Abstract Dogs and how my work has evolved over the years

So I'm really getting in to using oil pastels this month!  I'm thoroughly enjoying familiarizing myself with them, so much so, that I have that wonderful feeling we artists love to have, where we can't WAIT to get back to work!  I can hardly wait to get back into my work area and continue playing with the oil pastels!  It's one of my favorite feelings--when work feels like PLAY--and unfortunately I don't always have it.  The exciting part about this oil pastel experience for me is that my work tends to evolve in a big kind of way about once every 5-10 years.  When I first started doing my artwork after college, I painted colorful imaginary people.  A few years later I adopted my first cat.  She inspired me to create images of cats and other animals.  Those early animal images had a slight seriousness to them and it wasn't for another 10 years, after meeting my husband-to-be, (who is a very funny person), that I started adding a touch of humor & irony to my images. Drawing those new images initially had the same effect on me--I couldn't wait to get back to work and see what was coming next!  I still create work in that humorous animal style, and will continue it for a while because it is fun to make and I sell it well in the art circuit.  However, I am very excited to be doing something new and am eager to see where it goes. 

Here is a dog drawing I did last night.  I didn't go in planning to draw dogs, but when I saw it heading in that direction I just went for it.  I'm not quite finished with it and may end up cutting the dogs out and collaging them onto other paper--maybe black.  The one unfortunate thing about oil pastels is that they are a bit messy and the light green paper has a lot of smudges on it...but hey, isn't art supposed to be messy?!