Summer holiday is already over!

This is the last day of my summer holiday, I 'only' had three weeks off (this is very short comparing what I used to have as a student). Sigh...working life. But...I had a great time!


The very first weekend we celebrated the wedding of some friends, which was great. It was really good weather and though I still don't have pictures of my boyfriend and me, I can show you the illustration for their wedding invitation card I made for them some while ago:

It was really nice to celebrate a wedding again, last time I attended a wedding, was the one of my brother and my sister-in-law, which is...I think five years ago? People keep asking when my boyfriend and I will marry (we're together for almost 6 years now), but honestly to me...marrying isn't something you háve to do. We will marry someday, when we have the money and time I guess :).

Then after that weekend we went a week to Rome, and it was ...awesome! There are so many things to see over there, that sometimes it feels overwhelming. I have uploaded a bunch of photos here on my picasa here.
But for fun, here are some pics:


We visited all the standard tourists places, and it was beautiful. If you haven't visited Rome already, you should definitely go some day.

The second week, back in the Netherlands, we visited our family. Lots of travelling by train of course, you get a little tired of that after a while, so I was happy that the last week we could just stay at home. Though the rainy weather didn't make us happy either. It often feels like autumn here when it's raining in the summer and temperatures of 15/16 degrees celcius. Feels nothing like summer, but it doesn't really matter, I guess we're used to that here.

However, I kept myself busy with something new. We are planning to get ferrets as pets and of course I really want to make sure that we are making a good decision so I read a lot about it beforehand. We visited a frettery (ferret breeders) and it was really great. I'm really happy that we're getting pets because I miss them. I was raised in a family with lots of pets and animals around the house. And when I say lots, I mean two dogs, three cats, birds (those were my first pets, but later on my father got an aviary with a lot more birds), hamsters, rats, fish, bunnies and we even had a pig for a short while). When I lived in my student room I couldn't have a pet, but since we live in an apartment now there's room for it. 

Why ferrets? Well, they're very playful and they're not that 'boring' as a hamster or a bunny. Or a cat. I remember that there was a always a guy with ferrets at the local market back at my parents home. But my mom didn't like them (ofcourse biased by rumors that they stink and bite) so I never thought about it anymore until I saw a book about them three weeks ago. And now I've already bought a cage and a carrier and such! We're going to visit a ferret-shelter with the idea to get some friendly-older-beginner-ferrets this week and I can't wait!

Sometimes I worry a bit about the fact that having pets would be another hobby that would distract myself from getting more illustration work, but I think that it's a healthy thing to have more interests than just one. Sure if I wanted I could draw all day long and whatever, but...well...I've always been a person that is interested in a lot of things. I actually think it's good that I have to play with them for some hours in the evening because then I won't be such a computer-person anymore.

Here's a ferret painting I did from photo reference:

I'll post some other illustrations I did in the next post, so this one won't be too long :).