"Roll" is a story about a young albino rat that gets shoved off a washing machine by the family cat. He suffers severe brain trauma and his sense of balance is destroyed. Up and down have no difference. He slips into trances and spins from back to belly uncontrollably. Horrible dreams of his worst fear, cats, plague his mind. As if undefined directions weren't bad enough, he never knows if his next nightmare will last forever... (You were a good rat, Keegan. Sleep well little man!)

OpenCanvas session with my Roo boy. Top image is me trying to figure out how he really wants to be drawn. He wants his half meerkat-ness back ^^
Bottom image is what he drew for me :D

Roo wants a tattoo... He made a little sketch for me a few weeks ago, and i took it from there; making my own version and inking it in Flash. I then tried to draw it on his arm today, but it didn't go as well as i wanted. The one photographed is on his right bicep, and the mostly-white one is on his left, but i really screwed that one up, so you don't get to see it :P

Original image idea © 2003 Alan Brown, art © 2003 Laura Westrate

We are allowed some non-furry pics right? This took two and a half days to do. One of my brother's friends needed a drawing of a rose and she asked me to do it. This isn't the version she got though. I kept editing afterwards until i got this. She didn't want thorns or dew or rough leaves, and i had forgotten that roses have the green leafy things under the petals, so those just got added. I'm so happy with this! Had the hardest time with the rose bud itself, but i think it is okay now...

Ring tailed lemur that i inked and coloured while at school. The teaches couldnt decide whether to tell my to put it away, or watch. Its framed on my wall. I like it, of course:) lemur © 2001 Laura Westrate. Oh and BTW, im going to try and apply to Yerf again, anyone have any suggestions for pics to use?

Old pic of two dogs that was in my sketch book. I wanted to colour something with my Prisma markers, so i attacked it in class today (our last day, yeah! finally) and finished it at home.

Yea, now he's coloured... i just need help with a background! I think it should be dark with a light source in the upper left-hand corner, but i have no idea of theme or anything. Suggestions and help, please..? *polite smile* There are a few inches above his head yet and a bit on his right side, but the bottom and left are out of extra room. Prismacolor markers and coloured pencils on 8x11 inch sketchbook paper.

Finally! My commission for Rymeer is done. He has been so understanding and patient. First my mom was in the hospital for two weeks, then teachers give final projects all at the same time... I really hope he and Kittra (the vixen) like this. My scanner hates me though, or at least red and the beanbag. The red has more shading and depth and the blue-ish streaks in the beanbag aren't so noticeable. Oh well, the real thing looks good :D Rymeer and Kittra © their creators. Pic © 2001 Laura Westrate

Drew this yesterday. I was bored, so i started drawing some kinda cat thing and it turned into this. I'm really trying to get my backgrounds to be better, is it working? Prisma markers on sketchbook paper.

One of the main people who helped to start up the charter school i go to is retiring from the Board this year. I was honored when asked to draw a card for everyone to sign at Convocation in thanks to him for all his hard work. He is a physics professor at the college in my town btw, hence the certain equations. This card consists of 4 sheets of paper; a translucent light green vellum with a sketch of our school building on it (which i did not draw), under that, and just visible, is this piece of stiff paper, then a stiff sheet of green with the words "Thank you for helping our dreams take flight!" written on it, and lastly, a blank black paper. The pages are all bound with black and green cords ending in tassels. Everything besides the rat was drawn with metallic gel pens, which my scanner does not like. This looks much better in real life. Our school mascot is the (River) Rat, so that’s why the rat is there...

A SHAGGY Arab!? Hahahahahaha hehehe ahahaha-- Huh? What did you say? /Shagya/ Arab? Oh... never mind.

Rats...are so evil.
They worm their way into your hearts...you love them...so much..and then they just die after a year or three. Evil critters... they break my heart time and time again.
But i wouldn't trade my pet rats for anything! They are so worth it. Yes, that means i LOOOOOVE rats :D

This is just a random sketch that got way more attention than it should have :P

I found an animal skull under a big tree while at our cottage on Lake Michigan the other day. I believe it is an opossum skull, but i'm not sure. I would have drawn it the day i found it, but there was a family of earwigs inside that needed to be bathed in hot soapy water for a while... My scanner and PSP5 are in cahoots, they don't like light values of blue :( All the scratchy hatching marks on the top of the skull and inside the mouth are from squirrels that decided they needed more calcium in their diet :P Drawn with blue coloured mechanical pencil lead on sketchbook paper.

I thought i saw a cool looking statue on TV, but it turned out to be something different. I drew what i thought i saw and then elaborated on it. This was very fun!

Hmm, well this took way too long. I battled with Flash for a while, but finally we compromised. I gave up on the shading, and it let me delete some unwanted lines. This was inspired by one of our cats, Sneaker, whom actually looks like this for the most part. She has very well defined cheekbones and the fur around her nose comes to a point on each side! She resembles an alien... love her though. This’ll probably appear on stuff in my Cafe Press store: http://www.cafepress.com/cricket_fur

My brother asked me to make a background for he and his fiancé’s Christmas card today, so i quickly made this (and they really liked it:). I thought it was cute and decided to add the happy little snowfox to it (in the same place they had edited in Pikachu, their chinchilla). Drawn with my tablet in Painter Classic.

Ballpoint pen (blue and black) work doodle turned cute ^^

Looks like someone is having a bit too much fun with her tablet as of late...

I give up. I can't keep my paws off of Flash now that i know how to use it just a tad. I found a quick sketch that was a few months old and played with it in Flash until i ended with this. Oh the poor squirrel...it almost looks like a car hit it once or twice. Yes, that's why it only has one ear too, oops...

Bloody scanner...can't take red worth a darn :P

(Hey wow, what do you know, something that’s not cute and fluffy from me! I'm perfectly happy; this is not a depression/angsty pic...i just needed to draw something a bit different)

Heh, what do you know... i hadn't uploaded this... Least i can't find it in my directory. This was done sometime early this year in Painter with my wonderful Wacom friend. Suggestive lines or somethin' like that...

Why does my dad always think that what i draw is a mirror to how i feel? According to him I'm feeling "murky"... Actually, i got the idea for this when my brother's dog came tearing out of the cornfield with her mouth open and her tongue flying out her muzzle. She nearly ran me over. I guess she couldn't see through the tall corn. Serves me right for standing at the edge and calling for her... I just think the pic looks cool.

When i was little, our baby sitter had a horse that was walking in the pasture and stepped on a board with a nail in it and it swung up and hit him on the head. The horse died. The daughter of the baby sitter thought it would be cool to show a little 6 year old (me) the dead horse under the blue tarp behind the barn. Needless to say I've never forgotten what i saw...

Oooo, my dream horse :D I've always wanted a big, black, draft-type horse with feathering around the hooves, tall white socks on all four feet and a thick blaze right in the middle of it's face. I know that i would name it Fantasma, Tazzie for short. I also know that i will never get one like that, so i drew myself one, finally. I like the horse, the background on the other hand, well at least its not all one colour...

Quick test for the new scanner i got for my birthday. It..kinda failed :( That orange highlighting... you can barely tell it's there irl. The apple though, well, my old scanner would totally flatten out red tones, but this one doesn't :D I don't like how it handles sketchy pencil lines either, or slightly off-white areas. Totally washes stuff out, and i can't manage to fix it :( But, so as not to be too hard on my scanner, i'll admit that i too failed at drawing this image...it's so stupid and ugly!

I've been reading the book series Redwall for my AP English class. Does it show? :P This is Tim the stoat, named after the friend who wanted me to give the pic to him. At least he got it named after him!! For some reason this pose seems familiar to me, though i looked at nothing to draw it. Well, okay, i had my mom stand on the footstool to see how i wanted the hands... lol

About a week ago i got a new rat. To me she looks a lot like Tissle, my magical rat character. Now i have Tissle the real rat. I have decided to change my character to be more like the real rat. One of the most noticeable things about Tissle is that the last inch and a half of her tail is missing. It’s all healed over now; just looks funny. I was trying to make up a story to how it happened. Some dolt probably picked her up by the end of her tail when she was a baby and it broke off. That wouldn't do for a magical rat though. I'm still not sure how it will happen. My mom thinks I’m going nuts because I’m drawing pics of "mutilated" rats... The other rat is her sister. There were two tan rats at the pet store, so I’m guessing it was her sister... Any background ideas or tips would be wonderful since i am planning on doing a larger coloured pencil drawing of this soon! (perda@juno.com)

I was drawing red squirrels and i thought the ones with the tufts on their ears looked like a rat with feathers on their ears. My mom and i had been trying to think of a name for almost an hour when i set a rat on the keyboard and she pressed "tsssl", thus came Tissle. She's some sort of magical rat. I don't know how she attaches the feathers yet, but she does change the colours a lot. The ring around her eye is dyed fur. And note the guinea fowl feather on her necklace too *nod*

I have a little rescued albino mouse! Tobi was going to be piranha food, but the people changed their minds when she was bobbing around in the water. They didn't want a mouse so they gave her to me!! Now i have to convince my parents she needs a companion mouse hehehe She's a very nice little mouse, i was surprised. Still like rats better though :P

The last of my babies died. I had Nemo put to sleep today after school. He was so thin and constantly struggling to breathe :( With him a big part of me feels like it too has died. I kept almost the whole litter of Zelda's kids from birth to death. Zelda is the red-eyed rat in the bottom left corner. She gave me the best birthday present ever... (only 3 days early)

Nemo was special to me ever since he first started to get pigment in his skin. I wanted to keep him so badly. He was so beautifully marked, but i was only going to be allowed to keep the females, and my breeder friend told me "Baldie" was a boy. Luckily though, we couldn't find homes for any of the babies except one female, and my parents knew what would most likely happen to them if we gave them to the pet store, so they didn't make me. Over 2 and a half years later i finally gave the last of them up. Good thing is though, no more of my current rats should die (of old age at least) for almost a year. That should be a nice break for me ...ohh...

And yes, the picture of him under the end of the dead rat's tail is mirrored. I didn't realize that until it was too late to fix it.

Thank you Zelda; thank you all ya little furballs ... I'm gonna miss you guys so much.