Just another post of sketches of Beatrix Potter-style art, with the old badger making various friends...

Blue mason bee, best macro photo I have ever taken!

Blue Mason Bees

While I do still have fuzzy animal pictures waiting to be painted, my day was slightly derailed when I came home from work last night. My girlfriend had told me she was ordering mason bees, to keep in the yard as pollinators for our garden. Somehow I didn't anticipate how enthusiastic she'd be when they arrived. The mason bee house is bigger than either of us expected, while the bees themselves are tiny, almost fly-like. With camera poised I watched while she opened the boxes that held their cocoons, to find them already emerging. At first they were sluggish, wobbly, but in less than a minute a few were scaling the sides of the little humidity box that came with them. We let them climb on our hands briefly just to maneuver them back into the box, but by two or three minutes they were looking seriously ready to explore.
As I write this, they're in a special box in the fridge, waiting for us to get the bee house set up after work tonight.
Yes, we did warn the roommates.
My sketches are from google image search, but these are the same type of blue spring mason bees, just in better detail than I could ever manage to see from real life. Unfortunately the lighting was bad so late in the evening and my own photos aren't so good.
My girlfriend, meanwhile, murmurs 'bees!' and giggles every now and then. It's a cheerful thought on a grey and rainy Friday. This weekend there will be gardening, and bees.

Here and gone again

My parents came to visit, and now they're gone. I had a lot of fears, leading up to their visit, a lot of expectations, many of them not so good. I had a huge, looming, overwhelming anxiety over a specific conversation I've been putting off until I could see them in person, and now... I kinda miss them. The whole thing went a lot better than I expected.
There were no criticisms of our house, of our belongings. There were some unflattering personal comments made, here and there, but I'll let them slide. They gave me an iPad, which was wholly unexpected, and they gave me money with a promise of more to come in installments, which was... also unexpected. Part of me wonders where that gift was, when we were struggling and didn't always know where our next meal was coming from. I've only asked for money twice, once when my old '84 Chevy's transmission was shot, and once when my cat was in the midst of being diagnosed with cancer. They contributed money, in that first case, and a used transmission put my car back on the road. Maybe they were afraid, if they gave me money before, that I'd just spend it? Living in poverty is expensive. We're on an upswing in our lives, now, with enough money to relax a little and save up for things we'd like in our lives down the road. I'm not sure how clearly they understand the desperate period just a few years back, or the fact that in some ways we're still recovering. There's a lot of things I'm not sure they understand, and it's always been a struggle to relate my side of things to them. There was, this visit, a lot more listening than I expected or remember. There was still a lot of fear, from them, for me. There always has been.
A few people told me they could see my mother in me. I spent the whole visit realizing how much of my dad's speech habits and mannerisms I have, and how much I take after him. My own mother, when we were side by side in a public bathroom mirror, said she couldn't see what they were seeing, that I look like my father's side of the family. The last morning, she took a few last photos of me sitting on their hotel bed. I noticed my hair was doing this wave I keep trying to get rid of, in the pictures she took. She told me my father's hair had looked just like that, when they were first dating. She's still struggling with who I am, and the choices I've made in my life. My father still seems okay with it all, as long as I'm a good person. Some things haven't changed. They both said they wished I had a more successful life. I said that depends how you measure success. I've been with the same beautiful girl for fifteen years and intend to be with her the rest of my life. We're renting, now, but saving for a someday house. We're about to have our second year of a garden, bigger and better than last year. We have two cats (who both my parents quietly adored), and we have the things we need. We live frugally, not because we have to, but because our desires are pretty basic. I know who I am. More importantly, I feel free to be who I am.
That last one is not something I need their permission for, but it's nice to have it.

Beatrix Potter Birds?

So my parents are coming to visit next week... second time in almost fifteen years, and they've never seen this house before.

Needless to say I'm freaking out spending time cleaning. That said, I haven't gotten as much art done as I'd like. I did get a good start on art of characters for the aforementioned roleplay community, though. For some unfathomable reason we ended up with a lot of birds.

Primrose Greenleaf

I did get a few done, before full cleaning panic set in, and I actually got drawings penciled and inked for every character that joined up thus far, but today I'm only posting the finished paintings.

Here we have Primrose Greenleaf, an herbalist chicken. I'm told she is a buff brahma, which are some of the more awesome looking chickens I've ever seen. The player is, I gather, very fond of chickens. The black feather markings and the floof around the feet make this kind a wonderful art subject!

Rumple

I don't know much about Rumple yet, although I'm pretty sure that's short for Rumplestiltskin. I was told he's a magpie with half-moon glasses, and I have a certain fondness for magpies, so I was happy to have an excuse to paint one.

And lastly we have Balthazar, a yellow-headed blackbird, which is a species I had no clue existed until my girlfriend told me about them. This is her character, and that pendant he's wearing is a cluster of grapes. Balthazar is fond of wine, being artfully mussed, and looking for a good time.

Balthazar

The Tale of the Watercolor Badger

This blog keeps languishing, and I feel guilty for that, but I just have so much on my plate these days. When I started this blog for the 365 project, I was between jobs, living in a crappy little apartment, struggling to get by. A lot's happened since then. I nursed my cat of thirteen+ years through cancer and euthanasia (You can see her featured way back in this post and even then I can see the pale spot on one side of her muzzle where the tumor was lurking), I stumbled into a dream job working at a veterinarian hospital, and we moved to a house with a yard, where we're now preparing for our second year of a productive garden. Art and reading never stop, for me, but taking the time to sit down and write an essay about it is trickier. The job at the vet keeps me busy, and the past six months, while I'm still very happy there, I've been working 50+ hour weeks 6 days a week, so what free time I do have is partly eaten up with errands and all the basic business of living. I don't, I will admit, read as much or as often as I'd like.

I have still been doing plenty of art, even though I haven't posted it here.

In the spirit of that, I'd like to try to post stuff here again. I may or may not manage to resurrect my 365 project, although I had plenty of ideas waiting in the wings, so we'll see. If I can manage a post a week or so, to share art and musings, I'll consider that enough.

On that note, I'll start with my most recent stuff, and it is loosely book-related. The other hobby that I cram in whenever I have a few spare moments is role-playing, which is always a weird thing to have to explain to people who might not know what it is. Not Dungeons & Dragons (although I'm no stranger to that, and it's more flexible cousin GURPS), not something kinky for the bedroom, either. I roleplay online, and there's a pretty vast community who does, with original characters or fan characters drawn from books, movies or TV, we're mostly people of a writerly bent of mind, coming together to play characters meeting, going on adventures, forming friendships (or conflicts), and basically engaging in interactive story telling. It's something that crosses all genres and styles, depending what the people involved are interested in playing, and it's something I've been involved in pretty much as far back as I had regular access to the internet.

The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck

More recently, a friend created a roleplay community for some Beatrix Potter inspired roleplay, which is an opportunity both for stress-free fluffy tea time shenanigans, and also the darker more realistic side of animal interaction (a lot of the people playing grew up on books like Watership Down as well as the more pleasant talking animal stories children are fed). Beatrix Potter's work itself, for all that it's talking animals in clothes, rarely shied away from the realities of predators and prey.

I'm not sure if it was the general environment of the game, or the idea of Beatrix Potter's art, but I threw myself into the game with a passion, created an original character, and started painting.

The Tailor of Gloucester

When I was young, I had several Beatrix Potter books, including a big treasury with a collection of tales. Growing up, talking animals were very much my focus of play, I preferred animals over humans both in my games and my art, and what that says about me I'm not sure. I didn't really start trying to draw human beings until High School. The versatility of Beatrix Potter's animals interested me, the fluidity with which they moved between wearing clothes and presenting themselves as people, and other times wearing only their own fur and acting very much in their place in an ecosystem of wild animals. The pen and ink and watercolor style of artwork, too, was a medium I've become very comfortable with, and realism always appealed to me.

As a child, my favorite stories were the Tailor of Gloucester, and the Pie

The Tale of Mr. Tod

and the Patty Pan. Mice and rats always seemed to have a rich wealth of stories, my mind blending Beatrix Potter's portrayals with the Secret of Nimh and, later the Redwall books. Cats and dogs, too, there's a wealth of stories about, and I remember adoring the pictures of Duchess in my big treasury book, the art even more than the story, I think, was my favorite there.

The setting of the current roleplay game is the countryside, rather than the city, and we were encouraged to make animal versions of other characters we already play, if in need of inspiration. That's not quite what I did, but I definitely went for an archetype I tend to play, a slightly grumbly, bookish old man, and the perfect animal seemed to me to be the badger.

My own take on a badger character

Before I tried drawing my own character, I thought I'd google Beatrix Potter's art, because I couldn't even recall seeing an illustration of a badger from her. What I discovered was a single tale, in which a badger played a mischievous role.

There's nothing wrong with her illustration, of course, but the badger described in the tale of Mr. Tod wasn't my badger at all. What I cam up with was the image of something slightly more respectable. Bespectacled, bookish, just a little grumbly but with a sharp sense of humor. He's a retired, well-fed old badger who prefers a peaceful neighborhood and slow food (which ought to put the new neighbors slightly at ease). He's not quite as much of a gentleman as he's taken for in his old age, though, and he's been in more than a few scraps, including a vicious fight with a dog that left a scar over one eye. His name is Mr. Tadge Blackbriar, and in the game, I have yet to see anyone address him by his first name, I guess he comes off as too distinguished for that.

Mr. Tadge Blackbriar

There's something about working in ink (prismacolor fine line markers, in this case) and watercolor that feels like an easy default. From a very early age I got used to watercolor paints, and a family friend who is a professional artist to this day gave me childhood lessons. I remember sitting in her elegant house, with the grand piano and white carpet no shoes were allowed on. Her father's art hung on the dining room wall (a landscape in the tradition of English Watercolorists) and her art elsewhere throughout the house. At the dining room table she taught me different exercises in texture and how watercolors blend, or how to keep them from blending, when needed.
At home, we had a privately published book of hers, a story of a mouse.

Mr. Blackbriar moving into the neighborhood

Since then I've played with a variety of mediums, and I went through a period where I was in love with acrylics. Oil paints, I never did get the hang of. I always came back to watercolors, and these days they're fast and familiar, a quick and easy way to get color down the way I want it. The pages of the sketchbook I've been using aren't ideal for it, but the ripple effect on the paper seems to be at a minimum even with big washes of color.

I've been so inspired by the roleplay, in fact, that I started doing portraits of each character that joined. Playing online, there's space for icons, a handful of little images to be used with each post of writing that can help illustrate the character's mood. That kind of thing inspires me to draw even more images of the character, in a variety of expressions. Expect more art posts to come...