@imnotespecial is learning to turn her drawings into tattoos. She’s practicing on herself and making a portrait on her thigh of the lonely whale which sings at 52 hertz.. Research remains inconclusive as to whether the whale has a tattoo of Tatyane.
A portrait for @flukelady using elements of her alien series and featuring intrepid space-pup Luna.
It’s been a few years since I last went on a portrait-making spree. Every so often I feel like life isn’t providing enough inspiration (like, it’s winter – and I’ve probably drawn enough doodles about naked branches against a leaden sky!). Drawing faces pulls me out of the rut and makes me actually pay attention to rendering with intent.
There are a few artists on here who send me encouraging comments and I’m going to draw them, maybe using elements of their own personal style or technique. If you would like me to draw you, then just ask! Realize that I when I do these things I try to capture something of the subject rather than make a flattering image. -Try not to ask an artist to draw you with the provision that they make you look pretty. Be brave.
I have a couple of suppliers who pay for postage like this with handfuls of old stamps. It always pleases me. I like the idea that in a small, rural post office someone still has to rubber-stamp all the cancellations by hand.
The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.
Ken Liu, Translator’s Postscript to The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin (via theletterkilleth)
I can’t imagine being someone like Betsy DeVos. She’s worth billions of dollars. She could retire forever on an island somewhere. But she chose to go through a grueling public humiliation just for the opportunity to take school away from poor kids. Could you even imagine being that depraved.
Had a transcendent kung po experience earlier.
I was about 8. It was during one of those stays in the hospital and I was so bored, having looked at the circular pattern the sheer drapes made and the sunshine yellow of the blanket for too long. A custodian left a cart in the hallway that had some cardboard boxes and egg-carton material. I had a pair of school safety scissors in my coat pocket! I spent a day putting Allosaurus together. My dad was really impressed when he stopped by that evening because it was all “tab A, slot B construction” being that I had no tape or glue. When it was done I thought about how I was going to paint it and it became a really Baroque exercise. I went through it all mentally two or three times. One half was going to appear skeletal, the other was going to have skin.
The next day when I was in another part of the hospital doing aerobic tests someone threw it away. I asked the nurse. “WHERE’S MY ALLOSAURUS?“ "The what?”, she said. “THE DINOSAUR I MADE!" "You mean the tyrannosaur. All the trash has been removed. You’ll just have to make another one.” I didn’t. I suppose it was a valuable lesson.
*** I drew some good stuff back in the day.
The tuatara, which lives in New Zealand resembles a lizard, but it’s actually the sole remaining example of the order Rhynchocephalia, which flourished some 200 million years ago, predating the emergence of modern snakes and lizards. Being geographically isolated it managed to hang in there where in other areas its evolutionary niche was supplanted by newfangled critters.
They tolerate lower temperatures than your average reptile, eat crickets and beetles, have extremely slow respiration rates, and can live for more than 100 years.
They have no eardrums or external holes, but can hear. Their middle ears are filled with spongy fat that jiggles around when subjected to vibrations.
One of the 3-year-olds in Mrs. Lachrimaestro’s preschool class is obsessed with a song. It’s gaining momentum.
Lachrimaestro 