Walnut in pen & ink

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is separated. The two halves of this walnut shell have definitely been separated, and the shell's been separated from its meat as well.

Before I go any further, I've just noticed how scribbly today's effort is. Scribbly mood, I guess.

I love Christmas nuts -- nuts in the shell, I mean. I look forward to them all year. I wish they were available all year, to be honest. Nuts in the shell seem a lot fresher, and I like the challenge of working to get to them. Besides, nuts in the shell seem to leave a person satisfied after having eaten a lot less than you would shelled nuts.

Well, that's the way it works for me, at least.

Since I was a kid, walnuts presented a special challenge come Christmastime. I always made an extra effort to try to get the shell halves separated without cracking them. Sometimes it seemed silly, since leaving the shell intact made it that much harder to get the good stuff out, but I still prided myself on getting those shells open intact. I saved them, too.

What? There's always uses for walnut shells. They make great squirrel ornaments. And skunks. And mangers, if that's more your inclination for things to hang on the tree.

A few years ago I was looking for something in my old closet at my father's place, and I happened upon one of my forgotten walnut stashes. Two zip-bags full of walnut shell halves. I honestly don't remember when I put them there, but it must have taken at least a couple of Christmases to get that many shells. And then? I put them away like they were treasure. Kind of made me think that I just may have a problem...

Anyway. Those particular shells got taken to the nature centre where I work, where they've been used for quite a few craft days. Told you walnut shells were useful.

Today's featured shell (a fairly small, unbleached walnut. I think they taste better, to be honest) won't be squirreled away in the closet, I promise. I was thinking that I might paint it. Paint on it, I mean; not make a painting of it. No idea why, but if the results are at all interesting I imagine they'll get posted here.

Goodness knows that I've posted weirder things.

Work stuff

Yesterday was Ground Squirrel Day for yours truly. Richardson's Ground Squirrels, for anyone who'd like to look them up. These pictures are meant to be a bit on the cartoonish side, but still be fairly identifiable. Do I like them? They'll do. But for the record, I suck at ground squirrels. Plants work better for my brain.

 Adult

 Burrow

 Hibernation

Young

Incidentally, if you're ever planning to draw newborn ground squirrels (and I just know that you are), judging from my resource material the best colour match for their skin tone is raspberry. Who knew?

Round in inktense pencil

Do inktense pencils count as ink or watercolour? They're ink-based pencils, after all, and once they're dry they aren't moving...

Anyway. This week's Illustration Friday prompt is round. These? Bubbles, I guess. More or less. I don't really have much to say about them (a shock to anyone who's familiar with this blog, I'm sure) other than they were kind of fun.

The cheap scanner has, as usual, killed some of the colour here. My oranges have turned redder than I wanted and the green a bit yellower, but the idea's still there (such as it was). What's missing a little is that the brush strokes were intentionally messy. Now they look more like mistakes, but whatever. In the spirit of round I'm gonna roll with it.

Conch in pen & ink

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is silent. Today's doodle features my family conch shell. I'll get to the family part in a bit.

First of all, this thing's massive. It's nothing like the dainty, thin conch you might buy as a souvenir in Hawaii (and I know that because we also have a souvenir conch from Hawaii). It's thick, it's heavy, and it has layers almost like a sedimentary rock. It also has a hole drilled partially through it (I imagine the "partially" part was because the thing is really thick) so it could be hung on a nail. The side that was facing the wall is abraded smooth in places, because it hung for a long time that way. The rest of it is beaten up and scarred from a lot of years of abuse.

The shell is about a hundred years old, or probably more. A shell from an animal that lived a silent life in a fairly silent world (well, compared to ours). An animal that's been silent for a long time even if it could make a noise, and now its shell sits silently on a shelf.

The irony here? My great grandmother used it to call the men in from the field for meals.

A silent animal's shell prized for its carrying sound. I find that kind of neat, actually.

There's another part of this story that I find mainly confusing, though. I know for sure that my great grandmother used the shell, because my grandmother witnessed it every day as a child. The thing is... this was in Southern Alberta at the turn of the last century. Land-locked Alberta at a time when travel wasn't exactly easy and definitely wasn't cheap. How exactly did it get there?

No one I've talked to has the remotest idea.

The conch, of course, is silent on the subject.

Pet camouflage? In pen & ink

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is stripes. And this?

I dunno.

Something really quick, because I'm not going to be around on the weekend.

I have no idea why it's so fat. Or peeved. Ah well.

Candy wrappers in pen and ink

Just a quick (we're talking five minutes here) line study of some candy wrappers. Two mini bars and a package of gummies.

Don't judge me -- my father was the one who opened the Halloween candy early...

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...