Millie

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"Millie" Like many women of her generation, my great-grandmother worked at the Kaiser Shipyards in Vancouver during the war. She was able to save enough money to buy herself a full-length mink coat - something she had always wanted but never dreamed she would someday own! She wore it almost daily, no matter that it was "too fancy" for every occasion, and when it wore out she had it re-fashioned onto a stole. (Which I now have!) To me she was always a cute, feisty old lady named Mildred. But when I think of her working in the shipyards, saving up for a very girly splurge, she is a cute, feisty girl whose friends call her Millie.

Cleo

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 "Cleo" I was sketching out a woman with a very shaggy, pixie-style haircut but it kept looking wrong. I kept erasing and trying again but it just wouldn't come together! Finally, I did what any sane person would do and I gave up. I flipped the page over and this lady just sort of fell out of my pencil. The trouble was I could still see remnants of the previous lady's hair! I decided rather than try to mask it, I would make the most of the jaggedy lines and just started free-handing jagged lines all over the place which morphed into a sort of abstract foliage-and-floral background. Almost reminds me of stained glass. I dubbed her "Cleo" because her thick black eyeliner is like what Liz Taylor wore in the fabulous 50s era Cleopatra movie. The curlicues in her hair were achieved by using a gloss black paint over matte black paint.