Poor little goldfishy. He wants his bowl back but the other animals are using it. He's stuck in the little bitty cup. A school assignment. Still life, but we could use our imagination and add things to it. There was a bit more to it, but this is all that would fit on the scanner and i didn't feel like editing the rest in. Its not missing much else though. Charcoal on some kinda paper they gave us..

It’s Nemo! My Little Nemo. Inverted-Skunk-Boy! And just about as opposite of the real rattie as you can possibly get. He is a near Eeyore rat. Very shy, easily insulted. You can pet him if he feels like it. And plus, he is a lump much like his brother Wilburt, aka Brick... He looks skinny in this pic. But hey, his markings are cute cute cute!! I love my little Nothing Boy, yes, umm...heh

Arg, stupid horse nose... Art class assignment to create 3-D illusionary space with just black and white. I chose to use black paper and a white coloured pencil. Yes, that’s all this is. I'm sorry if it's too bright for you, but my monitor is very dark and i can't do anything about it except make the art brighter for me. It looks better IRL anyway. Stupid scanner. And wow, look, no inking lines! 8 1/2 x 11 inch black cardstock or something and a white Prismacolor pencil.

Oooo, just finished this one :) I like it. The shading turned out well. Drawn while watching The Lion King, of all things... musta been the manes on the lions that made it come out all floofy... My mom had a hard time figuring out what the line drawing was, so if you dont get this right away, keep staring, you'll see that its a wolf-ish thing sitting with its back kinda to you and its turned around to look sideways at ya. My mom likes its nose... :)

As usual, little stuff like this takes waaay longer than you'd think it would; at least for me it does XP

Flash5 pic based off images i drew with Yahoo Messenger's Doodle IMvironment.

This is where most of my time is going. The bottomless pit that is Ollie, the guinea keet. He (or she, we don't know yet) is a baby guinea fowl that i cracked out of a leftover egg. Its sort of a tradition around here that every summer i go out to the nest after the chicks have hatched and look for ones that have been left behind for any number of reasons. This year, as the first year, i found an egg that hadn't hatched yet and freed the peeping chick inside. It's amazing how cute they are as chicks and how ugly they get to be as adults! Hopefully Ollie gets to be full grown. Lucky, the first chick, was eaten by Ivy after about 6 weeks, and all the others were either too sick or had bad accidents within the first month. :(

My first animal pic done entirely on my Wacom tablet in Painter Classic. Its a barn owl or potato faced owl as i *still* call them heh.. Oh come on, don't you know what i mean? You may use the pic, but gimme credit for it, k?

(Fixed up after a few suggestions on the earlier file from people on YNA) I can't believe this took me several hours to do..arg My dad really liked it though (nearly cried!), so it was worth it. He bought me all my Macromedia software, so the least i could do was use Flash to draw him a Father's Day card! Eh heh...

Christmas present for my parents.. Shhh, i dont think they know about it yet!

Different types of scrapbooking paper, xacto knife, gluestick.

(I deleted another non-furry pic so hopefully I’m allowed to upload this one) Playing with the chalk pastels in Painter Classic..it's the background for a pic I'm working on, but i don't know when that will be finished, and i really like this, so i decided to upload it. This file will be replaced with the final whenever it's done. Clouds are unbelievably fun, i had no idea. Must do more clouds...

Oh oh, and there's me on our family vacation to some far away mountain range. Don't I look just the happiest?

I dunno... Just a Terragen background and a Painter Classic blue merle collie/coyote mix. And a big thanks to Katie Scully (on VCL) for the tips on using Terragen :) I can do flat land now too!

Oh, forgive me for the uber cuteness...i never thought i'd be a part of it, but this is for my brother and his fiancé again..'nother pic of Pikachu, their chinchilla. Jennifer has recently found Hamtaro, and i had to try this lol My poor brother... I'm gonna set a giant version of this as his wallpaper while he's gone at work today! *devious* What a surprise that'll be *CUTE!!WAAA..dies*

Pic mine, Hamtaro -whateverineedhere- belongs to ..them..?

I was having fun with a doodle, until i couldn't figure out how to finish it off. After much time and frustration, i ended up with this, and i really like it! Wasn't worth the time put into it though...

(Sorry for the re-upload but I finally got a better “scan” of it. Had to take a screen shot of it and paste it into PSP) It’s my dog Ivy... She has her good days and her bad days. This would be a good day lol Nah, she's just not happy that we are babysitting my cousin's Labrador. Ever notice how red doesn't do too well with compression?

Just spent like 20 minutes editing this pic pixel by pixel to get rid of a stupid black line and little black dots that were on the paper. I couldn’t get rid of the text that shows through the paper though. I tried! But if this ends up in my sketches section anyway, well at least it’s in my archive. I like it. Drawn at the top of my paper in my Women's History class... Everybody was like, "Oooo, that’s cool." even the teacher :D And the paper itself was yellow too...

This was drawn back when Maggie and Rio still would not get along. Maggie got so upset once that she started chasing her tail. When she caught it she chewed on it until that registered as pain in her strange little mind. She and Rio also would scratch and chew themselves until they were bald in places and had little scabs all over. Even when they finally ended up living together, they would groom each other so hard that they had little scabs under their chins and on their shoulders. I miss my Maggie...she was such a funny little rat! Poor Rio is all alone now.

Months ago i made up this new breed of cat-like mammal, mainly this one character out of the species. Her name is P'razema and she's a jerraket. Pretty much all the important stuff is on this pic. I have several more sketches of her i hope to ink and colour pretty soon. As always, when you make up and animal, you hope no one else has one similar, or with a similar name. So apologies to anyone if it seems like i've copied you or anything. As far as i know, i came up with this all on my own.

I wanted to see just how badly i could make a picture look, lol. Nah, i just wanted to try inking with a colour similar to the one i was planning on colouring the whole thing in with. Too much shine or something on the body of the horse..the purple horse with a blue tattoo which i tried to make my initials, can you get LBW out of that? It was a unicorn once, but i forgot to ink the horn... Use it if you want, but remember that you are borrowing from me.

I've been kinda stuck on doing computer coloured stuff lately, but when our power suddenly went out for a few hours yesterday and my computer was unavailable... Yah, Kay gets updated. I couldn’t find my regular inking pen..these new ones aren't as good :(

*I have been told that this would look better if the green circle were left out, so...* A while ago, when i uploaded lgrdmn.jpg, i got an email from Chris Goodwin saying i should do another one like it. Well... it took me long enough, and i don’t like it so much, but here's another one with just two brush pens. On the real pic i tried to colour a green circle around it, but my pen ran out and it looked really bad so i edited it out. Shoulda made the main objects overlap again though...

Little banner ideas for the next art project we're working on. Teacher wants something like this to be hung on the telephone poles around our school..like banners for museums and such, since our building doesn't look too much like a school. Name blocked out so you don't know where i go o.O right... like you couldn't figure it out somehow anyway... That beach ball gave me hell btw *grrr*

This is the pattern I should be using for my little sun-catcher. There is a frosty dark blue to go around it too, but when I drew this I didn't know that yet...

Stayed up all night finishing off a crazy idea of mine. All these little rattie line drawings will be on products at my Ratcetera Cafe Press store. It's to raise money/have some money waiting for my rats if they need medical attention, new toys, more food etc. since my parents are getting fed up with paying for them all the time, but i wont go into that. This is a really bad plug i know, but I’m not begging anybody to go. They'll be up for sale here: www.cafepress.com/ratcetera

My stained glass rat head is all done. I liked it better when the solder was still its regular silver colour, but then a friend and i decided to put the copper stain on it instead. The colours are a little different, but i never expected my scanner to get them right anyway.

I went to camp last summer and we chose the Rubber Duckies as our team mascot thing. I drew the duck while at camp (he's wearing camouflage and holding a paintball gun because we played that while at camp) and then added the rest at home on the computer with my scanner and paint program. Oooh aaah, ya wish ya were a Duckie!!! We had all sorts of chants... what a good time we had :D

I know... the turtle is already going counter clockwise... The pic is after a clock my brother got from his roommate after he left college, a going away present. I found that the turtle and penguin go counter clockwise after i drew the pic. It's because you are supposed to read it from the reflection... Odd clock. I don't think my brother liked this pic anyway...

I get to draw the title page for our yearbook this year! (I did it last year too, but that one sucked) The teacher told me they wanted a HUMAN looking into a river and the reflection was to be a rat (school mascot) staring back. It's been years since i drew a human, but amazingly, i had no one pose for the pic..and i think it's okay! Hopefully they give me credit this year. I made sure i put my signature in a place where it wouldn't easily get cut it out like last year... *fur prickles* They didn't even write something like "Cover page by Laura Westrate" *growls*

Part of an older pic of many drawings of my rat Rio. This is the best one and only one worth posting. Cheap text 'n stuff added...

I showed this to my mom and asked her if she liked it and she said, "Eeewww, No!" I like it at least... My rat Rio has a little spot on her tummy and i wanted to draw her so you could see it, but i couldn't think of how to draw her normally, so i did this instead. Its just HB pencil because i hadn't used that in a while and Rio is only black and white anyway (yes, black hooded). She's so sweet :) Licks your fingers all the time, awwwww :) Ratties are so special! And my mom loves them too, yup, she does, really! Rio © herself, pic © 2001 Laura Westrate

My poor Rio rat with her lump...gotta get that thing removed. Drawn with one of my few Faber-Castell coloured pencils. I have a few things up on Furbid to help Rio: http://furrybid.transform.to/cgi-bin/auction.pl?alluser&Lrattie