asakiyume | Entries tagged with drawings

The cashier was friendly, chatting with people as they came through. The woman ahead of me was buying just icing in a squeezy tube--two tubes of it.

"You decorating cookies? I love decorating cookies!" the cashier said. The customer allowed as to how she had a special recipe for cookies that used cake batter, and yes, she'd be decorating them, and the cashier seemed genuinely thrilled to hear it.

This cashier, she was quite pretty. She wasn't super young--not a high school student or a college-aged kid--but she wasn't old either. Maybe early thirties. Maybe mid thirties. She had expressively draw-on eyebrows, sort of 1920s style, long and arching. She had pale-ish skin and eyes, a wide mouth, and oiled curled hair that was dyed a deep auburn.

So I was quite tickled when it was my turn and I saw her name tag read JOLENE.

Jolene, I don't know if you'd be my man's cup of tea, but I think you're the best!

(I drew this picture of her.)

Current Music: Mindy Smith: Jolene

I'm slowly getting ready to self-publish a longish short story, "The Bee Wife," about a bereaved beekeeper and the swarm of bees that loves him. I've made some cover art for it. Let me show you in four steps, broadening out to the whole picture:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Step 4--the complete image:

It may still be a while before it's out in the world, but I hope when the time comes, people will enjoy Florian, his many children, and his bee wife.

Current Music: Cabeça: Cerca de abelhas

I love catbirds. They are so friendly! They come very near to people and just start chatting. When I hang up laundry, when I go out on my porch, when I'm looking at my plants, along comes a catbird.

The catbirds also like to eat my red currants. The season is pretty much over now, but I drew a chalk drawing in the 90+ degree heat to commemorate catbirds and red currants. I had it on good authority from the weather people that it wasn't going to rain until tomorrow at the earliest, which meant the chalk drawing would survive at least until morning for people to see.

NOPE! Flash storm! Big rain! Ah, evanescence.

Anyway, here is the drawing, which had a life span of approximately seven hours.

And here is a close-up.

Beneath the cut are a couple of process shots

( peek under here )

And here's a photo by Marie Lehmann from www.audubon.org of this friendly bird:

I finished my six-page picture book about planting eggs and incubating avocado seeds. Behold! The egg grew into a tree that has eggs on it:

And the avocado seeds that the hen sat on hatched some avocado chicks:

I sent the text and pictures to my friend and Tikuna teacher and said if she wanted to put it into Tikuna, we could create a dual-language book ;-) (And I said she should tell me if I'd messed up the Spanish, which is highly probable.)

The complete PDF is too large for me to send to my guides, let alone my friend, so I will try printing it up here and mailing it--though I'm not sure postal mail will reach anyone. But in any case, they have the pictures and (minimal) text to get a smile out of, and if my friend does put it into Tikuna, I'll add that in and send her the text and pictures again.

Current Music: Rihanna: Umbrella

When last I shared from Semillas y Huevos, the kids were planting an egg. So now we have them sliding avocado seeds underneath a hen :-)

Only two pictures left to do (the avocado tree with eggs for fruit and the little chicks that are little walking, cheeping avocados, heh!)

So here is what the tree in my dream looked like: like bamboo, but with leaves like a locust... except in this drawing, the joint-rings aren't raised enough-looking, hence the second, eye-searingly colored (expertly! with a mouse!) diagram/digital doodle to show you how the rings fit round the trunk and boughs.

Also...

Heard the first wood thrush of the season today. I was wondering how far south they go for winter--do they make it all the way to Colombia? ... Google says no; they winter in Central America. Google also tells me they're the state bird of Washington DC.

I was so thrilled to be using the old giant bubble maker on Saturday that I took it out early on Sunday morning to use up some of the extra soapy water, and Wakanomori took some photos. Here's one:

Here's a picture of Koffing I drew for L as a thank-you for the Pokemon card he gave me. KOFFING!!

And here's something fun: replacing "Bureau" with "Burro" for federal agencies. I thought they should be illustrated, so I found some images:

Burro of Land Management

Burro of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

Census Burro

Hey, we've been watching The Expanse in very slow time on DVDs from Netflix. I'm in the middle of season 3 right now. I've liked aspects of several episodes a whole lot, but S3 ep. 11 was the first that made me actually cheer and clap. It was when [in white for spoilers; highlight to see] Ashford powers up the Behemoth's gravity-producing drum and then broadcasts to the Earth and Mars vessels, telling them they can bring their wounded there:

I have a message for all the ships in this infernal place. We are all victims of the same catastrophe. But the Behemoth is unique. This ship, my ship, can create spin gravity. So I am able to offer it to all of you. Bring your wounded here so that they may heal. You will be welcome.

SWEET.

(Tangentially, I had never thought about internal injuries in 0 gravity. Interesting/awful!)

One of my little neighbors drew these amazing characters.

Don't they look like they should have a TV show? That they should be out solving mysteries or outwitting villains or recovering stolen treasure or exploring the cosmos?

I love the attention to individual detail. The pink one's hair has two shades of pink, and she has a unicorn horn:

The red one has a ladybug vibe--tiny and wise and helpful:

The purple one has pink AND purple hair and an asymmetrical pattern on her dress

And I feel like the rainbow one might be the leader? She has the longest hair, and as we all know, that correlates to leadership capability ;-)

I wonder if my neighbor tells stories about them.

Current Music: Los Rakas: Devorame

"The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander," by Gwen C. Katz, in the February 2021 issue of Utopia Science Fiction

In this absolutely delightful, funny, and clever story, scientist Jen has discovered** a new species of tiny salamander, and it's completely adorable:

The internet did indeed love the ostolotl. The six-inch salamander had enormous round eyes, a mouth like a puppy, fluorescent blue stripes, and fluffy gills sprouting from the sides of its face. There was fan art. There were uwu ostolotl memes. By the time Pseudonecturus ostolotli was formally described, there was a movie in the works.

Well if that isn't an invitation to produce some fan art, I don't know what is. Behold my version of Pseudonecturus ostolotli

fan art for Gwen Katz's story "The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander"

The movie in the works is called Full Throttle Ostolotl:

fan art for Gwen Katz's story "The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander"

But Jen doesn't just have an adorable new species of salamander, she also has a morose grad student with whom she commiserates about their funding: "Unless we plan to fund this lab on Patreon, we need to get some non-meme-based science done." And at home, she's got Madison, the prickly eight-year-old daughter of Kira, Jen's roommate from their college days. Kira and Madison came to stay after Kira's marriage fell apart, and now the three of them are tentatively becoming a family--but it's not easy when Madison is still angry at having to uproot her life. She's also sharp as a tack and asks good questions. When Kira says Jen won't like the headline about the new salamander ("Northwestern University Research Team Discovers New Species of Cave Salamander"), Madison asks what's so bad about it:

"[The salamander is] new to us. But the people who live there have known about it for thousands of years. They have their own name for it: ostolotl."

"So what should it say?" asked Madison.

Jen considered. "How about 'Cave Salamander Discovers Northwestern Research Team'?"

But soon the police require Jen's herpetological expertise for entirely other reasons: a security guard turns up dead in standing water in a YMCA basement, his chest crushed and his body covered in slime. Uh-oh!

In addition to being funny and all-around charming, the story touches on the issue of exploitation of wild animals, responsible pet ownership, and other things I can't mention because spoilers. Also, Kira is nonbinary, and that's handled completely naturally.

To read the story you need to buy the magazine, but it's worth it for this story alone (and it contains several other intriguing ones, as well as poetry and artwork).

PS: the author has also written a YA novel, Among the Red Stars, about an all-female Soviet aviation team during World War II. There's also a gallery of the author's own amazing art depicting characters in the story.

Current Music: Canalón de Timbiquí: Tio Guachupesito

Twitter was tempting me yesterday with a story about an Australian sheep, lost in the wild for a long time, that was encumbered by its huge fleece. It really looked like a **person** in very capacious outerwear. So I drew that:

Really, though, domesticated sheep are no longer like wild sheep--they need to be shorn periodically--and this poor guy was underweight from not being able to eat much because all the fleece around his face interfered with his eating.

Now he's been shorn, and he must feel positively weightless. (Picture, as the stamp indicates, is yoinked from Reuters. The picture I screencapped above was from CNN, I believe).

Here's a Huffpost story on it, or you can just Google "wild Australian sheep" and stories will turn up.

Current Music: Ana-María Estupiñan: Amar y Vivir

Current Music: Três meninas do Brasil: Deixa a Gira Girar

I've done only a very little reading this week.

Long form:

I read a little more of The Winged Histories, but this may just be something I need to come back to at a later date. Will keep reading a bit more, though, because I do love the writing, so casual and graceful with insights:

I put down my things, and he noticed the swordbox. "Oh! Ha, ha! Did you bring that thing? Ha, ha!" he wheezed, leaning on a couch. "A joke," he explained to my Aunt Firvaud, who regarding me with a searing stare. "Our Tavis used to be so fond of swordplay."

"I still am," I said, though I did not feel fond of anything. I thought I would never be fond of anything again."

How Tavis feels: you know it so entirely from those last two sentences, and you know how the aunt feels, and you can sense the impotence of the uncle .... yeah, you know writing this is persuading me to read on.

I also started reading WEB DuBois's The Souls of Black Folks, which I've been meaning to read for years. I had to open up a document to store all the quotes I wanted to remember--it's going to be most of the book, I can tell already.

For the first time he sought to analyze the burden he bore upon his back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

WEB DuBois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and earlier in the chapter he shares this memory--and it feels shamefully fresh:

I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.

Short form:

You can read this flash story in under five minutes, but it's both funny and profound and may lift your spirits: "Addison and Julia Tell the Truth to Pemaquid Beach"

And here's some fan art I made for This Is How You Lose the Time War. It's a moment when Blue saves the life of child-Red, though Red doesn't realize it at the time.
( it's a bit large, so it's behind a cut )

Current Music: Kittie Harlow: Fight the War

I finished a review of A Sinister Quartet just 45 minutes late of being able to post it on the day the book launched, which was yesterday. The review is on Goodreads; people reading here have heard my reactions to the first two stories in any case.

Those two--"The Twice-Drowned Saint" (CSE Cooney) and "An Unkindness" (Jessica Wick)--were right up my alley thematically and writing-wise. The remaining two, "Viridian" (Amanda McGee) and "The Comforter" (Mike Allen) were both excellent tales, slightly (or in the case of Mike's, very) outside the circle of what I normally enjoy reading, but both did what they set out to do with finesse. I think anyone who's drawn to any of the four stories will enjoy some of the others a whole lot as well, and possibly all of the others.

Next I'll reread Aster Glenn Gray's The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball so I can do it justice in a review. I'm also going to read The Headless Cupid, a Zilpha Keatley Snyder story I somehow failed to read as a child. I absolutely adored her Green-sky trilogy and The Changeling, and I enjoyed many other of her stories as well.

I also drew another chalk thing. "Be the frog-riding, moth-and-dandelion-wielding hero you want to see in the world"

I decided to buy some street-art-quality chalks and see how long they last (answer: not long! This would be an expensive hobby...)

And I drew this...

The nice thing about chalk art is you can keep on tinkering with it. I might add more red to the face.

I also ended up decorating my jeans:

The healing angel and her significant other are living across our household and the significant other's household (yes: we know--we consider ourselves all one infection/virus family), and yesterday evening they were over, and we all watched Frozen II together, which was relaxing. I enjoyed seeing the sisters' different hairstyles, and the songs were fun. The plot was a little lurchy, but it seemed like it advanced both sisters further along good-for-them trajectories and that it gave young fans more of what they liked.

Then the healing angel and her significant other retired to the healing angel's room, and Waka and I watched the Easter vigil streamed from our church. In addition to the priest, there was a cantor and some readers--the cantor sang the Exsultet, which gladdened my heart.

Current Music: The Be Good Tanyas: In My Time of Dying
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/945941.html

On Twitter, Aster Glenn Gray shared some chalk art from her neighborhood, and chalk art is something I love and something I think is really restorative and heartening, so when I had to give up watching Self-Made (with the aforementioned Aster Glenn Gray--though remotely of course) due to Wakanomori's need to use the bandwidth for teaching, I went outside and drew a phoenix:

Here's a detail

We'll rise from this.

I've been heartened by a number of encouraging posts from people on my friends list, but yesterday it was especially this one from

gaudior on how to handle a plague.

Current Music: Natalia Lafourcade: Soledad y el Mar
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/944645.html

I did her as a celphalopod, sort of. My thought was that her three legs were arms, and her arms were arms, and her long hair was also arms. But I gave her hands on her arm-arms. Why? I don't know.

Also here are some flying amabie to bless your day.

Current Music: Betty the Shark: Palm Tree
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/943855.html

I saw this odd little scene two days running, a very tiny makeshift stand by the side of the road, a rainbow umbrella, a sign, a cinderblock (and probably a moneybox somewhere, but I didn't notice--I was in a car), so I made a cartoon (?) about it:

Flowers: a flexible term!

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/928545.html

(With this job I'm likely to be mainly a Friday-Saturday-Sunday poster, but I'll try to be reading and commenting on people's blogs on other days.)

The crow and the dove
This morning was *warm* and although the hills are still waiting to spring alive again, there are hints of life all around--pussy willows, birdsong. On a morning run saw a magnificent crow up so close, close enough to admire his bill and exchange glances and hear the wind whistling in his wings as he flew off.

Later I heard a distant radio--but it wasn't so distant: it was on the other side of the road, and there was a woman sitting there on her stoop in her bathrobe, enjoying the sun slowly climbing above the trees on the hill across the road. I waved and she smiled and waved. Something like that is as good as sharing a whole meal with someone.

Then a little further on in the run a mourning dove flew up into a tree and the sun shone through its white tail feathers, glowing ... After the flood the dove and the crow became neighbors and told their kids stories about Noah's crazy habits.

music
And music. I have been listening to lots of cumbia and now want to learn to dance it, couples-style. Past me is looking at present me in frank amazement. There there, past self. It's all good. But what I'm sharing here are two songs that are not only nice to listen too but also have cool videos. The first I discovered through Afropop Worldwide: "Tenemos Voz"--very cool animation and a great song.

And "Zapata se Queda" is spectacular in a different way.

Gender of the Day
There's Twitter bot called @genderofthdday that comes up with different amusing combos each day. "The gender of the day is the smell of stale beer and the sound of a dial-up modem"; "The gender of the day is a dragon with a lute." (Actually, I'm realizing as I trawl the back pages that it gives several per day.)

A couple of days ago it gave "The gender of the day is a tired basilisk on a pegasus," and I thought that one needed an illustration, so:

Current Music: Ya Yegros: Nada Parece
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/921778.html

On Friday, people were in arresting colors. Taking Wakanomori in to work, I saw a girl wearing bright orange hightops, like in the upper right corner (only brigher).

Then on my way to the jail, I saw a mother and daughter, daughter on a tiny two-wheeler bike, mother alongside, like bottom right. They both had robin's-egg blue headgear: a bike helmet for the little one, a baseball cap for the mom.

Then *at* the jail, in the lobby, there was an older woman in a bright pink track suit, with black boots with bright flowers and leaves embroidered at the top--red, pink, yellow. It reminded me of Eastern European motifs, Ukrainian Easter eggs and Polish embroidery and such. This woman was looking at a picture book, The Girl Who Spun Gold, and my impression of the book cover was that it was all warm greens, golds, and browns (though looking at it online I see it's not really quite like that).

Here's a song by Utada Hikaru called "Colors," to go with the post.

Current Music: Utada Hikaru: Colors
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/895239.html

Last week's prompt for the students in Holyoke was "This cat is very strange ..." I did a couple of illustrations to go with some students' descriptions:

This cat looks like a dog. The cat ears are hanging to the floor, has a long tail but the cat skin is red and blue.

Then there was this cat:

I was in the park and I seen a cat with three eyes looking at a bird.

What did you think when you saw this three-eyed cat?

He has a better chance of catching the bird! LOL

A few students were suspicious of black cats, though when I asked one if black cats were bad luck, she said,

No, cats are not bad luck, they just cats. They are good of seeing ghosts around, though.

When looking for an image to illustrate that woman's writing, I found this fun story about Sable, the crossing-guard cat, who comes out every day to watch the kids safely cross the street to school in the morning and leaving school in the afternoon.

Sable has been watching over the students from across the street for about a year. Tamara Morrison owns the cat. She says one day, Sable just walked outside to greet the students, and he's been doing it ever since ... [Tamara] has now bought a safety vest for Sable to make him an honorary member of the Enterprise Safety Patrol.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/888231.html

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with drawings

at the supermarket

art for a cover

catbird and red currants

last two pictures in Semillas y huevos

next picture in Semillas y Huevos

drawing of the dream tree; a few other random things

a couple of photos, some burros, The Expanse

delightful gang of four

Short Story: "The Curious Case of the Cave Salamander"

woolly

Atmosphere and sky

Wednesday reading, plus some art

reading and other escapes

a bounding deer

a phoenix

my amabie

flowers?

the crow and the dove, music, Gender of the Day

colors

This cat is very strange...