Go and catch a falling star….

So, yes. This is, essentially, a stylized marabou stork carrying a slightly-anthropomorphized mandrake root in a ruff/pouch around its neck.
As usual, your next question (assuming the above statement answered your first) is probably, “okay, but why?”
I would like to blame the flavor text/Pokedex entries from … gen 1 on, really, though X/Y definitely played a part in this particular fiasco. Various wacky excesses were leading us to ponder the liberal use of overstatement and drama in the descriptive text, perhaps in the hopes of of impressing young children for whom such description techniques are standard. I suggested that some of the more perplexing design mash-ups might similarly represent childhood confusions about plants, animals, objects, etc.; and thus the stork idea was born.

I suppose Howl’s Moving Castle is also to blame at this point, since I recently re-read it against my will (as it turns out, you can not look up just one paragraph or page from that book without continuing on with the rest of it, whether it’s midnight or not), so John Donne’s prophetic poem was fresh in my mind as well. Thus we wound up with the stork’s white ruff and rather unattractive throat-pouch-thing morphing into a removable knotted bag/sling/nest dealio that additionally stands in for the fabled baby-bringer’s most prominent prop, while the baby is replaced by the aforementioned mandrake root. There’s … not much more to be said than that. Aside from the fact that yes, this is drawn on scratch paper and the printed square on the other side is showing through rather aggressively.

Call me Solitaire….

Again, not really much more to say about this one. One of my classes is over today, so I should be able to make some slightly better contributions soon, but for now we have a sad dodo-type bird inspired by a Deep Purple song.

Yes, you read that right (unless of course you read it wrong; I’m in no position to judge these things, I suppose.) The first song that starts up when I have my media list sorted a certain way is “Solitaire” (which you may well have never heard of, since I’d wager 1993 isn’t typically the decade that comes to mind when one thinks of Deep Purple), and I almost always have music playing when I draw. I started drawing birds and eventually wound up with a dodo, which naturally (if you’re me) led me to think about the Rodrigues Solitaire, a similarly extinct and flightless fellow. I also have an unfortunate tendency to *associate* music with what I’m drawing, so the wailing and whimpering lyrics (“A heart without an echo/A man without a child/Alone with all my sorrow”) inevitably led to the imagined plight of the sad sole surviving Solitaire.

Incidentally, and speaking of sound-alikes: There’s a repeated line, “Empty hearts and icy stares/Oh, call me Solitaire” — and despite always having *known* from context what the correct lyrics are, I cannot help *hearing* the line as “icy stairs.” Because let’s face it, here in the Midwest you are far more likely to encounter icy stairs on an average October-through-April day. It would be entirely plausible to include them in a mournful ballad.

DISCLAIMER: I don’t know exactly what a Rodrigues Solitaire looks (looked?) like. But it’s okay, because nobody else does either.

Shake it up baby…

Here we have a baby snake with its very own rattle.
I … really have nothing more to say than that. I was sketching Burmese pythons for a different reason entirely, and then I decided to make one of them into a rattlesnake. With a bonnet, obviously. Because (aside from a rattler’s lack of rattle, of course) baby snakes really don’t look too different from grown-up snakes except for the size difference. Which is pretty cool, to be fair — I was always impressed by the fact that venomous snakes hatch out that way, ready to take out the first tasty or terrifying thing that scurries past. It shouldn’t have surprised me, I suppose, since baby snakes have to eat too; but to an altricial mammal like myself it remains impressive. After all the snake-hatin’ I’ve been seeing recently (Halloween brings that sort of thing out in people, I think), here’s sending out a little respect for the rattlers and all their kin, no strings attached.
Even if I did just dress one up in a bonnet….

Firebug….

Well, I missed my deadline again. Today I’ve chosen to blame SNL, which aired half an hour late and entirely muddled my nighttime schedule. I elect not to blame my failed attempts at beating the Tower Tycoon in Diamond.

As something of an apology, I provide my Halloween-colored buddy from many years past (yes, more old drawings — but I’d be here even later if I’d waited to finish something like *this* for my post). If you can’t tell, it’s a monarch butterfly-themed dragon/wyvern, hanging for dear life to a rather put-upon looking purple blossom. He (on the equivalent of the hindwing — his tail — I appear to have included that little spot that distinguishes the monarch genders) is one of a series of bug-themed dragons, and one of the few fairly full-sized critters I actually bothered to color fully *and* give a piece of scenery to save him from floating around in a paper void.

Anyhow, for better or worse, sooner or later, here we are again. Hope your autumn has been free of freak tornadoes and snowstorms (e.g., not in the Midwest) so far.