alexa, wolf, & crow

the other night, i went to see alexa woodward play with her friend hunter paye at the bollyhood cafe. wolf & crow played first, which was a pleasant surprise, i’d heard good things about them.

i also made one with purple lettering <--click

alexa told a story about growing up in north carolina. she would bring her cool 90s grungy friends home, and her uncle doug would spoil it all by saying, “let’s go out for ice cream — hallelujah!” (everything ended in hallelujah, he was a preacher.)

here is the wolf & crow bassist:

black shapes, so pleasant and inky!

when she packed up her case to go home, it reminded me of this:

a little girl in white ankle socks bent over double under a yellow flowered cello case, struggling down divisadero like sisyphus.

alexa caught me droring:

ants fer me dinner

we have been gobbling up david attenborough documentaries like giant anteaters gobble up ants. the life of mammals series is totally mesmerizing! it’s a wonder that deer and owl people keep drawing deer and owls over and over again (ha! guilty!) because the world is full of crazy, adorable, and just plain weird creatures. for example, the aforementioned giant anteater:

anteaters gallumphing on the pampas. i think they are actually fairly solitary, but i couldn’t resist.

here is david attenborough running one down at about 4:26 in this life on air segment. of course, you can’t have fun like this anymore!

and the pangolin, a walking artichoke! i always pictured them scrambling around like armadilloes, but they trundle along on their hind legs, i had no idea.

really!

malaysia

^^click for notes!

a tiny little painting about malaysia. it includes stuff i thought about as a kid: 1. the copious amounts of milo ( a chocolate-tasting drink sort of like ovaltine) my aunties made me, 2. the plants which snapped shut that i played with all day, 3. why do malaysian cats have no tails?, 4. ketupat, little woven packages of steamed rice my nenek used to make, 5. mom’s curry puffs (delish!), 6. mangosteens, my favorite fruit, and the rambutans from nenek’s tree, 7. cicak, the little house geckos that scrobbled along the ceilings and ate bugs. everything else i thought about later, like the carnivorous plants, giant moths, fishhead curry, and whole families weaving in traffic on their motorbikes.

the layout is based on this carson ellis poster i just love to bits kind of inexplicably. carson ellis is amazing, by the way.

angela

“you are so beautiful, it hurts to look at you!”

i drew this for merilee cuz i accidentally gobbled up the entire my so-called life dvd set (including writer commentary and actress interview) in 2 sittings and it was all her fault.

i was afraid to watch it again for a long time because i was angela’s age when the show came out and it resonated SO TERRIBLY MUCH. would watching it again give me grave purple anguish? would i melt into an embarrassed plaid puddle? would i think about that boy? (the one i referred to, jordancatalano-esque, by his first and last names, because i liked saying his last name)

to my mortification, i ended up identifying with the parents this time around!! like, GOD. sick.

magpie bits & bobbin

getting sketchy for a panel i am thinking on to go with the bowerbird one. why do magpies collect shiny things, anyway? maybe what they really want is the moon and stars.

the actual panel will probably look something like this, unless i have an epiphany.

sunday morning bowerbird

good morning! i finished painting a bowerbird on a panel last night. i’d like to make it the first in a series of animal collectors. next: a magpie with a nest full of string and shiny silver things. then: a long, sinuous ferret with a bunch of toys and knickknacks. i’d like to do four, but the only other creature i could think of was a pack rat. i’m not even sure if it’s a real animal.

this panel is so pretty and shiny in person! i used some gold acrylic paint for accents and felt naughty about it. do real illustrators give in to the lure of gold acrylic paint?? it doesn’t reproduce very well. i should have just used ochre and made it look like gold instead, but oh! so sparkly. i will probably be selling this, i’ll post again when i come up with a listing.

march was hard! either the young man or i have been sick since the last week of february, except for a brief respite over a dear friend’s wonderful wedding. april has been sunnier and i’ve been listening to happier kate bush this week to lift my wheezy spirits. cloudbusting: “i know that something good is gonna happen / i don’t know when / but just saying it could even make it happen!” also, morning fog, because it sounds so wake up and enjoy.

i have been remembering a conversation i overheard while i was sitting outside the academy of sciences in the sunshine. it took place between a 7 year old goth-in-training and his little sister:
brother: Somebody DIES every day! there is a funeral EVERY DAY.
sister: Somebody buys an ice cream every day!

they were both irish and so actually it sounded more like “soombody buys an ice-crrreem every deyy!”

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??