asakiyume | Entries tagged with drawing

We have some sunny days, and I finished the job I was working on, so I drew a song sparrow. The song sparrow is found throughout most of North America, "continuous from the Aleutians to the eastern United States," says Cornell Ornithology. They're small everywhere bird with a lovely song. Both their song and their plumage varies across the continent.

Scientific name "Melospiza melodia." You can hear samples of their songs here. (The ones around here sound most like the fourth recording down.)

Current Music: Cheikh Ibra Fam: Diom Gnakou Fi (feat. Mo' Kalamity)

There was this place where the sidewalk pressed right against the flank of McKinnock Hill. Walking that section of sidewalk, you’d have ferns dropping moisture on your shoulders. It was a narrow sidewalk: you couldn’t walk on it and hold your left arm out straight. Too much McKinnock Hill in the way. But if you bent your arm, you could press your hand into the hill’s thick moss.

You could also kiss a bare patch of stone. That was the kind of thing we’d do when we walked home from school as kids: “Kiss that spot there … Gross! You just kissed McKinnock Hill! You’re going to marry McKinnock Hill!”

There were animals on McKinnock Hill. Mainly squirrels and chipmunks were what we saw, but sometimes there’d be roadkill—possums or the occasional raccoon. So we knew those lived up there too.

And foxes, too. A place like McKinnock Hill has to have foxes.

( At some point we heard a story... )

I have turned this little story into a PDF with the foxes in the header ;-) If you would like a copy--if you would like a copy to send to your millions of friends so that my flash-fiction reputation spreads like a tsunami worldwide!--you can message me here or send me an email at forrestfm (at) gmail dot com, and I will email it to you.

It's been a while, but I finished the next illustration for my Semillas y Huevos picture book, where the kids plant an egg and put an avocado seed under a chicken to hatch.

It took extra long because I finished one drawing but was dissatisfied with it, so had to start over. (I like this one better)

Here the kids are, planting the egg.

Current Music: Doughnuts hole: Otonano okite

Two posts in one day! What?!

Here is the picture for page one: a boy shows his cousin the two avocado seeds

I'm making a six-page (counting the cover...) picture book for the kids I met on my trip (they're all siblings and cousins of each other). It's about planting an egg and having a hen hatch an avocado seed. Here's my cover image: two avocado seeds and two eggs :-)

... Hoping you can tell (but would not be surprised if not, heh) that the top two are the avocado seeds and the bottom two are the eggs. I'm biting my tongue to not-say all the things that are wrong with the picture. Mainly I like it even with the problems.

Current Music: K'naan: The seed

sovay wrote about a dream she had that featured a bottle of beer:

I dreamed of reading a story printed on the label of a bottle of beer; it ended apocalyptically, with the ghosts of slaughtered whales and other, increasingly less identifiable leviathans passing in endless procession down the road to the sea. The label was red, the text white. I remember just the last half of the last line: "and watched the road burning, which was America."

I can't stop thinking about this. It makes me

(1) want to invent beer names (always a fun thing to do)
(2) create beer labels (potentially a fun thing to do?)
(3) write a poem ending in that line .... so many poems could end in that line these days

My brain isn't reaching to a poem, but I made a beer label. Behold:

Very weirdly coincidentally, the beer we had this evening matched the color scheme she described:

(Sorry for the unedited snapshot--complete with stove time stamp, LOL)

Current Music: Mattafix: Gangster Blues
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/940074.html

I can't think of swords without thinking of the evocative Rider-Waite tarot swords--this one, for example:

Or this:

This picture is more reminiscent of Rider-Waite 5 or Rider Waite 7, in that the figure's carrying a bunch of swords, but I was also thinking about sword-bearing angels and... so on.

Current Music: Arne Hörberg: A Happy Ending
Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/877118.html

Another possibility I considered was a world of huge inverted mountains--icebergs, as seen from underwater, a world of floating mountains. But it was too cold; I didn't want to draw a cold thing. (I haven't checked ahead to see if there's a prompt "cold" or not.)

When we imagine the world above water, we focus (usually) on the floor of the world--the ground underneath our feet and the things that spring from it and, like us, walk on it, but when we think of the world underwater, we focus (usually) not on the ground level, but on the air (except it's underwater, so it's not air; it's water) above. Imagine if it were that way above water and most of our landscapes were airscapes. But we're bottom dwellers in the world above water, so that's what we depict.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/876333.html

Today in church one of the altar servers was wearing red ballet-slipper-style shoes with sparkles.

They were beautiful, and I was thinking, wow, church has come a long way since Hans Christian Andersen's time (different denomination, too, but let's sail by that issue), when the poor protagonist of "The Red Shoes" eventually HAS TO HAVE HER FEET CHOPPED OFF for the sin of indulging in vanity by wearing her red shoes to church. And then, even after she's repented and had her feet cut off, her bloody feet, dancing in the shoes, keep her from entering the church!

I have vivid memories of the illustrations accompanying this story from the version of HCA's fairy tales that we had when I was a kid--particularly the one of Karen, the protagonist, her hair a wild golden tangle, pleading with the executioner to cut off her feet. With much searching (a zillion people have illustrated HCA, including famous people like Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham), I found that the edition we had was called Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by twin sisters, Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone. They had an overly pretty, slim, stylized way of drawing people that I was fascinated by. I couldn't find the one illustration online, but I did find the one of her going into church all in white... but with the offending red shoes on. Unfortunately the person who took the photo cut off the feet (LOL), so you can't see the shoes, but you can see the glow from them:

(source)

If you click on the source link, you can get more of a sense of the illustrators' style. They had a great illustration for "The Wild Swans" of the prince who ends up still with one arm a wing, but I thought you might like this fairly hot (in an overly pretty way) picture from Tales of Greeks and Trojans:

(source)

Crossposts: http://asakiyume.livejournal.com/869054.html

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with drawing

driveway art: song sparrow

The McKinnock Hill Fox – a flash story

planting an egg

Semillas y huevos, 2nd picture

semillas y huevos

"The label was red, the text white

Inktober Day 6: sword

Day 4: "underwater"

The Red Shoes

Profile

June 2025

Syndicate

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags