Have an average day….

I do in fact hope you have a happy Easter or Sunday or whatever, but this was one of those “first thing that comes to mind” titles; a Russian instructor (the instructor was Russian, the course was Linguistics) of mine would send us out of class like this after observing the doggedly upbeat insincerity of American greetings and farewells (particularly in classrooms and checkout counters). He once actually did wish us all good day, and it was deeply unsettling.

Anyhow, here’s an Easter bunny, very nearly too late for the actual holiday, decorated in a style vaguely reminiscent of those beloved fancy pysanka/pisanka/Easter eggs from Eastern Europe (most famously Russia … see, that wasn’t an *entirely* random anecdote up there).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some pop-singer covers of Disney songs to listen to (including the only version of It’s a Small World that I really like). This is what comes of having free time to organize the CDs in the Youth department….

A leaf on the wind…

Easter bunnies are so next-holiday. For the first day of spring, I present you with: The Equinox Raccoon! I think she’s like the Easter Bunny except instead of giving you candy she steals it and watches it dissolve in the river….

Okay okay, clearly my previous Zootopia post taught me nothing about perpetuating negative animal stereotypes. What can I say, bad childhood experience involving a campground and a May basket. They took the Sundaes, man. I LOVED Sundaes.

However, I also love the raccoon’s species name, lotor, which means “washer.” It’s the unofficial name of this piece (I’ll come up with something different when I put the design up for sale, because who the heck searches for “lotor” unless they’re looking for one of those somewhat dreadful lesser-read Jean Craighead George books where she apparently went “let’s just name all the animal characters after their actual exact Latin names and be done with it, even the ones that sound super weird”), and is what inspired me to go with a watery motif for the decoration.

It’s also what inspired my admittedly-lazy title quote, in a roundabout way … think about it for a sec … yep, there you go. Having forced you to dredge up the memory of that scene, however, I’ll also give you a moment to shake your fist at the heavens and curse Joss Whedon’s name or whatever.

….

Okay, that’s enough of that now. Also, I feel myself on the verge of a lengthy and unnecessary ramble about how raccoons don’t really “wash” their food but it’s interesting how their behavior of appearing to do so has been so influential in the names used for the species over the years… so to cut that short entirely, we’ll veer sharply into an unrelated tangent: Kickstarter! I actually got to write some stuff this time! But not too much, because if you let me write more than a sentence at a time you tend to wind up with things like that last blog post of mine. Oof. Yep, snarky one-liners making fun of other people’s writing are where it’s at.

Check out Out Of the Box, where I “work” as the “editor” at a “company” … well, you get the gist, the whole thing’s fictional. I will actually be editing the books though, should the project take off, which basically means I get to sit around correcting other people’s grammar. Who doesn’t love that?

 

A real articulate fella…

So, yesterday I got around to seeing Zootopia. I’d tried to avoid too many spoilers, although of course the fact that my workplace got a copy of the movie storybook before the movie actually aired (yay!) and it looked so pretty that I was unable to avoid paging through it before reshelving it (oops!) made that slightly more difficult than anticipated. Luckily I managed to stop myself before I got to any major plot points.
As is the case far more often with animated than live-action movies (I’m looking at YOU, the-last-five-reboots-I-watched), I feel like my expectations for this one were just in the right place. I wasn’t especially wowed or anything, but I was already expecting to enjoy it, and overall I did.

There were definitely some points to note, though. Buckle up, major amount of words (and one pretty picture!) coming your way after the jump…

I beg your pardon….

Coloring is hard. The coloring-book craze has kind of baffled me, due mainly to the ridiculously intricate designs that seem to be popular. They’re beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but … I would not have the patience to sharpen that many pencils, let alone keep track of which color went next to what to avoid overlap.

…It’s possible I’m approaching this the wrong way.

Nevertheless, I prefer working with simple color drawings and complex grayscale ones. But in the spirit of the adult coloring book craze, I decided to draw a rather decorative cheetah. I somewhat arbitrarily chose vines for the appendages (morning glory for the limbs, roses for the tail), a fern for the chest/belly, and completely random stylized leaves and ray flowers for the rest of the body.

There’s no way I would color all that in even to see what it looks like, but it was a lot of fun to draw! I’m working on cleaning it up and vectorizing it, and I’ll have it up in my shops soon.

As for today’s title, in hindsight it’s sort of only funny to me. The WIP name for this was “jungle cat,” just because there were plants and it’s a feline. Then I saved the file as “pard” because the jaguar/leopard association had already been made in my head (and “acinonyx” takes too long to type anyhow). Also, the roses were the last part I drew. So when I was trying to think of a better name for the finished product, “roses” and “pard” were in my head, and I reflected that the design was more like a garden.

Aaaand thus the Lynn Anderson song. Incidentally, for all of that I am no closer to finding a good name….