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??

gentleman fox knickknack wall

more fotoshoppe coloring practice. click. click. click. click. hunch. i like painting so much better!

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:

octopus love

just in the nick of time for valentine’s day!

^^CLICK CLICK for etsy listing

i really must get better about making seasonal things. everybody else is so much more on the ball than i am.

holiday cards

my birds came in!

^^click for listing!

i think they turned out really well. they’re an interesting size but fit in a business size envelope so you don’t have to worry about weird postage.

sunset

sometimes i have to remind myself of things. like, skies don’t have to be blue. it’s a hard habit to break! also, people can be green or purple. meg hunt is very good at remembering those things. take a look at her work if you haven’t seen it already! delightful patterns and colors.

i might have to sit on this picture awhile, it’s a bit late in the season to make postcards (fall on the wane!) maybe next summer in time for september-october-november, i’ll print up some promos and a few to sell.

there used to be words on the ribbon, but i decided i liked it without. what do you think?

cards, cards, cards!

i don’t remember if i mentioned it, but i have some goccoed cards for sale at the museum of craft and folk art store in san francisco! so if you’re local, check them out. it’s a sweet little store full of handmade things just across from the jewish museum (you know, in that enormous intimidating upended black cube downtown). so if you go to the sendak show, pop on over. if you aren’t local, i’m selling the cards in sets of three from my etsy store. there are only 2 sets of the foxes, though, because the museum ran off with most of them. there are plenty of elephants and owls, though. click click click on the pictures below to see the listings.

the museum store is making an etsy page and needed a photo of the fox card, so i took one outside and did a glamorous garden foto shoot. i sent them the mossy one.

fox on moss

fox and daisy

fox on foxglove

fox on pot

beautiful! beautiful, dahling! you’re a fox!

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.

winter approacheth

these birdies are letting each other know that it’s time to get outta dodge. i loved painting that ribbon! it’s not actually red, it’s brown madder. i’ll holiday cardify them in the next week or so — 4×9″ flat cards with envelopes! neat, eh??

gocco feature!

i’m one of the 13 artists featured in this gocco article & giveaway on sharesomecandy. check it out, lots of studios to snoop in! i’ve actually stalked many of these people’s etsy shops over the last couple years (hee hee, just keepin’ tabs on the competition). i’m so excited to be included with them! i wish we all lived in the same city so we could be a secret treehouse gocco-hoarding club.

depression sisters homesteading

tea-ed and colored! based on the whinery family of pietown, new mexico.

none of my grandpeoples lived in america ever. they were kicking cans in various other locales during the great depression. if you wanna tell me a grandparent depression story, please do!