Asakiyume mita

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.)

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.

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.

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



Or this:



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.

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)