Tulip in... finger paint?

Um, yeah. "Messless" finger paint on reactive paper.

Maybe the less said about this one the better?

Although... my inner five-year-old has certainly been coming out a lot in the past couple of days, hasn't she? Makes a person wonder, really.

Laundry Men in modelling clay

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is Parade. This week's picture is decidedly not an illustration...

The thing is, I'm a bit under the weather and didn't have the patience to doodle. I did, however, feel like being a five-year-old. The result? A parade of little clay men on a laundry basket. And why a laundry basket? Well, if you were a little clay man wouldn't you want to parade on a laundry basket?

Ok, seriously? I'd just finished folding some towels.

Max the cat, incidentally, did help with the modelling somewhat. He didn't stick around to have his photo taken this time, though.

Oh, and I really have no idea why the purple guy has it in for the white guy. Maybe they were just having a collectively bad day....

Spider, moth and rose in pen and ink

Illustration Friday's prompt this week is Hierarchy. Odd one, I think. My mind went all sorts of ways. Totem poles, circus balancing acts... but in the end I went back to nature. Stick with what you're familiar with, I guess.

This was inspired by a photo I took last year (or maybe the year before. Not like it matters. And, as usual, click on the photo to enlarge it). I'd post a link but I think it's on my work blog. I kind of like to keep work and personal stuff separate. Anyway, I spotted a tiny moth on this wild rose bush. The fact that it wasn't moving gave me the hint to look for the even tinier crab spider that was eating it.

And what does this have to do with hierarchy? Well, at first glance it's a pretty simple food chain. The rose leaves were eaten by some insect (not the moth, though), and the spider's eating the moth. Top man on the pyramid, right?

I suppose. But which one lasts longest in the end? Not the spider, and obviously not the moth. And without the plant, neither the moth (which, as a caterpillar, would have depended on some kind of plant for food) nor the spider (which,as an ambush predator, needs the plant for shelter and camouflage) would even exist.

Sometimes it just isn't as simple as who's on the top rung of the ladder. Even in human society, each level of the hierarchy is dependent on all of the others. Sometimes we just forget that, I figure.

Birds. Well, kinda sorta.

Weird Play-doh bird meets weird modelling clay bird.

I, um...

I think that maybe I need to get out more.

Yeah.

Afternoon Poems

Afternoon poems are different.
While nights speak of darkness
and warn of mornings
afternoons only know that they are hot
and lazy
and should have worn a hat.
Afternoon poems meander through the brain like old rivers
remembering old floods
but too trapped in yesterday to want
the rush of young foreign streams.
Afternoon songs are mumbled songs --
snatches of showtunes with teatime philosophy
and no more memorable
than a friendly round of Name That Tune.
Afternoon poems do nothing for the soul
and yet
when dusk brings on its shadows
and forebodings
watch the mind plead for just one small touch
of afternoon.

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I haven't been writing poetry for a while (got bored with myself, to be honest), but in honour of National Poetry Month I thought I'd pull up something from the notebook archives just for... well, I was going to say fun, but does this qualify as fun?

Maybe. I guess.

This one's part of a longer cycle called Life on the Small that, according to my notes, was written back in 2005. The rest of the poems in the group are uneven -- I'm being charitable there -- and from the style I can guess that I was writing at the patio table on a hot summer day. And, apparently, didn't bother to go back and tighten things up afterwards.

Ah well. There you go. The verbal equivalent of the five minute doodle you usually see here. If you're desperate for more of this (whatever this actually is), just hit the poems label below or on the sidebar.

Um... something in watercolour and Sharpie

I... dunno. It's colourful?

I had sat down to draw something but then decided I wasn't in the mood to doodle. Apparently I was in the mood to trace around paint splotches.

I really just don't know...

Happy Easter, I guess.

Last year's clematis leaves in pen and ink

Today's doodle was brought on by the Illustration Friday prompt fleeting. I suppose dead (so dead they're crispy) clematis leaves could be looked at as the leftovers of summer's fleeting memory. They could be, if a person wanted to go all Last Rose of Summer on the subject...

Me? I just like the lines, so I purposely kept this very simple (maybe too simple? It's almost an abstract, really).

That, plus (here comes the honesty part) the fact is that I don't have my Micron with me so I was using one of those new Sharpie nylon-tipped writing pens. Not a bad feel, actually, but a bit too thick for details unless you're working pretty big. Which I wasn't.

Enough typing, already...