My new hobby is consuming all my time and energy, which is inconvenient for me because I have other things to do that are much higher priority. Those priorities like “work,” “writing research proposals,” and “looking up PhD programs anywhere but here” are time-consuming and less fun than what I really want to do, which is this:

Make ugly drawings of my friends’ pets.

The particular pets in this image are Penelope, my little Christmas puppy, and Gus, her bestie (although Penelope has a lot of besties because she is a social butterfly), and it’s based on a photo I took of them a few months ago. Since I started this endeavor, I’ve drawn quite a few pets, and I’m having an embarrassing amount of fun doing it. Here are some of my other drawings, which I’ve also linked in the brand new Happy Hagfish feature, “The Gallery,”:

If you like any of these drawings, then I’m so glad, but I also want to be honest about how I create them. I use an app called “Sketchbook,” which has a layering function and also allows me to import images. Thus, I can import an image of someone’s pet, lower the opacity so I’m seeing through it, and then create my own coloring book on the other layer. I only export the one layer with the finished drawing, not the reference photo. For a brief time, it felt a little like I was “cheating at art,” but I realized what’s most important to me is that I’m having fun doing it, and my friends get nice pictures of their beloved pets. Because otherwise, when I try to freehand draw anything, especially a beloved pet, it looks more like this:

If you look at the photos, beginning with the first attempt at Bentley and then ending with my most recent attempt at Harrison (both of whom belong to my lovely friends in San Diego), you’ll see I’m making some progress, although it’s slow-going. I hope to continue messing around with this software to create more images, which I plan on uploading to the Gallery, so I recommend checking that page for image updates. I hope to use it for any art that I create myself, which will include drawings and the silly royalty-free photo manipulations I used to work on.

And if you want a drawing of your pet, I’ll do my best to get on it, but I will have to take breaks to work on my dumb job.