Sea-gooseberry in Derwent Metallics & carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is light.

The Comb-jellies or Ctenophores are a group of jelly-like aquatic animals. They're largely colourless (well, most of them are. There are exceptions, though), but as they move their rows of propelling cilia they scatter light and look as though they have moving rainbows, more or less.

There are some ctenophores that are bioluminescent (that is, they can produce their own light), but most of the ones you see on those deep-sea submarine documentaries are just shining in the light that the filming equipment uses.

This doodle is VERY loosely based on a comb-jelly known as the Sea-gooseberry (Pleurobrachia pileus), which is found world-wide. Well, in the oceans at least. I have a feeling that you'd have a time finding them here in Alberta.

I wish I'd had my black paper to do this one on, but since I don't have it with me you get carbon pencil scribble instead. Ah well. You work with what you have, right?

Merry Christmas

Last post 26 October? October? Sheesh.

Excuse #1: I've been rehabbing a very stubborn wrist injury that makes me shaky if I try to have too much fine muscle control for too long. Frustrating for someone who likes to work in pen and ink. It's getting better (finally!) but I think I'd be wise to stick to pencils and (sigh) paint for a while. Why the sigh? Well, as anyone who's looked at this blog more than once knows, I paint like a five-year-old. I wish I didn't, but somehow my brain just doesn't like to think in paint.

Excuse #2: The "art" I've been making lately is just too randomly blobby for me to want to bother scanning it. I've been amusing myself, but it's definitely not for public consumption. Heck, sometimes it's barely for my consumption. Trust me, you haven't been missing anything.

Excuse #3: Is it just me, or has Illustration Friday been a bit less inspiring lately? Probably just me. It's my usual reason for bothering to post here, though, so if it hasn't been doing much for me I guess that still counts as a reasonable excuse.

Today's (likely) last post of the year is a quicky in tinted charcoal. And yes, I know that's not the right colour for a poinsettia; even the highly overbred ones that make up Christmas decor these days. If they make red or even pink in tinted charcoal, I certainly don't have it. Lavender was the closest I could come.

Anyway, here's to posting more than every two months in the new year. And here's to me not being stupid enough to bugger up a major joint for months ever again.



Um, anyone who knows me in person is killing themselves laughing right now at the absolute impossibility of that last sentence, and to them I'd just like to say shut up and then pout in a corner...

Stripped Down in tinted charcoal

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is farewell.

Goodbye, winter gear. Too bad, so sad. Don't come out again until next November.



Of course, since this is Alberta it'll probably be out again next week.

Sigh.

Sunflower Scaffold in tinted charcoal and Derwent Metallics

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is train.

I like to train morning glories up my sunflowers. I like the way it looks, and since I'm container-gardening on a balcony the two-for-one in the same space is a nice bonus.

Now, if only spring would make a slight thought about appearing...

Thin-legged Wolf Spider in carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is carry. I usually make an effort to do a doodle specifically for the word (actually, that's really why I bother participating at all. I'm not an artist. I'm sometimes pretty uncomfortable putting my stuff anywhere near those of you who are. At least IF gives me a reason to keep practicing, though), but it's not going to happen this week from the looks of it. So, rather than miss another week, here's an oldie. It was done for a spider display at work.

Wolf Spiders and Nursery Web Spiders are unusual in the spider world in that, rather than make an egg case and guard it, or make an egg case and just plain die, they carry their egg sacs with them. For the Nursery Web Spiders it must be massively difficult -- they carry theirs on their jaws. Wolf Spiders, however, attach theirs to their spinnerets and drag them around with them while the spiderlings develop.

They're not done even when the eggs hatch, though. The dozens of tiny spiderlings climb up on their mother's back and hitch a ride until they're big enough to fend for themselves.

Pretty nifty parenting for an invertebrate.

This spider is a Pardosa sp (no idea of the sp. We have a few spp around here, and I couldn't begin to tell them apart. And incidentally, I've totally been saying sp as "spuh" in my head as I've been typing this) that I found on my father's pond liner conveniently just as I was starting to create the display. I'm not sure she was a willing model, but at least she stayed long enough for a reference photo.

Flown in carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is grounded. And here? An assortment of things that used to fly, but won't be flying anymore as far as I can tell.

The feather I hope was moulted rather than leftover from some animal's meal, although... circle of life and all of that, right? Actually, as a zoologist I have to admit that I'm not at all squicked out by food chains. They're more than a little bit necessary, after all.

The plant fruits are both wind-dispersed, and have a couple of different strategies for staying in the air as long as possible. Everyone's familiar with the parachute-bearing fruits of the dandelion, I know, although I didn't know that the fruits themselves are called cypselae rather than achenes (kind of a nerd point there, but without us nerds the world would be a much duller place. No, really. It would. Nerd power!). The other fruit is an achene, and it's the samara or key of the Manitoba Maple or Box Elder. We always called them helicopters when I was a kid, because they stay in the air by spinning as they fall. I have kind of a weird little fascination with these things, I guess, judging from how many of them I've drawn over the years.

Last but not least, I like to think that my little spiderling has just finished the one and only flight of its life. In order to spread out -- and keep from eating each other -- the spiderlings of many species will send out a long filament of silk once they're hatched, and "balloon" to another place when the wind catches the silk.

Everything here was built to be aloft (well, maybe not the spider) but has hit the dirt for the last time. Sounds pretty grounded to me.

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Incidentally, as an almost-fanatical sharpener -- to the point where I hardly used to be able to start any sort of drawing project until ALL of the pencils in the kit were sharpened even if I wasn't going to use them -- I'm stupidly proud to say that I didn't sharpen my pencil one single time while I was doing this. Not even when I got to the dandelion seed. Small steps count, you know.

Spider on Rose Leaf in carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is scary. Is it cheating that I drew something that is scary for some people but that I find fascinating?

Hey, I can understand fear of spiders. They're crawly, they seem to have a few too many legs, and the thought of them lurking around the rose bushes is enough to send some gardeners into shivers.

Me, though? My usual spider reaction is "cool. I wonder what kind it is?"

That is, I suppose, a fairly recent response. I mean, I've always tolerated spiders. Terrified of insects as a child (and the massive infestations of tent caterpillars at the time didn't help. Not being able to go outside without stepping on that wriggling blue carpet? Nightmarish.), but not so bad with spiders. I know it sounds weird, because it is weird. Best I can figure, the spiders were ok because they ate the insects.

Spiders became more of a like than a tolerate for me a few years ago when I was working on a spider display for the nature centre. I spent an entire summer photographing and drawing spiders (some of the sketches can be found via the slideshow on the blog's sidebar, for anyone interested), and when you get something like that in your head you start seeing spiders everywhere. No, wait -- that's a good thing. You start seeing spiders everywhere, you gain an appreciation for their different life styles and survival strategies, and you realise very forcefully that if it wasn't for the spiders we'd all be butt-deep in insects. They're fantastic pest control.

Of course, it didn't hurt anything that I have a fascination for comparative anatomy stemming from my university days. You can tell a lot about an animal by looking at the structure of its body parts, and spiders are beautifully built for the jobs that they do.

Yes, I meant to type beautifully there. I know I'm not going to convince most of you, but there's a great deal of beauty to spiders.

Anyway. I suppose that the idea of spiders in the roses is scary enough for most people to qualify for the IF prompt, even if my reaction was a little more on the disappointed side. Disappointed that I never did figure out what species of spider the original for this doodle was, that is. It wouldn't give me a good enough look at it to attempt an ID.

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This particular doodle started out to be a bit more precise than it ended up. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to get scribbly with carbon pencils. Maybe I need to take some time away from the pen & ink and let myself get looser again? Might not be a bad idea...

Ladybird in Hand in carbon pencil

With a little bit of watercolour pencil thrown in just for fun.

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is brave. So what's brave about holding a ladybird beetle? Not much, unless you grew up a complete insectophobe. Which I did.

Having this happen to me as a kid would have kept me indoors for at least a week.

I work as a naturalist now and it isn't unusual for me to wind up with insects crawling on me in the course of a school program, but there's still a little voice inside my head that thinks I'm absolutely insane to let it happen. The fact that I can, and that the children I'm teaching probably don't know that I used to be scared of insects? Well, doesn't that count as brave?

Brave comes in all sizes, I figure.

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Edited to add:

After I posted this, it occurred to me that I could have submitted pretty much anything I've ever submitted for Illustration Friday for this word. I'm just a doodler, and for a long time I was a pretty closeted doodler. It's a bit of an act of bravery every single time one of these doodles makes it to the blog...

Walking the Beam in graphite and carbon pencil

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is clumsy, and this doodle takes a bit of explaining.

I was born with short Achilles tendons and had them -- well, let's say medically dealt with -- when I was three years old. Some of my earliest memories, unfortunately, are of sobbing to my mother that I didn't want to do the physiotherapy exercises that had been assigned to try to ensure that the tendons didn't contract again (and don't feel sorry for me about the sobbing. I was a weepy kid anyway). The whole tendon thing has led to a lifetime of being more or less clumsy and awkward in getting around.

One of the things I had to do regularly as part of the therapy was to attempt to walk a balance beam. Not the elevated type that they use for gymnastics; this was just the kind of thing you might find in a daycare's play area. For me it may as well have been three metres up and fifty metres long, though. I didn't have the balance or coordination to get all the way down most of the time, and my toe-scuffed shoes were always a testament to the fact that I often forgot to put my heels down when I walked.

Can you imagine having to actually remember to put your heels down when you walk? Even today I still occasionally find myself thinking "heel, toe, heel, toe" on my clumsier days...

Yeah, it's as weird as it sounds.

Kind of suits my overall weirdness, I guess.

Wilderness in... um...

Well, mostly graphite and carbon pencil with a bit of watercolour pencil thrown in just to be confusing. Or something.

This is a quick doodle for the Illustration Friday prompt wilderness. Quick because, frankly, it was all my head could take today. I could donate a headache to anyone who needs one. Seriously. I'd even pay shipping.

Um, anyway.

I know that some people out there might see wilderness (forests, specifically) as dark and forbidding places where something's always watching you. They can be dark, yes, and it's a pretty good bet that you're being watched by something when you're in a forest. I tend to think of it more as visiting someone else's neighbourhood rather than being in a forbidding place, though (erm... can you tell I spend a lot of my time teaching children about nature?).

And hey. If you wander around in someone else's human neighbourhood I'm pretty sure that you'll get watched there, too. Or at least noticed. It isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Columbine in carbon pencil

I know, you're thinking "what kind of idiot draws a nice, colourful flower in black and white?"

Don't worry, I'm thinking it too.

Please do note, though, that the date on this doodle is NOT from two years ago. That's right, I've actually sat down and done a proper drawing.

Ok, maybe not proper exactly, but at least it mostly looks like a flower.





Erm... doesn't it?

Long-jawed Orb Weaver in charcoal

Another from the spider display, because I don't have many more doodles saved on my stick to post. Guess I'll have to round up a few more to have their pictures taken.

These spiders are often found near ponds or waterways. They tend to make a tilted web, and they cut the middle out of it so they can move from side to side.

They'll also stretch themselves out to camouflage as a bit of vegetation, but I've spread this one out a little more to give a better idea of the anatomy.

Jewelled Araneus in carbon pencil

Or at least I think it was in carbon pencil. Hard to tell from the scan, but it doesn't look like graphite to me and I don't have the original right here to check.

What can I say? It's been a few years since I did this one.

Araneus gemmoides is a large-ish orb weaver whose most easily distinguished features are the two large bumps on its abdomen. So what do I do but draw the thing from an angle where you can't really see the bumps?...

Gotta wonder what happens in my brain sometimes. Logic certainly doesn't seem to apply.

Marbled Orb Weaver in charcoal

And now for something completely different.

Well, a little different.

This illustration was for a spider display I created at work a few years ago. The original is in (cheap, pressed) charcoal, but the scan loses a bit of the texture.

The species drawings were supposed to be fairly basic, and the first few were... but as is often the case I got on a bit of a roll and the later spiders started looking a bit more realistic.

I like spiders for a lot of reasons (not the least of which is that they eat insects), and the reason I like them from a doodling point of view is that they are, at least in my eyes, functionally beautiful. Nothing is superfluous on your average spider; it's all there for a reason.

That's cool.

Tulip in charcoal

This was part of a series of doodles of a tulip bouquet, and the photo's a bit off because the sketch is hanging up on my wall and I was too lazy to take it down.

Lazy is a big theme in my life, as you might have noticed.

Stargazer lily in carbon pencil

I love carbon pencils. I love the smoothness, but I also love the depth of colour that you'll never get from graphite.

I should end this post right here, you know. Otherwise I'm just going to start muttering on about texture, and... well, what the heck. One of the main reasons that I don't usually paint (besides the fact that I have the brush skills of a five year old) is that touch and texture is a huge part of the doodling experience for me. I can easily spend an hour in an art store just fondling paper.

Yep. Not kidding there. I fondle paper.

The texture of the paper, the feel of a good pencil; the whole thing's pretty visceral for me. When you combine decent paper with something like a carbon pencil I'm completely in art geek heaven.

I don't even care that the sketch is nothing to write home about.

Well, I don't care much, anyway.