B

bee wings sure are hard to draw. bbz helpfully revealed that they are voronoi diagrams, which made it a little easier. i still kinda wimped out, though.

also, dr. ph martin’s inks in their little glass bottles are so pretty! especially cyclamen.

cascarones

how i used to know it was easter: merilee would show up at my house and look kind of shifty in the back yard, so i’d come out to see her. then suddenly there was cascarone smushed all around in my hair, and merilee, hands all confettied and eggshelly, looking extremely satisfied with herself.

Icara

STICKS

i was riding my bike past the california academy of sciences and the music concourse the other day and saw a horde of little kids making stick houses under those trees that look like gnarled hands (pollarded!). i had to stop and watch them for a while, it was really wonderful. none of them were hitting or poking each other! there was one little boy lounging in an enormous nest.

here i have put my sister into one of the stick houses. of course this cannot be, as she is working on her phd and living in brooklyn. but she is the default little girl i draw.

it looks like the stick structures appear every once in awhile after the trees get trimmed. here’s a picture from last year round about this time:

photo by ranjeet.rao

at first i thought it was a cal academy activity, cuz it looked so organized and the little houses were so numerous and nicely spaced. but it couldn’t have been, right? do organizations even allow kids near sticks these days??

saturday drorings

i wish there were fireflies in california! we stayed at a b&b in pennsylvania last summer, and when the evening went purpley-red, we sat on a picnic table and watched the fireflies blinking. there weren’t any fences between the backyards in the neighborhood, so you could see the fireflies aglow on this long stretch of grass for blocks. i’d never seen so many! it was amazing.

fox knick knack wall with shelf fungus shelves:

victorian fox lady in bloomers riding a pennyfarthing:

ghost birthday party

this is for a picture book i’m thinking of writing. the picture is based on the time i electrocuted myself on my second birthday. my mom says she found me awhile later behind a door, talking to ghosts.

here is a ghost who has eaten some birthday yummies:

brush pen

i’ve been at the family compound the last several days without my usual art supplies, so i’ve been drawing with a pentel brush pen. usually i hate brush pens, but i’ve actually been having fun with the darned thing!

more birches. i will probably try coloring this one sur l’ordinateur.

gentlemen, along with bears and screenprinted bicycles, are in the air. here are their accoutrements. while looking for pictures of macassar oil bottles (for keeping the gentleman’s hair well-groomed), i found out that there is a thing called privy excavation. basically, there are these dudes that find old outhouse holes and dig them out. i didn’t know people put anything down there but your standard numbers one and two, but apparently they were used for trash chutes as well. so these guys that excavate them have been finding dolls that girls’ evil brothers threw in the toilet and hyatt’s infallible life balsam and hair oil bottles.

this is kind of a strange one, and will probably make more sense if i color it in. i was picturing it as something like “The Lady of the House Returns to Her Cats After a Long Antipodean Journey.” i stole her fox fur from this photo of a 20s sydney inmate. there is also a tin ceiling, a fainting couch, and a picture rail.

i think mama took this picture in kyoto. some of the flavors in katakana read: ba ni ra (vanilla), ra ben da (lavender), ro su to pea na tsu (roast peanut), me ron (melon), mee ru ku (milk), and ba na na.i thought it might make a nice print. could be satisfying to use a bajillion different colors.

my flickr page has all these biggerer.

feed sack dresses

the great depression is so visually interesting. feed sack dresses! flour sack undies! cardboard insulation! flattened tin can roofs! dugouts! canned veg! people were so resourceful.

chirrip chirrip

lauren & alexa woodward at the velo rouge

we have had traveling musicians, their Danes, and their vanagon around the last couple days. our old pal lauren a.k.a. linky (a gentle giant) has come through town on tour with alexa woodward. lauren plays the washboard, and alexa plays the banjo and they sing together. it is beautiful!