Holiday Cats and Eclipse

Okay! New Year's Resolution! Let's see if I can update this blog once a week! Instead of, you know, every other month or so... (First two weeks of January totally don't count.)


Oh no, the Year of the Tiger is almost over! (Or maybe it technically is over in some places... I can never keep Lunar New Year dates straight...) Damn it, there goes my excuse for making random tiger pictures. Oh well, before the rabbits come hopping in... here's one last round-up of Big Cats.

The tiger family was a present for my parents on their joint birthdays... The cubs are supposed to be me and my sister, of course. Waiting to wreak havoc.

The candycane tiger was this year's Christmas card - a last-minute endeavor as always, overly complicated as always, I never learn... But, you know, I HAD to do a tiger. (The bird is a red-bearded bee-eater - I wanted a small bird in red or green that might conceivably live somewhere near tiger territory, and that little guy is red and green and cute and situated in the right general area. Glad I found him. Hey, my piles of random wildlife books are actually useful, whatd'ya know!)

The snow leopard was an extra... he was meant as a second card idea, but of course that turned out to be over-ambitious, so he didn't get done until January. Call it a New Year's card.

These are all available for sale as cards and prints. Hint. (Sales pitch? What sales pitch?)
Tiger Love || Candycane Tiger || Snow Leopard

The holidays this year were rather mellow (it was so cold we mostly stayed inside and ate cookies...) But there WAS this eclipse going on. Full moon eclipse on the solstice, man! That deserves a picture. I caught most of the second half of the eclipse in the wee hours of the morning before the clouds moved in - here's my general impressions of what it looked like (from memory, photos were kind of hopeless.) The full eclipse was very smudgy and orange from where I was. If I didn't know it was an eclipse I would've thought it was a very small and very localized cloud.

Raccoons and Tornadoes

Well, this has been an... interesting month. Parts of it, anyway. I spent most of the month chained to my computer trying to meet a few deadlines... But one evening, just as I'm about to take my daily walk, the sky suddenly turns green and I look out the window and see the air is full of horizontal rain, or some kind of precipitation, and whatever it is, it's so dense and blowing around so fast I can't see a thing out there... Naturally I postponed my walk. And shortly thereafter I learned that we'd just been struck by the famous Ten-minute Tornado of Brooklyn!

Hurricanes, yeah, sure, we get those, but tornadoes!? Weird.

The rest of this month's excitement was provided by an invasion of plumbers tearing my bathroom apart - my very own indoor tornado, complete with drills and blowtorches and strange skudge left all over the sink afterward...

Oh, and raccoons. We have a family of raccoons in the park. They all like to hang out together in one particular tree in the evening, so I stare at them, and they stare at me... I've managed to get a few doodles of 'em when they were out before dark, here they are!

We need a few obligatory tornado photos, too, of course. Mostly kind of dodgy, I'm afraid - my camera is broken so I had to use my phone, and most of the immediate post-tornado photos were taken at night... so, yeah, not pretty. Most of the damage in my area seems to have happened to trees and cars - as in, mostly trees falling on top of cars. Oddly, only a small part of the park was hit, the rest looks totally normal - but that small area definitely looks like a tornado hit it.

Illustrated Dreams...

So. A contest comes along with a theme of illustrating your own dreams... guess who has over ten years worth of totally weird, wild, and eminently illustratable dreams written down? HA, there's no way I could resist doing this! And now that I've done one dream picture... I think I want to do more... oh dear.

If you're really curious, you can read the dream here (and see the final picture as posted for the contest.)

That Picture Again (Somewhat Smaller):

Life studies for the picture, because I'm a perfectionist (look, HANDS!):

WIP it good! Various stages of progress: