Crayons are Still Fun.

So there is this. This is me biding my time on the internet while I organize things before posting some actual art with thought behind it. In the meantime, you get:

MORE MERMAIDS! Aren't you excited? I am sure that you are. 

I call her "Crayonmaid" and she is drawn of crayon. And I also drew her on some weird piece of thin cardboard that probably just should have been thrown out. I do like the neat wrinkly texture that all the folds in it ended up giving her... although her shoulders are strangely big... and she's like, hunched backwards or something... 

Whatever, I can forgive myself all of the weird and bad angles of her body that I made in this one because I MADE IT OUT OF CRAYON ON SOME WEIRD PIECE OF LEFTOVER CARDBOARD AT WORK ONE DAY. Look at how well that water is (kinda) blended. BOOM. Man, those wrinkles really make it look like water in some places. Accidentally well done, self. Keep that in mind for future mermaids. And I will... Just you wait.

I can't not see it...

...in the Art Nouveau Tarot Deck that I mentioned before there are some really lovely illustrations full of leaves and flowers and flowing fabric. The deck itself is 90% pretty ladies but every now and again there is a dude thrown in there, and that dude is King Triton. 

Not really. 

But pretty much.

See?

Under da sea. 

He's a hell of a lot less fatherly, but that up there is King Triton. I mean, he's got everything from the white beard and crown to the scepter and tail-like fabric. He's an angrier, more mythic King Triton which is an accomplishment since King Triton is already pretty good at both of those things. 

"I am about to make your life miserable."

I have never looked at so many pictures of him in my LIFE as I just did to find that. I also never realized quite how cut he is... LOOK AT HIS SIX PACK AND MASSIVE ARMS. I hope that he never intends to take those decorative man cuffs off, because there is no way that they're getting off of his huge, meaty hands.

OH HAY LOOK. I ended up talking about mermaids again. Who'da thunk it. At least it was a man... maid this time. 

Fairy tales get weirder - The Little Mermaid

OH HAI BLOG. SORRY I LEFT YOU ALONE FOR SO LONG - I GOT A LITTLE DISTRACTED BY MY HOLIDAY FESTIVITIES. In my family, Thanksgiving is serious business and we go alllllllllll the way out. For like a full week. Even though it may seem weird to just about everyone, Thanksgiving is and always will be one of my faves, and it is super awesome. Here are pictures from part of it.

Pre-Thanksgiving pizza night. 

Cousin Walk - Thanksgiving 2011 (wearing mom's attractive sneakers)

So, yes, mermaids. I also love pegasus's and unicorns. Or pegasus/unicorns. And magic, and pretty flowers, deadly things that look cute, reading, teal, getting more than I payed for, grapefruit, birdcages, CAPSLOCK, movie trailers, buying people gifts, keys, Alphonse Mucha, tea, ninjas, and Thanksgiving. I AM VERY VARIED IN MY INTERESTS. But I just keep going back to mermaids... so here is a teal one based off of a book. Combo-interest attack!

We may as well get into the story that pretty much started it all. If you don't have the time or the energy to delve into reading that... I will break it down the story after the four scenes that I drew:

The Little Mermaid

                                                      Colored Pencil, 13"x 16"                             Colored Pencil, 16"x 13"

1. There was once a Little Mermaid who was the youngest and prettiest of all the mermaids. She had five sisters who were far less interesting (but I MADE them interesting looking. MADE THEM) than she was even though she was apparently 14 (which may be like 26 in people years) and had no idea what was going on in the real world let alone the ocean... but I digress. She wanted to go to the surface to look at things up there which she was allowed to do - once she turned 15.

2. She went up, fell in love with a prince, and decided that she would do just about anything to get him. Literally. More than any one person should have to do to be with someone. She saved his ass from a sinking ship and that just wasn't enough... so she just went right ahead and visited the sea witch to get a potion to turn her tail into legs. In order to get it she had to cut out her tongue as payment, and "drink the draught down. Then your tail will divide and shrink until it becomes what the people on earth call a pair of shapely legs. But it will hurt; it will feel as if a sharp sword slashed through you." BEAUTY IS SUCH A GOD DAMN PAIN. However, if she didn't get the Prince to marry her, she'd die and forever be in limbo because, apparently, mermaids don't have souls. Oh, and her feet would bleed as she walked. That too.

3. She went above and tried to charm the prince with her smokin' human bod but, although he liked doing things with her (such as climbing mountains and watching her dance her feet into a bloody mess), he thought of her as pretty much a little sister. Because she was 15. That didn't stop her from trying though... "She danced time and again, though every time she touched the floor she felt as if she were treading on sharp-edged steel. The Prince said he would keep her with him always, and that she was to have a velvet pillow to sleep on outside his door." Like a dog. Like a shapely little dog.

4. Sadly, the Prince decided to marry someone else (who wouldn't add him to any government watch lists and force him to stay 100ft from a playground) and set sail in a ship with his new bride and the Little Mermaid. She was obviously a bit distraught about this development, so on her last night she was up, staring at the Prince and his wife as they slept, and heard her sisters calling out to her from the water. The five of them had gone to the Sea Witch, cutting off all of their hair as payment, and gotten her a knife that would return her to being a mermaid if she stabbed the Prince with it and let his blood fall on to her feet - turning it back into a tail - and allowing her to live out the rest of her 300 mermaid years. She considered it...  but declined. Instead, she threw herself into the sea and turned to foam (as mermaids tend to do do when they die). And they lived happily ev- oh wait, no. Not even close.

At the end there there is also a bit about her floating into the air and talking with some spirits trapped in limbo for (again) 300 years, that tell her "unseen, we fly into the homes of men, where there are children, and for every day on which we find a good child who pleases his parents and deserves their love, God shortens our days of trial. The child does not know when we float through his room, but when we smile at him in approval one year is taken from our three hundred. But if we see a naughty, mischievous child we must shed tears of sorrow, and each tear adds a day to the time of our trial."


Good luck with that, Little Mermaid.

SO YOU HEAR ME KIDS? DON'T EVER CRY OR YOU'LL KILL A MERMAID.
Or something. 

Busmaid.

Remember when I said that I like to draw mermaids? 

That is still true.

Because I watch children, there are times when they do activities and I just hang out... well, watching them. I spend most of this time reading or observing them as they do their hockey/martial arts/dance, but from time to time I also drawwww. This little lady is a sketch that I mostly did while freezing my buns off on hockey practice bleachers. Oh, and also on the bus ride home. In the dark. Successsssssssssssssssssss. Ish.

This is one of those rare mermaids that wears a built in shirt... as they are wont to do. Done with a ballpoint pen and some sort of pencil. Who even knows anymore.

Creature Feature

This is just a special little sketch combo that I did one day during a lecture class. It not only shows the weird crap that I like to draw by mixing ladies with animals or elements of nature, but also shows how distracted I get while taking notes. 

Don't worry, I was still able to read it.

It think the whole reason that I started to doodle this was because I wanted to practice drawing a snake-lady for an illustration that I did for an Arabian Nights story. So... success at art. Fail at 'Intro to Comedy' note taking.

Mermaids.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE?

I will tell you.

I love mermaids. They are all floating hair and whimsical bodies and MAGIC. Plus you can give them neat fish ears.

I thought for a while that mermaids were going to be the new vampires (just like vampires were the new pirates and pirates were the new... wizards? I think it may have been wizards. I guess I can't remember that far back... ) which really pissed me off because MERMAIDS ARE MINE. Back the hell off. However, it now seems like zombies maybe coming back as the new vampire... or that could just look like the case because it's real close to Halloween and that's a really easy costume. Whatever. 

The bottom line is that I love mermaids in all of their ridiculous, biologically impossible glory. 

While doing the drip-paintings, I thought it would be fin (← accidental typing pun. Leaving it.) to do the Little Mermaid as she would probably look if she were a real fish lady chillaxing under the sea, shoving any crabs or flounder unlucky enough to cross her path into her fanged jaws. And still managing to look saucy enough doing it to entice a prince or two:

The Little Mermaid

Oil, 20"x 30"

...I've also done some colored pencil illustrations for the original Little Mermaid Hans Christian Andersen story, but those came later. You'll be sure to see them eventually, don't worry...

P.S. On the topic of zombies, I recently read a book called "Warm Bodies" by Isaac Marion which turned out to be pretty damn good. It's from the perspective of a zombie which I imagine is hard to do while making an interesting/coherent book. Plus the cover art is neat. If you want an easy, different, and entertaining read you should check it out: http://www.isaacmarion.com/. Feel free to ignore the fact that Stephenie Meyer has anything to say about it.