dr. sketchy’s toulouse lautrec night

oh la la! la belle france! a model in her drawers! another fabuleux evening at dr. sketchy’s anti-art school.

javelinas

wee penelly

for penelope’s 2nd birthday. i started it when she was six months old! she used to have far less hair with far more lift.

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!

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.

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.

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.