Inktober Fish

In an effort to climb out of this creative slump I've fallen into (well, a slump by my standards, anyway), I'm doing Inktober, where you draw an ink drawing every day in October. You can follow my efforts on Instagram and/or Twittter if you want to (I'm anagramforink on both), but so far I've mostly done simple things (especially my two for the 2nd and 3rd days, when I got home after work too sleepy to accomplish much).

Anyway, yesterday I drew a fish I was rather happy with, though I could tell it needed more to really make it a finished drawing. Here it is, in green ink with touches of violet and silver ink, drawn with a brush (well, two brushes -- one for lines and one for washes) on watercolour paper.

This is not any particular sort of fish, just something out of my brain, that developed as I was looking at a little print of a flying fish by Charles van Sandwyk that I have on my wall next to my desk (I'd kind of like to be CvS when I grow up...). The head ornaments are loosely anglerfish-inspired, and the fins might have come from a fancy goldfish.

This afternoon I decided to scan it for a better image than the one I posted last night on Instagram, and then, well, I couldn't resist dropping it into Photoshop to play with. I knew I wanted to keep anything else I did to it subtle, so to start I just plopped in an old foxed book paper texture, then made the texture on the fish itself less opaque, which gave me this

Even this little bit of work makes it look more finished, though I still have niggling thoughts about adding some other little touch. Bubbles, maybe? Then I thought how much fun it would be to have this fish on a coffee mug, so I made a version I can use on deviantArt (where you'll find me as feynico) and other places that do POD mugs, with a white background (I might take out the signature glyph, but I also kind of like it).

In this case, I made the paper texture 100% opacity on the fish to show up better. I'm half thinking I might add some muted reds and oranges to the scales, but I'm not sure...

Writing Wednesday: Back on Track… ish

Just before I sat down to write this, I found out that I got the part-time retail job I applied for. It means I'm likely to have less time for writing and drawing unless I sacrifice something else. And since I'm determined to keep writing fiction and making comics, it may be this blog that suffers. But it's only a part time job, at least for now, so maybe I'll be able to keep juggling everything else. At any rate, it'll mean being able to pay the bills every month, which is a huge relief.

But not all is lost. I've managed to write a couple more parts of the odd story I started, so I'm up to about 3500 words (hand-written, so my estimate is probably a little low). It's not a prodigious amount, but it feels good. And I'm excited to see what happens to my characters.

I've also been working on a little mini-comic or zine, with monsters reconstructed from fossils -- based on the idea that ancient peoples interpreted huge fossil bones as giants and dragons. It's pretty fun, and silly, and I hope people will like it. And of course, I'm slowly pecking away at the dragon faux natural history book. I've set a goal of November for having that done, but there are a lot of illustrations yet to do, so we'll see.

And, as if I don't have enough to do, I'm tossing around the idea of doing an occasional webcomic about being an almost-middle-aged woman working at a mall video game store. I'll have to see if I have anything interesting or funny to share from the experience first, I guess.

Paper Moths

I had been thinking, a while back, about combining letterpress printing and die-cutting to create some paper moth specimens. Something like the ones I made from leftover proofs of my book moths intaglio prints (sorry, no photos of those to hand at the moment), but more three-dimensional. I'm still planning to do that, but it occurred to me the other day that I could also make three dimensional moth specimens out of my handmade paper.

So I tried it. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram (@anagramforink on both), or are a friend on my personal Facebook account, you may have seen a photo of the first attempt. For the past couple of days, I've been making a cheap dollar store shadow box look nice to put it in, staining, adding a hanging wire, and lining it. I still have to find a small brass latch, but today I've been trying to decide what colour paper to line the box with.

I've narrowed it down to five more-or-less neutral papers. Royal blue looked nice, as did burgundy, but the rich colours, I thought, drew too much attention to themselves. Here are the five finalists (apologies for the less than stellar photos -- I took these with my iPad in poor lighting). Any opinions are welcome.

White:

Black:

Grey faux parchment:

Deep grey:

Deep brown:

Some of the papers aren't lying flat, but they will once they're pasted in, so please ignore that. I won't mention which one(s) I'm most inclined towards yet, as if like to see what people think.

And I will be making more of these, and they will be for sale. This is, I hope, just the beginning. Which means I'm going to need to make more paper...

Jackalope

I'm feeling wintery, so here's a jackalope in the snow.

Natural History Sketches: Skunk

One night after teaching letterpress in Halifax I was driving home on our rural highway and had to stop and let a skunk (Mephitis mephitis -- striped skunk) cross the road. It's not uncommon for skunks to be out in the dark hours (porcupines and raccoons are also very common, so I tend to drive slower than most people do in the dark on that road).

What was interesting, though, it that this particular skunk has such wide stripes that it was more white than black. It was so pale I even wondered if my "knowledge" that skunks don't change colour in the winter might be wrong.

Well, skunks don't change colour (like hares do), but it turns out it's actually not that unusual for striped skunks to be nearly white. A quite look through Google images showed that while the usual black and white pattern was the most common, a lot of skunks have stripes either thicker or narrower than the norm, so they vary from nearly all white to nearly all black. There's also a fairly rare paler colour phase in which the usually black parts of the animal are a pale brown.

Anyway, the next day I attempted to remember what I saw well enough to sketch it.

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Shrew and Mouse

I live in a rural area in a somewhat unfinished house that hasn't been maintained as well as it might have been. Consequently, we have mice in the walls. They're actually quite lovely little creatures: deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). They're also native to Nova Scotia, so I feel a bit bad setting traps for them, even when they get cheeky enough to watch me from the top of a bookcase.

Every now and then my cat, who never goes outside, will catch one. Usually somewhere in the still-dark hours of the early morning. Then she lets them go in the bedroom, which has a sill on the door, so they run around and around the room while she chases them. Eventually she gets bored and they escape, or they go into shock so I have to scoop them up in the morning and release them into the woods. Every now and then she actually kills one.

(I know, I am a monster for not intervening. But at three a.m. I am pretty much a zombie and capable only of groaning and burying my head under the pillow.)

Once, I discovered the tiny body in the morning and instead of a mouse, it was a shrew (probably a masked shrew, Sorex cinereus). I still don't know how it ended up inside, because as far as I can tell, shrews are not usually house-dwellers. I can only guess that perhaps it got lost in the tunnels under the snow (there was a lot of snow on the ground at the time) and followed a mouse hole, or the dryer vent, into the house. Only to be captured by a housecat.

Shrews, if you're not up on your mammalian classification, are not rodents (which, of course, mice are). Though they do resemble mice somewhat, they're actually more closely related to moles. Masked shrews are very, very tiny. Even smaller than deer mice. Sadly, this dead little beast is the only shrew I've actually seen (though I did spy a living vole -- a mouse-like rodent -- a couple of times in one of our rock walls).

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Squirrels

You can tell what I think of these drawings in the comment I wrote next to them. Oh well. One of the points of keeping this journal is to get more drawing practice, which will -- I certainly hope -- help me improve.

North American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)

These little guys are almost unbearably cute, but they're also accomplished thieves. Unless you buy special (rather pricey) bird feeders, they'll steal all the seeds. Fortunately, they're not too bad most of the year, and most of our birds aren't bothered by them (and we only have two regulars). I once saw a crow chase a red squirrel away when it got too close.They do get very gluttonous in the winter when they're stockpiling, and they'll leave the seed pile with their cheeks stuffed so full their heads look two or three times normal size.

In some parts of Canada, red squirrels have been driven out by invasive grey squirrels, but that hasn't happened here in NS (at least, not yet).

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Pheasant

It seems it's been a while since I posted. I guess I'm not doing so well on my New Year's resolutions. Oh well. Here are some of the sketches from my big giant natural history notebook (which I also haven't been keeping up with as much as I'd like).

Pheasants (Ring-necked or Common Pheasant, Phasianus colchicus)

These lovely, big birds aren't native to Nova Scotia, and were actually introduced a number of times by people wanting to establish them as game birds. They're still relatively uncommon over a lot of the province, but somewhat common where I live. I've actually seen six or more birds, male and female, foraging together in the same field, but more often I'll see one on its own -- usually a male, as the females are much better camouflaged and therefore harder to spot.

There used to be one male that regularly came for the seeds we put out every day, but he hasn't been around for a year or two (or else he waits until no one's looking). Here he is in 2010.

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks.

Corvus corax Sketch

Yesterday's entry in my new, giant natural history journal was the usual weather report and list of beasties in the yard. We had a new visitor, though: a raven.

Although we have a lot of ravens in the area, the closest they usually get to the yard is flying high overhead. For a few weeks in the fall they would gather in the evening in the woods just beyond out property line -- I could hear them gossiping and saw them fly over, but that was it.

But yesterday one stopped by to check out the seeds I put out and stayed long enough to pick some of them out of the snow with her enormous beak. She didn't stay long, though, because our resident crows, which are much, much more skittish than city crows, saw me watching from the window and flew off in a flurry of wings. That made the raven nervous enough to fly away, though she hadn't seemed concerned herself that I was watching.

This sketch isn't from life. I ran to get my camera, but when I came back was when the crows decided to cause a fuss, so I didn't manage a photo. Instead, I found a picture online that matched more or less the raven I saw. It's a pretty rough, quick sketch, but I think I succeeded in capturing, at least a little bit, the range of textures in the bird's feathers.

And, as promised, here's what the book looked like in its original  installation. Not very good photographs, I'm afraid, but I hope you get the idea.

Natural History Journal: Days 1 & 2

I don't really have much to show for my new natural history journal in a giant blank book project yet, but a few people have expressed interest, so here you go.

Here's the book itself, which some of you have already seen on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It's big. Next time I think of it, I'll dig out a photo of the project I originally made it for, which was an installation for a wood type letterpress class I took in 2007 I think.

Here's a shot of page one. It doesn't say a whole lot. Just some comments on the weather (cold and snowy) and a list of birds spotted in the yard.

And here's a close-up of the blue jay feather drawing. As you can see, I need a lot of drawing practice. But that's one of the points of this exercise.