We're Back! With Kitties!

Okay, we're back... (I hope.) With kitties! Yeah, so things have been busy and the blog kinda lapsed, this happens... BUT KITTIES MAKE IT ALL BETTER! Er, right? Actually, it's all one kitty. One huge fluffy orange kitty named "Luna" who belongs to my aunt. I visited her place this Summer, and of course fluffy kitty sketches were inevitable. Enjoy!

Dang was she a nuisance to sketch sometimes, though. She looks like a huge mound of orange fluff with eyes, it's hard to know where to even start... "Somewhere under that rug is a cat, dang it... If I could only find it..." Plus of course, being a cat, she never really holds still. Just when you think she's settled down for a nap, that's when she decides to start lolling around, or washing, or jumping off the table to go inspect the food she won't eat... Yeah. Cats.

Year of the Rabbit(s)

Happy Year of the Rabbit! All right, it officially started, what, two weeks ago? (I meant to post last week, really I did - but I got snowed under with a flurry of work stuff. Totally valid excuse.) Well, anyway. In honor of the occasion, I've dug up a huge horde of bunny sketches - these cover a range of years, I'm not even sure of the dates, I just went digging through archived scans grabbing bunnies right and left. Most of these were sketched in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden - some are your regular garden-variety average brown bunnies, but I'm pretty sure the fancy varieties were abandoned tame bunnies.

Heads up - Bunny Mob, INCOMING!

And of course there were Lunar New Year festivities! I didn't catch many, but I rambled around Chinatown one weekend looking for lions. I didn't find nearly as many as some years (I think they might have been more active on Thursday, that's when the new year officially started,) but I spotted a few. So, here's the obligatory lion dance photos (such as they are...)

Groundhog!

Just a quickie post to say Happy Groundhog Day! Okay, normally I'd ignore this, but I was digging through my sketchbooks and found some groundhog sketches. Kinda old, but cute anyway.

(Spotted this guy on one of my walks upstate ages ago, really fat critter. Caught a little bit of him before he disappeared into his burrow.)

It's almost the Year of the Rabbit! There will be rabbits here shortly. Lots of rabbits. Stay tuned!

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.