Kind of just a mixed media mess...

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is snow.

I hate snow.

No, really hate it.

I grew up with snow, I still live with (I was going to say in rather than with, but then you'd wonder if I lived in an igloo) snow, and I hate snow. I hate cleaning off my car after it's been snowing, I hate driving in snow, and the only reason I don't hate shovelling snow is that I live in an apartment building so I rarely have to worry about taking care of walkways. And as for white Christmases? I think that they lose their charm once you're past childhood. One of the best Christmases I've ever had, personally, was one we spent in Hawaii.

With no snow.

Not a fan of snow, did I mention?

So naturally a prompt like snow wasn't going to bring out warm fuzzy feelings in Yours Doodlingly. What it did bring out was my mess of a mixed media journal (I so want to put journal in quotes. This book is nothing like a journal. More like a disaster). What you're seeing, then, done in front of the television last night, is cut-paper snowflakes covered in gesso and a blue watercolour wash, traced in watercolour brush pen, and... um, I guess you could say accented with silver and purple spider writer ink.

Yep.

I guess snow gives me the blues...

Darwin's Finches in soluble graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is explore. What you're seeing here is three quick sketches of what are popularly known as Darwin's Finches: "finches" from the Galapagos Islands that Darwin described after his trip around South America and Australia aboard the survey ship Beagle. The beak on my warbler-finch (the one on the left) is a bit too short because it was hard to judge from the reference photo I was using, and of course I didn't bother to do any further searching until I'd already finished the drawing. The other two finches are currently considered to be the same species, but the one on the right has developed a heavier body and beak and may one day become a new species.

That's the short and simplified version of that story, by the way. If you're interested in learning more, it should be easy enough to find if you google Geospiza fortis 5110. This post really isn't going to have much to do with Darwin's Finches and their importance to the development of the theory of evolution, believe it or not. It's more about the voyage.

And before I continue, I should note that as usual my scanner wasn't fond of the soluble graphite wash, so I've had to darken this a fair bit to show any detail.

I recently finished reading The Voyage of the Beagle, which is Darwin's account of his five years on the ship. He was serving as naturalist on a surveying trip, and in those days that meant you had to know a little bit about just about everything about the natural world (enough abouts in this sentence for everyone yet?), from geology to entomology. It was quite something to read this diary of a fairly young man (which, granted, since I was reading the second edition, was heavily influenced by the thoughts of the later, older man. Hmm. That makes it sound like Darwin invented time travel. Who knew?) exploring a world completely different from the England he'd grown up in. At times he's incredibly full of wonder and awe, at times he's dismissive, at times he goes on far too long about geology (I'm sorry. I just find it hard to get that interested in geology), and at times... well, he climbs an awful lot of hills and mountains. He must have driven his guides and servants nuts.

One thing that struck me very forcefully was the giant ball of contradiction that was Victorian science. There is this absolute admiration of the wonders of nature coupled with incredibly callous destruction. The standard operating procedure seemed to be see, admire, describe, shoot, describe dead thing.

There's a lot of dead things in The Voyage of the Beagle.

Now, before any of the more science-minded amongst you starts in on the importance of study specimens to the advancement of understanding, let me just say that I know. I have a zoology degree. I've handled many a dead thing. I know that it's almost impossible to fully understand anatomy without dissecting things, and I know the importance of study skins in the description and comparison of new species. It's not the death that bothered me so much; it's the scale. Where nowadays we might go out and collect one or two animals (or, increasingly and even better, their DNA), the Victorians were shooting braces at a time. As my officemate reminded me when I was describing all of this, there was a time where every field scientist's lab or office contained a well-used gun cabinet.

Considering what's since happened to some of the species that they were shooting in dozens, I'm glad that's not the way we explore the natural world anymore. The early science was important to take science to where it is now, but I hope we've learned that we can't continue to be so cavalier when dealing with the animals that we're studying.

Backing off from death for a moment, it's interesting to me that at first it wasn't the finches of the Galapagos that attracted Darwin's attention. That didn't happen until he got back to England and his collections were studied by other people. He was far more interested in a couple of species of... mockingbird, I think it was. A good lesson there, really. Sometimes you need others' eyes to help point you to the ideas that are truly important.

There are other things I could say about The Voyage of the Beagle -- the uncomfortable feeling a modern-day reader gets while hearing his very Victorian dismissal of many of the natives he meets comes to mind -- but I've already blathered long enough and blather's supposed to be for my other blog anyway. I'll just say, then, that if you have any sort of interest in early(ish) scientific exploration and the associated attitudes, the book's worth a flip-though.





Is it weird that I just gave a review for a nearly 170-old book? Probably. Welcome to my weird life, then.

Movember

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is whiskers.

Harry thought that handlebar moustaches were for sissies...

Happy End of Movember, boys. Congrats on whatever sort of 'stache you ended up with to support the cause.

And congrats to the many women in your lives who are no doubt waiting impatiently for December to start...



chuckle

Fun with art supplies? Or whatever.

This weird thing actually started out as thoughts about leaf structures on a magnified level.

No, really, it did.

Then my brain got into the construction paper. And glue. And acrylic paint. And a canvas board. And then... this.

Now the scary thing about this (it's called Leaf, very originally) is that it's currently on the wall of our art gallery at work. Yes, it's showing in public, and that's the reason I'm using it for this week's Illustration Friday prompt, which is shy.

I've said it before: I'm not an artist. I dabble. I doodle. And when I experiment like this, it doesn't ever get seen by the public. Except this year, for some reason. Not only did I bring in this... masterwork? for the staff show, but I also did a three-canvas painting. Yes, painting (it's on the other blog that's linked on the sidebar, but it's no great shakes so don't worry about checking it out). For anyone new to my world, I don't paint.

The staff show was hung mid last week. The thought that people were seeing these things nearly caused shyness overload.

Yep, seriously. To the point where I didn't show up for the opening.  Couldn't handle the thought of hearing an opinion about what until now has been a very private part of my life.

You artists out there are by now thinking that I'm at best neurotic and at worst slightly insane over something that's not a big deal, but for me it is a big deal. I'm a shy person to begin with; to put myself out there is never easy. To put this kind of thing out there? Well, I've used the word terrifying before, and it's pretty close to that.

Ah well. They're on the wall now. They've been seen by people. I haven't died.

I guess it's all ok.

Final Moult in pen & ink

Hey, look who's actually drawing again! For those who haven't seen my whinging and generally feeling sorry for my self on my other blog, I've been trying to get something ready for a show that's being hung next week, and in my world that's the signal to become completely blocked. Doodling for myself is fine, but the thought of putting something on a wall purposely for others to see it scares the bejeebers out of me enough to ensure that all arty things come to a complete, screeching halt (that "I'm not an artist" bit on the About Me tab? Not false modesty. I'm not an artist. The thought of putting my "art" on show is terrifying). Add that to the fact that this non-painter decided to work in acrylics this year, and... yeah. No art at all until the time crunch forced me to get something done. Pressure's off now, though, because the completed piece is all I've got and I can't do anything more about it.

Anyway.

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is haunted, and I promise that there's a reason why my brain went to dragonflies.

Entomophobes (of which I am a somewhat-reformed one) would be forgiven if they were creeped out by being around during the moulting time of some species of dragonfly. It doesn't happen with all of them, but for some species they exit the pond en masse looking for good, sturdy places to grip during the time it takes them to finally exit their nymphal skins. I don't want to bore you with the biology of the whole thing (for a change), but there's a good write-up here for those who are interested in the process. For me, the most incredible part of the whole thing is that it can take hours. Just imagine the vulnerability during that time, when your legs aren't yet solid enough to hold your weight and your wings haven't even inflated (and yes, I do mean to say inflated). If that happened to humans, I don't think humans would even exist.

Geez, all these words and I haven't even got to haunt. Get on with it, Dee.

I've been around local ponds in the late spring (doing school pond studies at work, mostly) in years where we've had masses of dragonfly nymphs climb out of the pond at once to metamorphose, and it really is a sight to see. All these rather large insects crawling along the ground and up any strong vertical surface, then splitting open their skins and starting the struggle to emerge. It truly looks exhausting, especially when you see it in real time as opposed to the sped-up versions you see on the internet. It's always a good learning moment for kids, to see metamorphosis up close.

What's left afterwards, though, is exuvia. Skins, that is. In peak years, hundreds and hundreds of skins all over the deck and picnic tables of the area where we pond dip. That's where haunt comes in for me. You can walk around the place and it looks like it's haunted by the ghosts of those hundreds of animals who have all shed their water-dwelling existence for an entirely new life. If I was feeling more poetic I could get absolutely purple here, but it is kind of a neat metaphor when you think of it. Shedding your skin, leaving the things that were haunting you behind, flying away... a lot could be done with that, I think.

Not by me today, though. It's enough of a triumph for me that I got the sketchbook out. It should happen more often now that the other piece is finished, I expect. Wish me luck with the staff show.

Symmetry in graphite

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is mirror. I have a bad habit of saying "this is a quick doodle...", but this one really is. Not at all obvious, I know. The fact is, I wasn't really in the mood for drawing this evening. I did, however, have something I wanted to say in regards to mirror.

When I was a kid, I drew. Just about every kid does. You draw, you explain to people what you drew, and you're happy. There came a point as I grew older, though, when that wasn't good enough. I started to hate drawing faces.

I never seemed to get them to come out right, you see. I'd start out great, but then they'd go all lopsided and uneven and my (even back then) slightly OCD self would get frustrated. In desperation, and since I hadn't yet been introduced to tracing paper, I used to draw half a face, fold the paper, do my best to trace what I could see of what I'd already drawn, and then unfold the paper and try to follow those traced lines to get my "perfect" face.

Is this sounding familiar to anyone else out there? If so, you know that faces done that way generally turn out worse than anything. The proportions usually aren't right. Eyes are too far apart. Chins are too wide. And for me, for whatever reason, mouths were often too small. Frustration on frustration, so I stopped drawing faces.

I've since learned through taking Early Childhood Development courses that pretty much every child goes through the perfectionist stage. Just drawing isn't good enough; the drawings have to be right. In the same vein (and I notice this at work particularly), children in that same stage will be very bothered if something they've written is written wrong and there's no way to erase it. Trust me, "just cross it out" doesn't work for kids who need everything to be perfect.

It's the stage, by the way, where a lot of people stop drawing all together. I can't draw this good enough becomes I can't draw, and there's the end of it.

For me, I didn't stop drawing. I wasn't as enthusiastic about it, maybe, but the drawing didn't stop. I didn't draw faces, however. Come to it, I still don't. Nowadays it's because I really don't have any interest in drawing people, but I'm sure that the disinterest started with my failed mirrored faces.

Now, the irony in all of this is that faces aren't mirrored. One of my little biological fascinations is symmetry. It's come up here before, so for anyone who actually reads this stuff I'll skip the diatribe and say that, for the most part (and we're talking about the so-called higher animals here), symmetry is bollocks. It's "apparent". Superficial. Our apparently symmetrical bodies are only apparently symmetrical on the outside. Cut us open, and things are shifted all over the place. You couldn't sew the left side of a body together with a created mirror image and expect it to function. And even on the outside the whole symmetry thing breaks down. Noses are crooked. One eye may be slightly higher than the other. One breast is very likely bigger than the other. And testes?

Well, ok, you get my point. The sad thing, though, from the kids' art side of view, is that telling a child that a lopsided face drawing is ok because faces really are lopsided probably isn't going to stop most children from getting bad face frustration.

So what to do? Well, I'm no expert and there's plenty of expert (or sometimes "expert") sources out there, so I think I'll let you look them up if you're interested in the subject. One suggestion, though. If you have a child who's hit the frustration stage there is NOTHING WRONG with letting them trace and copy things. Sure, it's not creative. Yes, we've been brought up to believe that stifling childhood creativity by telling kids the right way to do things is wrong. It would be wonderful if every child out there could make it through the perfectionist stage by figuring things out on their own, but most of us don't. If a musical kid gets frustrated by plinking away at the piano without being able to figure out how to make his or her fingers work right, we send the kid to piano lessons. Why do we seem to expect that a kid who likes to draw but is getting frustrated for lack of technique will eventually just blunder some way to success?



Um, yeah. Obviously it's something that matters to me, and I've blathered away too long about it. For anyone still reading, well, thanks.

Maybe I'll draw a face for you someday.

A happily lopsided face.

Cattails in art stix

This week's Illustration Friday prompt is burst. Autumn's nearly here, and with it comes the bursting of the cattails into seed balls. And as anyone who's ever used cattails decoratively knows, if you bring them in the house without spraying them with lacquer or something like that, in a little while you'll find yourself with a heck of a fluffy mess.

By the way, cattails can be an important survival food if you're ever lost in the woods (or near a marsh, in this case). They're easily recognisable, and pretty much all of the plant is edible. Tubers can be roasted, leaves can be split for the pith (but that's more work than I'd bother with), and the young flowers -- the "hot dogs" when they're still green -- can be cooked and eaten like corn on the cob. They're actually pretty tasty. The pollen can be used to stretch flour, and later in the season the fluff can be a good source of tinder.

And, erm, now you know.

This was done loosely and quickly on purpose. I'm still ruining things with too many details (that's why none of them have been posted) and I've got to get out of that rut somehow. The scanner's taken a bit of the colour again, so if you'd like to imagine a little orange rather than brown in the sky and on the tips of the leaves, that'll help somewhat.

I'm going to try to paint something now. Either that or fold the towels.





What do you want to bet that the towels win?