Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Soar"

This is the third or fourth Bulgarian fresco I've done a copy of, the theology of them escapes me. The demon in the middle (see the original, below) seems to cheerily soar over the proceedings. Zed said his caption should read: "You'll never have a matching pair of socks again!"




Technorati Tags: Illustration Friday

Mike does Illustration Friday: "Soar"

For Mike's comment, see below.

New York: A Book Recommendation

Ma,

On the Urban Caballero's recommendation, I've just started reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. It's much better than I would have thought - though a bit battle centric, as one might expect, it's also smart, thoughtful, cynical and modest. He also has a fascinating worldview in that his whole understanding of the universe is based in geography and land - how the land is formed, how it can be traveled over, who lives there, what natural resources exist. I guess that's part of what made him such a great general.

One excerpt I liked so much I typed it up by hand: Grant and a colleague are riding through Mexico and hear wolves howling on the trail ahead of them.

"The part of Ohio that I hailed from was not thickly settled, but wolves had been driven out long before I left. Benjamin was from Indiana, still less populated, where the wolf yet roamed over the prairies. He understood the nature of the animal and the capacity of a few to make believe there was an unlimited number of them. He kept on toward the noise, unmoved. I followed in his trail, lacking moral courage to turn back.... When he did speak it was to ask: "Grant, how many wolves do you think there are in that pack?" Knowing where he was from, and suspecting that he thought I would overestimate the number, I determined to show my acquaintance with the animal by putting the estimate below what possibly could be correct, and answered, "Oh, about twenty," very indifferently. He smiled and rode on. In a minute we were close upon them, and before they saw us. There were just *two* of them. Seated upon their haunches, with their mouths close together, they had made all the noise we had been hearing for the past ten minutes. I have often thought of this incident since when I have heard the noise of a few disappointed politicians who had deserted their associates. There are always more of them before they are counted."

[New York Bureau] We have Achieved the Adventure

Back from a week in Costa Rica with the Urban Caballero and his family. A poorly translated list of instructions on an amusement park ride became my favorite quote of the journey. The instructions read something like:

Children under 40 kilos may not achieve the adventure (literally translated from 'realizar la aventura'.

Women in a state of pregnancy may not achieve the adventure.

Those with medical problems including heart attacks may not achieve the adventure.

Well, I am happy to say that we have all achieved the adventure!

Who is the happiest person in the world?

I wrote to Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti and asked him if my remembered/imagined quote rang a bell. He wrote me back:

It does ring a bell. It comes from the first book of Herodotus.

King Croesus of Lydia asked Solon who the happiest person in the world was. Solon first said Tellus, who died defending his fellow Athenians.

Asked by Croesus who was the second happiest, Solon said Cleobis and Biton from Argos. Their mother was late for a festival, and the oxen couldn't be found for her chariot. Her sons pulled the chariot behind them to the festival, and died afterwards from the effort. (Perhaps she was what folks call a well-nourished woman!)

By now the rich King Croesus was angry, because Solon had not named him as happiest.

Solon made a long reply, in the course of which he stated, "He who unites the greatest number of advantages, and retaining them to the day of his death, then dies peaceably, that man alone, sire, is, in my judgment, entitled to bear the name of 'happy.' But in every matter it behoves us to mark well the end: for oftentimes God gives men a gleam of happiness, and then plunges them into ruin."

Croesus thought Solon was a fool, but he later recalled Solon's words when he was defeated and put to death by the Persian King Cyrus.

Michael's post today contains this quote from Sir Thomas Browne:

He who must needs have Company, must needs have sometimes bad Company. Be able to be alone.

Loose not the advantage of Solitude, and the Society of thy self, nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the Day is not uneasy nor the Night black unto him.

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The fabulous photos of David Plowden: Vanishing Point

His website is incredibly generous with the photos he took over decades, photos of bridges, trains, rural America... he stopped taking photos two years ago, saying the things he loved to shoot have all vanished.

Technorati Tags: America

Coon Jumping

I like wacky competitions - the World Beard and Moustache Competition was my favorite. Here's a sport for donkeys and mules, sort of a reverse limbo.

I don't think I'd want my donkey Jethro to see this. It would make escape from my humble fences at home much more likely.

Coon Jumping

"Coon jumping is an event unique to Long Ears. The event originated from night time coon hunters needing to move their pack strings over fenced fields. Many fences were of wire and could not be taken down as stone or wood can. Often the hunter would remove his coat and lay it down over the wire in order to "flag it" for his animals to see, then jump his mules over the fence one by one.

Let it be pointed out here that only donkeys and mules "Coon jump." Horses do not as it is physically impossible for them.

Unlike a horse show jumper ... coon jumpers must take the obstacle from a standing start.

... all Long Ears tend to crouch down on their hind legs, raise up their forelegs, then "rocket" over the jump. Some mules even like to "rev-up" with their forefeet, dancing until their springs are wound up tight, before catapulting themselves over the jump like a cat.

Often, Long Ear heads will go up as their bodies come down on the opposite side of the bar, reaching down with their forefeet while tucking up the hind ones.

First jump is of median chest height, continually raised after every round of jumps... Animal must pause inside box BEFORE jumping (there are no running starts allowed)... Loose animals/loss of control is automatic disqualification. Refusal to jump is also grounds for disqualification."

Technorati Tags: Donkey, Coon Jumping

Mike does Illustration Friday: "Horizon"

Future horizon for 2008 --Mike


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What gmail offered me today: yurts

If you have a gmail account you know it chooses little ads for you based on the content of your letters. I was corresponding with a gentleman who makes a roundtrip from NC to Mongolia every month, and a little ad popped up from groovyyurts.com.

Of course I had to visit the site, I've been talking about building a yurt for decades. In the 70s, I even bought a book called "Build Your Own Yurt." It always seemed too hard, though, and joined the list of hobbies I managed to circumvent by buying the books rather than embarking on the projects.

Here's one of the company founders with his wife and child in their yurt. They build the kits in Mongolia and ship them around the world.

And here's a facebook photo set of a guy setting up his new yurt from this company.

I already have more dwellings than I need, but I'm still tempted.

Technorati Tags: yurts, low-cost housing, architecture

Glad I can still "work that stick."

My dear friend and bandmate Beth's daughter told her, years ago, while watching me play the fiddle: "I want to learn to work that stick."

That kid has gone on to be a good classical violinist and plays at the Duke String School. Meanwhile, I can still work that stick.

Last Tuesday Bob and I (the Pratie Heads) trucked over to Goldsboro and played at Wayne Community College. A nice guy who is a professor there had Googled us when his old Pratie tapes from the 80s were all worn out; he'd been surprised and pleased to see we were playing together again.

He'd noodged and wheedled until he'd gotten his Powers That Be, the President and the Diversity Council, to ok funds to hire us.

Luckily a goodly number of people came to hear us in their lovely hall, including the President, who loved the show so our host was very relieved. (He couldn't even remember the last time there had been any music offered at the college.)

The only smirch on the gig: still reeling from a donkey accident two days before, and a little woozy on pain meds, in an exuberant moment just before the encore I swept my fiddle off the stand onto the floor. It bounced. I was so out of it, I didn't notice it was wrecked - I was ready to keep working that stick, but Bob looked askance and said: "You're not playing that fiddle any more tonight." The neck was broken.

Next day I took it to our local miracle worker, John Pringle. He's a fabulous, world-renowned viol maker from England who settled out in the country west of here, in a log cabin he built (Bob helped him), and who taught school for a while but is back to making viols full-time. He's really too good for me, and fixing my fiddle is kind of slumming for him, but I've known him a long time and he was very sympathetic. I got my instrument back yesterday morning.

Last night Bob and I played at the Pittsboro General Store. The main advantage to this gig is that they feed you a fabulous dinner. We had a lot of appreciative listeners, but this was the biggest surprise:

A couple swept in the door holding a photo and came over to us. They said, "Nineteen years ago today you played at our wedding reception." They had dug the photo out of their wedding album to show us. Hey, we were cute back then. We figured it was one of the last gigs we did before we broke up for seventeen years... "Were we speaking to each other?" I asked the couple. "Welllllll, I guess so," replied the former groom, "but we wouldn't really have noticed..." Oh yeah, they were getting married.

We dedicated one of our favorite lovey-dovey songs to them and having them there, happy and holding hands and enjoying their delicious dinner, smiling at us in a sort of proprietary way, was a treat. I got very nostalgic, and beamed realizing once again that Bob and I are lucky, lucky to have started playing together again, lucky we still love our music and are able to play it. Lucky to be above ground. I think I'm enjoying the fiddle more than I ever have in my life.

Happy hols, all.

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Cutest picture of the day.

I don't want to be a total scrooge, just because I'm busy hiding from Christmas doesn't mean I begrudge its joys to others! So here, a picture from one of my very favorite blogs, presentsimple. The author writes so beautifully about her life in Japan as an English language teacher, and about all the wondrous things you can see as you go about your day if you'll just open your eyes. (I've recommended her blog many times to my son Zed, who would like to teach ESL abroad, but I don't think he's checked it out yet. Hey Zed, go look at presentsimple!)

Menticia and I were a Christmas present juggernaut yesterday afternoon. I've finally convinced her that handmade stuff is preferable to cheap stuff bought at Walmart so we made things for her family - peanut and pecan brittle, gingerbread muffins, earrings and little animals out of Sculpey. Ah, the good old days.


(I've read online that Christmas is very hip in Japan, especially among non-Christians.)

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Melinama goes holiday shopping at Griffin Wrecking and Salvage.

This is by no means the first thing you see when you enter D. H. Griffin - first you go past balers, and then you pass bales and bales of aluminum and steel crushed things - but it's the first thing I could get a picture of. The place is not set up for tourists.


Where is a little kid when you need one to go "ooh" and "aah"? As a grownup, I feel funny going "ooh" and "aah" by myself.


Here is the front office of D. H. Griffin. There are three guys in it. One takes your money. The other two are discussing possible future career options.


Here is the first showroom. Blessedly, there are no Christmas carols being played over any loudspeaker.



However, the place is not entirely bereft of holiday cheer, as you will see by the wreath towards the left in this picture. Is it salvage, or has it been purposefully introduced to brighten the spirits of employees and customers? I forgot to ask.


Let it not be said that there are no aesthetically inclined souls at junkyards. MOMA would pay a fortune for this piece.


Why is there a piano at the metal salvage yard?


Is there something wrong with me, that I like this kind of stuff so much?


There are so many good stocking-stuffers to choose from!


Finally I caught sight of something which might serve my purpose - I need to make a ramp for Jethro's trailer, which I got for free from the Gentleman Farmer in McCleansville.


They came with a loader to take it over to the torch.


A guy cut it up for me, no charge. The box itself cost $25.





An onlooker must always be involved.

I came home with an awful lot of steel in the car, very pleased with my find.

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"Flash" and java scripts are making me more insane than I was already.

{rant}

I am so so tired of websites oozing backwards and forwards. It offends tired eyes. Why does any web designer think we want words to get larger or smaller, or change color, or move to the left and right, whenever our cursors come near them?

Why does the local weather site think we want the days of the week to move to the left at their own pace? Why does it think we want the little cloud icons to swell and then detumesce? Blessedly, in this case there's a "no-flash" version which I've bookmarked - usually, unfortunately, no "no-harass" option is offered, we are captive to some idiot's idea of genius.

I stopped using Yahoo's tv guide when it started shimmying under the cursor.

The animated advertisements are so irritating I have a piece of paper to hold up over them as they dance and beckon.

How about those horrible bubbles of information which well up unbidden when my cursor strays towards a file name in my own "windows explorer" directory trees! It makes me nervous. Isn't there any way to make it stop? Please, file names, just lie there on the page quietly and stop yelling at me! I don't care how many pixels you contain!

And how about those ghastly websites with navigation menus which only appear when you roll your cursor over them - and if the cursor moves a bit to the left or right, the menus disappear!

The cursor has become dangerous, it leads me into dismal circuses of fun. When I'm at one of these bossy, multimedia embossed websites, I try to keep the cursor far from anything which might explode or turn colors or offer unwanted options.

Even more obnoxious: sites which begin talking, singing, playing little tunes when you open them. I don't care if it's the site itself which is crooning away, or some loquacious little advertising avatar - I flee as fast as I can get my cursor to the little X in the upper right hand corner of the screen...

Please, you technology nitwits, remember:

Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
{/rant}

Technorati Tags: Flash, applets, , web design, windows, multimedia, animated gifs, java+scripts, cursor

McDonalds sends you a honking big bill if you park too long at the restaurant.

Seen at BoingBoing:

Extracts from
McDonalds drive-through customers get 45-minute time limit
Enforcement firm issues £125 bills for overstaying
Steven Morris for The Guardian, December 11, 2007

The question of just how long it should take to eat fast food is being answered by the burger giant McDonald's, which is making customers finish within 45 minutes or face a charge of £125.

If they do not pay, the fee rises steadily and customers are threatened with court action and approached by bailiffs.

Many supermarkets and restaurants are handing over the management of their car parks to companies which use number plate recognition cameras to log when people enter and leave.

If they stay too long, the details of the registered keeper of the vehicle are obtained from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), and he or she is billed.

An elderly Wiltshire couple were recently berated by Tesco after taking too long to do their Christmas shopping at the supermarket.

One motorist, Jamie Thomson, told the Guardian of his experience at a McDonald's near Gatwick: "I ordered a burger, chips, a doughnut, coke and coffee. I sat in my car eating my lunch, and listening to the radio. After eating, I continued to sip my coffee for a time, and ate my doughnut." He says he was in his car for about an hour.

Several weeks later, he received a letter from Civil Enforcement demanding £125, or £75 if the charge was paid quickly. At first Thomson, a businessman from Sussex, did not even realise that he was being charged for spending too long at McDonald's, as the notice gave only a partial address.

When he remembered his visit to McDonald's, Thomson asked Civil Enforcement for photographic proof of his "offence", but was told he would have to pay for a photo.

McDonald's told Thomson that the use of "enforcement methods" happened only in "extreme" circumstances.

The company added: "At this restaurant we have stipulated that a member of the public may be parked for 45 minutes unless permission is given to stay longer by the duty manager."

Thomson's charge has risen to £213. He has been threatened with court action and received a letter from a debt collection company.

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Designing a wheeled walk-behind donkey-drawn plow / cultivator

Using Pratie Place as a file cabinet again, here are pictures I've been accumulating as I try to figure out what kind of a farming implement for pasture renovation and reseeding would be pullable by my standard donkey. If you aren't interested in plows, I won't be offended if you slip out the door...

This picture was drawn by the author of "Farm Tools Through the Ages" by Michael Partridge - it's his copy of a 16th century woodcut. You see what I'm looking for is not a new-fangled invention.


This is a mouldboard plow with a coulter - the old-fashioned coulter was a knife which got pulled vertically through the soil in front of the big metal shape which lifted and turned the soil. Moldboard ploughs (aka bottom plows) are, I think, still most used here in the U.S. as well as elsewhere, even though a lot of researchers now think disrupting this much soil, and leaving a barren naked soil exposed to the wind and rain, is a major cause of erosion and soil degradation. It leaves a neat field, though, a field that says: "My farmer is strong and worked hard."

Well, I don't want to work that hard, and I don't want bare earth, because I have perfectly nice grass and weeds growing in my field already. I just want to be able to plant some more seeds, and improve water retention.
Spike harrows - in the family of drag harrows - have been around since the middle ages - the early ones were wooden bars tied at their junctions, with wooden pegs driven through them. But the basic design isn't much different now.


This is a modern one - looks small enough to be pulled by a donkey, but getting around corners might be pretty dangerous for everybody concerned.


This is a chain harrow. Same idea. In fact, people have dragged just about anything behind a horse or mule. Pieces of chain link fence, tires, boards and logs, anything to break through and also smooth the surface of the ground.


These are usually, however, used after a regular (moldboard) plough has turned the earth. Or they're used to smooth roads. Not sure they would work so well on a hardpacked clay soil like mine. Maybe the tines would just skid along on top of the ground.


This gizmo was invented in 1820 and is called "Findlayson's grubber." He wanted it to scratch the weeds out of the ground but not tangle and choke them in his machinery. I guess it worked pretty well. I like my weeds and don't want to get rid of them.

Notice that this machine sits in a framework - the tines, always parallel to the ground, can be raised or lowered.


Here's a field cultivator, using the same idea. Like a spring-tooth harrow, it has curled teeth which stick into the ground with their own tension as they are dragged forward. This design, unless it was much smaller, would be too "aggressive" as they say - that is, it demands a lot of, uh, horsepower to function and does a lot of damage. I don't want to kill or remove the stuff which is already growing in my field.


Isn't this one scary looking? But a good size! A chisel plow has teeth like this but many more of them.


This one has cultivator-type spikes, which I think would work well, especially if they were filed to be narrower.


That one, and these next three are all, I think, in the family called "horse hoes." Notice the single wheel in front. They were designed to be pulled between crop rows - they grub out the weeds in a narrow area.


I bet pulling something with only one forward wheel takes more strength and skill than I'm likely to develop at this age, but I love these ploughs. These handles are close to what I'd like.


A modern version, not much different.


This one is sold by Northern Tool and is called the Earthway Kentucky High Wheel Walk-Behind Cultivator. It looks too good to be true. Like those speedy onion-cutters they sell at the state fair. Easy when "they" do it. A nightmare when "you" try it.

But how sweet it looks, and the model plying it on the site is smiling and is clearly not working up a sweat. It must be a piece of cake. And look how nice her dirt is!!! We don't have that here.



Now here is a major improvement, in my opinion - two forward wheels. This is how I'll make my plow, with two wheels in front, lower than these.


These are called vertical coulters, and are used in today's low-tillage or no-till farming to make slots for seeding through stubble, avoiding the moldboard plough. Unfortunately, most low-inversion tillage systems recommend a huge drenching of herbicides to kill everything completely dead. Fortunately, since I don't need to kill anything, I can skip the poisons.


Here you see "ripple coulters" mounted.


And here you see an ATV pulling a coulter plow through a cover crop of some kind. See how the coulters are mounted on a rear axle? That's how I want to make my plow, except I want it to have ploughshares (handles) so I can lift it and press it down into the ground. Like the horse hoes above.


This small disk harrow and the one below below are like coulter plows and look pullable by a donkey. I think they depend on having additional weight(s) piled on top of them.


They are not navigable from behind. I'd give one of them a try, though.

I'm thinking of using old table saw blades (10") or rotary saw blades (7-1/4") instead of disks or coulters, which are expensive. I'd space them with sawed-off pieces of conduit and they would be easily replaceable because I think I'll bust a lot of them.


Finally, a picture of a no-till driller being pulled by a donkey through ground that looks like mine will if our North Carolina drought doesn't end.


UPDATE: Jethro's plow was designed and built and used!

Technorati Tags: Garden, Farm, Implements, Tools, Tractors, Harrow, Cultivator, Disk, Drag, Chain, Horse+Hoe, Donkey-drawn, Horse-drawn, Mule-drawn

What's old is new again: youngsters macrame iPod covers.

(Shown here: "Custom Gadget Monkey Cozy" from etsy.com.)

I absolutely do not mean to put this down. I'm a do-it-yourselfer, many of my best friends are do-it-yourselfers, all my homes have been mazes of finished and unfinished projects...

I indoctrinated my kids so thoroughly, they can't bear to use machine-made wrapping paper or buy greeting cards. (Remember potato prints?)

Now I'm working on Menticia: we're doing an all-afternoon craft blitz this coming Friday to make presents for her family.

It's fascinating the care and time people put into making things, things one person considers gorgeous and another might shrink from with horror. That's art. What a wonderful human impulse - missing from some of us, lurking within others, sometimes blossoming into life-changing obsession.

Have you seen the knitted bacteria?

Extracts from
Handmade 2.0
By Rob Walker for the New York Times, December 16, 2007
The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called buyhandmade.org in late October. "I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request that others do the same for me," it said ... within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done so.

The consortium's most prominent member was the online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills itself as "your place to buy & sell all things handmade." Etsy does not fulfill orders from an inventory; it's a place where sellers set up virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales... more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the highly idiosyncratic.

Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk.

"Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost," the Handmade Pledge site asserts. "Buying handmade helps us reconnect." The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.

Making something yourself is a form of "political statement" and a protest against chain stores that are turning "America into one big mini-mall."

Readers of the first issue of Craft magazine might have eagerly followed the instructions to stitch a robot. But surely others gravitated to a related article about the popularity of a style of hand-stitched robot that you could buy on Etsy.

On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It's nostalgic. The company is host to a book club, which Kalin participates in, and when I visited, the most recent reading assignment was "The Wal-Mart Effect," a book that assesses the societywide impact of that mass retailer's success. Kalin seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer.

Buying something from the person who made it is "the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience," he told me earlier. "Handmade isn't a fad, it's a resurgence, one that is of a piece with the booming interest in organic food."

Etsy charges 20 cents per listing and 3.5 percent of the final sale price; this is generally lower and certainly less complicated than eBay's fee structure; it also charges up to $15 if creators want to highlight a particular item on the site's high-traffic showcase pages.

"Running a small business yourself, and trying to separate yourself from the masses — it's a political statement in its own."

While this is an art movement, or an ideological movement, or a shopping movement, it is also — and probably fundamentally — a work movement.

Another element of the Handmade Pledge: "The ascendancy of chain-store culture and global manufacturing has left us dressing, furnishing and decorating alike." It's a shrewd pitch, because the consumer craving for novelty, for the unique, the special, seems unquenchable.

Buying something from an indie craft artist can result in a buyer-seller connection, but it can also make consumption itself feel like a creative act.

Technorati Tags: art, crafts, small+business, entrepreneurs

Of cinnamon buns and justice.

Having a sleepless moment, and missing my daughter, I tuned in to her new blog Jspot.org and read this:

Today I’m in Philadelphia, where our fine friends at Spark are training the future leaders of our Jewish service learning trips. This afternoon, we spent a fair amount of time talking about the kinds of games and activities that help illustrate economic realities.

One classic exercise involves balancing a working family’s income and expenditures (Q: If you make $700 every two weeks, how do you pay for health insurance, rent, gas, electricity, car, and groceries? A: You don’t).

Our group agreed that ten years after a trip like this, you might not remember the name of the town you saw or the texts you read, but a simple exercise might stick with you. This brought on a sudden memory:

I was in sixth grade. My middle school principal came into our all-school assembly with a big bag of fresh cinnamon buns. (Clever educator - she had my attention already.) She divided the entire middle school into groups representing the populations of various continents. I was sent to South America, where I stood patiently with my hungry comrades.

My principal then went around the "world" distributing cinnamon buns according to the amount of wealth that existed in each continent. My fellow South Americans and I each received a little shred of cinnamon bun and watched with anxiety as she passed out the rest of the cinnamon buns among the other continents (maybe she'll take a second pass and give me a little more?)

She didn't come back. The exercise took a long time, and I must have tuned out by the time we got to the moral, blah blah, because I can't really remember what she said. However, the next moment is seared in my memory: when the period ended, I found my best friend nearby in North America and asked her how much cinnamon bun she got.

"Oh," she shrugged. "We got about a half a bun each."

Oh, man, I remember the exact moment of this shrug: where I was standing, which way we were facing in the room, the indifferent expression on her face, the sudden rush of rage I felt.

If the rest of the South Americans hadn't already begun dispersing towards their next period classes, and if I hadn’t been such a timid little kid, I'm sure I would have staged some kind of intercontinental coup ("Okay, now let's say every chalk eraser represents a machine gun...")

So that’s how a cinnamon bun and a shrug became one of the most memorable lessons on economic reality I ever experienced.

Technorati Tags: Economics, Justice, Education, Hunger

Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Backwards"

We had a late start painting today and it got dark so fast. That influenced my "backwards" (ie fourth-grade level) painting of this scene looking back to an imagined past. I'm working on the same color scheme I used last week.

I've been designing a plow for my donkey Jethro to pull and will be posting about it soon. Meanwhile, details are a bit sketchy...

Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday

Mike does Illustration Friday: "Backwards"

Mike says: Don't look backwards, little elephant.

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Melinama does Illustration Friday: "Little Things"

This is unfinished - it will be the back panel of a garden cart I modified yesterday so Jethro could pull it. I envision taking it to parades, rallies etc. and pulling little kids through the crowd.

The slogan has always been one of my favorites and pulling a cart with Jethro reminds me of one of my favorite children's books, The Pushcart War. Among vehicles that rumble and roar down our roads these days, a humble slow moving animal - with or without a cart - seems tiny and endangered.

So this panel will be sort of a "slow moving vehicle" sign and whatever else you might read into it, go ahead.

Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday

Mike does Illustration Friday: "Little Things"

Mike wrote: A chipmunk, a monkey and a salamander amongst bright leaves with nobody to disturb them.

Technorati Tags: Illustration+Friday