 hours.

Graphite, Moleskine Cahier sketchbook