Fireweed in pen and watercolour pencil

Illustration Friday's prompt is pioneer this week (bit odd for Christmas, I suppose, but it worked for me) and, being the nerd naturalist that I am, my brain immediately went to pioneer species. Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) is an early coloniser of cleared or burned areas (as its name suggests) and can often be found as a bright contrast to the charred tree remnants around it.

The flowers are also pretty good in salads.

As always, click on the thumbnail for a larger version.

Just some watercolour silliness

These are... not much, really. I'm only posting them because I didn't manage to do anything (yet... but if I haven't managed it yet it's probably not going to happen) for last week's Illustration Friday and I thought that the blog might be feeling lonely or neglected.

Ok, not the last part.

But anyway.

What you see here is exactly what the post title would lead you to expect. I played with the watercolours a bit while I was housebound during the last cold spell. Oh, wait. Not the last cold spell. The second-to-last.

Not that it matters.

But anyway. Again.

Up top? Some nonsense with weird washes, salt, an emery board, and a drinking straw. What's it supposed to be? Nothing.

Below? Something a little more somethingish. I have a collection of mini bottles (I think they were given out in laundry soap or tea or something when I was a kid. My grandmother saved them for me). And these are some of them.

The end.

I really have no idea what to think of this post.

Sea Turtle in pen and ink

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is hatch. And this is a sea turtle. Of some sort. The source I got my resource photos from didn't say which species.

My apologies to anyone who actually knows more about turtles than I do (which is... a lot of people, really. I'm a mammalogist by training. I like reptiles, but that's about as far as my expertise goes) for the lack of detail. I was just hoping to get enough to give the idea of the face. For whatever reason, it amuses me that baby turtles are born already looking mildly peeved about the world they've ended up in.

Yeah, I don't know either.