Here’s today’s (already sold) painting for my Animals for Animals fundraiser on behalf of Heifer International: a Possessive Raven!
Turn-offs: sharing. Turn-ons: shiny things. This one was pretty fun to do – painting in those crazy oil-spill highlights that ravens have in their feathers. This one was sold for $50, since it took me a bit longer and has lots of colors.
Total raised so far: $130, which is enough to buy a whole llama or goat! Two of my favorite ungulates of all time!
I did a raven because so many people suggested it, so if there’s a critter you’d like to see me depict next, post a comment.
Today’s Heifer International fundraising watercolor is a literary hare!
Writing her memoirs, no doubt! An entire chapter is dedicated to yesterday’s fox and what a doofus he is. Also what sell-outs bunnies are.
This one sold instantly (wow dang), but there will be more on the way this week! If you have a request for a particularly fun animal you’d like to see me do, post it in comments and I’ll throw it into the hat.
And, just to start keeping records, Animals For Animals has now raised $80. That’s enough for four rabbits or half of a llama!
People have started asking if I’ll produce prints of the animals for sale. The answer is yes, but I want to encourage sales of originals before I start selling reproductions (although I would like for proceeds from print sales to go to Heifer as well).
Stay tuned!
Every year I try to make a Christmas donation to my favorite charity – Heifer International, a wonderful organization that purchases animals (from bees to buffalo)as well as veterinary care and training for impoverished families the world over. (Read more on their site.)
This year it’s a bit harder for me to donate than usual, since I’ve made the transition to being a self-supporting artist. Many of the friends with whom I used to go in on an animal purchase are in the same financial situation.
It seemed to me that this was an opportunity – for me to make things, for you to purchase something lasting, and for a family in the larger world to benefit from it! For the month of December, I will be creating and then selling watercolor paintings of animals (as often as I can manage!). When I finish, I’ll count up what’s been raised and then buy the most animal possible!
My offering today: an enemy of many of the animals Heifer sponsors, a fox! Little does he realize that his dastardly deeds will ultimately be doing good.
This craft fellow is on sale at Etsy for $40. It is a lovely little painting, and I will guarantee arrival by mail to any part of the world in time for Christmas, and that it will be packaged fancy-like.
In the Extremely Cool department:
My work is part of the new Monsters of Webcomics exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco! I sent in a series of images that takes this page of Family Man from dissociated layout doodles all the way to the final version, including the original, hand-drawn inked page. This happened to be the page I was working on at submission time for the show, so it’s really representative of my typical work-through, rather than the extra measures I go through for a more glamorous page.
I’ve never displayed my “process” anywhere before, so it’s a reasonably neat glimpse into my diseased mind. The other artists in the show are all irredeemably fabulous: Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, the Foglios, Dorothy Gambrell, Nick Gurewitch, my dear friend and housemate Jenn Manley Lee, Chris Onstad, and Spike are all in the lineup.
It opened this past week and will be up through December 6th – in conjunction with, oh my childhood heart, their major exhibit on the art of the Disney film Sleeping Beauty, a piece of magnificent artistry that’s always blown Tiny Dylan away. Having work displayed within a five mile radius of that work is exciting enough to forestall several of my major bodily functions, so being just a few walls over is kind of nuts.
My thanks to Andrew Farago and the good people at CAM for inviting me in on the show!
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Meanwhile I’m gearing up for a week’s visit to London, which means that in order to avoid thinking about how much I hate transatlantic flights, I’m mucking around in my brain over the difference between what I’m calling Mythology of Place versus Mythology of Character in modern narrative forms. To that end, riddle me this, dear readers:
What’s your favorite epic locale/setting/set piece from…
A movie? (example: Cloud City in Star Wars)
From a comic? (example: Atheia in Bone)
From a prose novel never adapted into film? (example: the attic room of carvings in the Gormenghast novels)
From a prose novel that has been adapted into film – but NOT the film’s take on that setting? (example: the Weasley residence in the Harry Potter books)
From the film version of a prose novel? (example: Rivendell in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings)
From a game? (example: the temple in Shadow of the Colossus)
And…why?
Last weekend my loose conglomeration of affiliated nerds gathered ourselves together and attended the third performance of Trek in the Park‘s public recreation of classic original series Star Trek episode Amok Time (also known as “The One Where Spock Is Horny”).
It was the kind of wonderfully silly communal event that makes me so happy to live in Portland. When the guy playing Chekhov gets applause just by saying “Yes, Keptin!” in the appropriate tone, you know that you’re in for a good time. (He later upped the stakes by nailing the Montalban-as-Khan accent in the preview for next summer’s promised episode, Space Seed.)
I was raised with Star Trek, and I was raised with skit theater, so the whole thing felt immensely correct. I took as many photos as I could bear to, given how much willpower it took to look away – and one nice video of the first fight scene, which the cast executed with consummate shirt-ripping skill.
So bravo to Adam and Amy Rosko and all their fellow Trek in the Park contributors. You put together something genuinely sweet, communal, and delightful. If you need a spare actress who’s also good with graphics and web design, call me, and I will buy you all popsicles.
The crowd reactions are almost better than the action itself.