My local animal shelter, ARL (Animal Rescue League) of Iowa, just held the greatest most genius and wonderful fundraiser of all time.
For a donation of $25, people could submit pictures of their pets, and volunteers (like me) would draw them. Some people would donate an extra $10 and they’d get their drawings back in 48 hours.
The only catch is, will the drawing be good? Or terrible? Who knows! It’s a gamble.
In just two days, well over 1000 pet-pictures were submitted, and most of them have already been drawn and returned to the donors.
Which means this one fundraiser — in two days!!! — brought in well over $25,000!!!!!
And they raised all that money while offering people like me who love to draw an additional way to help animals!
I also donate money every month, but this is just so fun!!
All the pictures are based on photographs, and so a lot of the pet owners end up with goofy / weird / good / bad / baffling drawings of their pets. I think that’s part of the fun.
Sometimes the approach I took was silly, but more often I just wanted to capture the specialness of these animals. This little cross-eyed cat is one of my favorites.
But they’re all beautiful in their own ways.
During the fundraiser, I was stuck-in-bed sick and couldn’t do much of anything. Being able to wake up, roll over, and draw animals for charity on my ipad was a life-saver for me.
(I fell a little in love with this come-hither chihuahua.)
And I made some mistakes: this dog had a white patch on his arm, but I didn’t catch that until it was too late.
But the last one I did is probably my favorite: look at this magical calico! Look at her!! She’s perfect. Purrrrrrrfect.
Support your local animal shelter. Or mine. :D