The April Challenge is Old and New

By Susan Irving. I was playing with the art app, Draw Free, which is mainly for children. I wanted to see what I could do with a photo I took of computer mice.  I just like to play and experiment. 

By Susan Latreille     If you live in the country it’s almost a guarantee that you will have mice ….. in your house!

But with weatherstripping around pantry and closet doors and caulking around pipes where they run through walls, floors, and ceilings, the main living area of my house is hopefully mouse-free.

So, to snap any photos for this month’s CC Challenge, I figured that I’d have to strategically hide somewhere in the man-cave, the cold-storage room, or the garage.

 None of these options appealed so I thought to skip the challenge until I remembered Yvonne’s words, “Let your imagination go!”

So, with photo-editing tools and my imagination, this is what I have to offer.

Disclaimer: No mice were injured in these ‘snaps’.

by Tina Whitman Right away “Mice” made me think of the nursery rhymes (from my younger years).

After reading about the possible origins of Three Blind Mice-they were all quite violent!–I chose to illustrate the Farmer’s Wife.  

It is said that the mice were blinded by the wife pushing them into the bramble bushes with her broom. As you can see, I opted for the chopped tails.

The farmhouse is based on a photo I took at Fort Louisburg in Nova Scotia. I loved the sod roof, so pretty. The woman was an animator at the Fort.

by Kerry Herwynen McIntosh

I will begin with a creative failure. I “creatively ” attempted to rig up a shower curtain around one of the old claw foot tubs. Turned the shower on and stepped in.  The whole thing came crashing down around me so I bathed instead. 

I had left the two rods and shower curtains in the tub to clean up later on.  When I came back to it, I found KATdinsky had made a little fort and was having a marvelous time. He brought a toy mouse…

I’ve been playing with tissue paper lately and having a lot of fun with it.

This painting began in 2018. I had had an ocular migraine and this image was left on my eyes for a long time afterwards.   I had to go paint it while I could still see it.To me, it looked like a cubist cat.  I didn’t do anything with it until this challenge.  I looked at it again and thought, it needed a mouse! 

I also include KATdinsky’s latest although, frankly, he’s losing interest in painting, preferring instead, to drink the paint water and knock things over.

by Flip Flockton One of the few upsides of Covid restrictions is the time to go through papers, drawings etc.  In doing so, I came across my illustrations for a slim volume of 30 vignettes of ‘life after 70’ which I put together to raise money for my favourite charity. Amongst these was one where a mouse makes an unexpected appearance.  I thought it might amuse some of the members

Dedicated Volunteers and an Unexpected Conclusion to Fund Raising Efforts Tommy and Mary can always be counted upon to volunteer. The exemplify the old adage: “if you need somebody to do something, ask a busy person”.

When they first retired, they built houses in Guatemala, taught English in Africa, and raised husky puppies in the Arctic. Tommy’s run-in with an unpronounceable (and unmentionable) health issue negatively affected their travel insurance, and regrettably curtailed these activities.

Undaunted, and home-based, they energetically threw themselves into everything.  Between them, they volunteered at the garden club, the heritage society, the recreation association, the church, the arts and crafts guild, the golf club and the hospital auxiliary.

But, it was the night Tommy made one too many suggestions at the heritage society meeting that the trouble began. Before he knew it, he had undertaken to head up the new fund-raising committee to preserve the crumbling historic Grouse House. Months were spent researching potential funding sources, preparing proposals (cut-and-paste was a bonus) and corralling stake-holders (all with contrary objectives). At last, Tommy ceased his two-finger typing and submitted his proposals to four foundations and five government departments, naively confident of success.

Meanwhile, Mary found she was (by default) in charge of “matching funding” activities (dinners, concerts and giant yard sales) and wondered why she was exhausted!

The months passed with no responses to his multiple submissions. Tommy spent a great deal of time “on hold” during follow-up calls to government departments, while his e-mail reminders to foundations elicited zero replies or “we need more information”.

Tapping away with his two fingers, Tommy diligently provided whatever was requested. But thanks to the proximity of “h” and “m” on the keyboard, the heritage society eventually received significant funding, not for the preservation of Grouse House, but for the preservation of the Grouse Mouse!

by Milo Smith The challenge was mice.  Obviously, mice mean cheese.  So, I got a piece of cheese and assembled my mice.  Thanks to some art direction from Yvonne, we have a mouse party image and an image of a country mouse and a city (electronic) mouse.  Some post-processing in Photoshop to enhance and project done.

by Jeanne Bougie Desjardins The first thing that came into mind when I saw the word mice, was the childhood rhyme “Three Blind Mice” hence the title for this first piece.

Unfortunately the painting was becoming too realistic for my taste, and not wanting to frighten anyone with these rodents, I began a new canvas with a much lighter view of mice. 

by Francois Desjardins Didn’t have anything for this challenge until Jeanne reminded me of something I did a long time ago!  We had a very old country house which we were renovating and inside the walls, we found all kinds of things of course, and one mouse skeleton!  Well, as I was teaching photography and doing the odd show, I had printed the slide on Cibachrome: two eggs seen from the end, one painted black, with the mouse bones on top! So now, 40 years later, I used it to produce another interpretation.  Still a dead mouse!