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Some of the last known Tasmanian Tigers My Dr Midas books often include endangered or extinct animal characters, so I was very interested to hear about a new DNA experiment involving the Tasmanian Tiger. I wish there was a way to bring this and other animals back to life - with a time machine perhaps (lol) - but at least this new study gives an insight into their make-up. Australian scientists have taken genetic material from a 100-year-old museum specimen and put it into a mouse embryo to see how it works. Dr Andrew Pask, of the Department of Zoology, said it was the first time that DNA from an extinct species had been used to carry out a function in a living organism. "As more and more species of animals become extinct, we are continuing to lose critical knowledge of gene function and its potential," he said. "This research was developed to examine extinct gene function in a whole organism." The Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine) was hunted to extinction in the wild at the start of the last century with the last known Hobart Zoo in 1936, but several museums around the world still hold tissue samples preserved in alcohol. The University of Melbourne team extracted DNA from some of these specimens, and injected a gene involved in cartilage formation into developing mouse embryos. Blue dye then showed were the DNA was working. Prof Rawson, is involved in the Frozen Ark, a global project to preserve genetic information from threatened species. Some scientists hope mammoths will be next to be examined. Prof Rawson said: "To go back to animals and plants that went extinct thousands of years ago, there is less chance to get a sizeable portion of DNA to unravel it," he explained. "But modern techniques are developing all the time - we can now get information from material we once thought was impossible." Guess what I'm reading now Reading about the Tasmanian Tiger has also prompted me to read a book that's been on my shelf a while. 'Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf' by Australian Sonya Hartnett. The story follows Satchel O'Rye and Chelsea Piper, who find their own survival becomes inextricably intwined with that of an animal they believe to be the last-ever Tasmanian Tiger. Sonya was the Christopher Paolini (teenage author of Eragon) of her day, she wrote her first book, Trouble All the Way, at thirteen and it was published when she was just fifteen. She has written a number of books for young adults since then and has won many awards including the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

… I’d go out on the ocean, and if I had a pony, I’d ride him on my boat…

Seven or eight years ago I experimented with doing children’s book illustrations, and I actually produced a few I was happy with—but I wasn’t quite at the level where I could pull off exactly what I wanted to do. I have always thought the Lyle Lovett song “If I Had a Boat” would lend itself perfectly to being illustrated, and it has been in the back of my mind all this time. Well, now seems as good a time as any to put it out there, out on the ocean.

Oh, and if any of you happen to know Lyle, tell him we gotta talk.

The leaping fish mean this works for Illustration Friday this week as well, the theme is “leap”.

This morning I stumbled upon our resident raccoons, and when I saw the female’s sweet diamond-studded face, I thought, why is it I have never done a portrait of her? It seemed high time, so I broke out the watercolours for a quick run at it. It certainly looks like her; perhaps I’ll present it as a baby shower gift—I’m reasonably sure she’s with child(ren), considering what happened here on Valentine’s day…

Music poured from my new iPod speakers as I painted tonight. About three months ago, I purchased and downloaded Tom Petty’s album Highway Companion from iTunes—it had been out for a year at that point, but I hadn’t even been aware of its existence, and I was quite excited to have a new raft of Tom Petty songs. Excited as I was, however, I just listened to it for the first time tonight. There’s no real excuse for it taking this long, but that seems to be the way things go around here at the moment. Can’t fight it. But I do have to say good old Tom never disappoints—the phrase “ankle deep in love” is simply brilliant.

Of course, I would prefer to be ankle deep in raccoons, but still.

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It has been awhile, so I thought it was time for another in the collective nouns series. I’m feeling rather sleepy today after all the recent action, so I thought a nice peaceful drift of hogs was appropriate…

The rest of the series can be found here.

This morning I heard a now-familiar jackhammer-type sound coming from outside the house, but definitely nearby. The last few times I heard it, I suspected the basement workshop of my next-door neighbour—but another thought crossed my mind as well. We have new skylights in the attic, so when I heard the sound this morning, I followed my hunch and went upstairs. Sure enough, there on the metal cap over the chimney was a flicker, madly drilling into the metal. I thought it must be terribly painful to pound away at something hard like that with no payoff, but then look what he ended up digging out of there—well worth his time (and headache), surely.

At least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. You see, I took my camera upstairs with me, and I snapped some photos of the scene, so I could do a drawing later. The trouble was that later, when Sidney and I returned home after a quick jaunt, we stumbled onto a burglary in progress, in our house. The dirty bastard stole my camera with the photos, so I’m going from memory here. To add insult to injury, he also stole all of my pens—luckily I found a brown one lurking in with my watercolour brushes. As tempted as I was to do a police sketch of the guy for today’s drawing, I had to do the flickers anyway—I wasn’t about to let the loser win.

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Not only does my sister get to spend her entire day surrounded by dogs, she also gets to take her own pup to work with her. Talk about a fine way to spend your day. And for my sister’s dog, Audrey, it’s heaven—although sometimes I wonder if the other dogs see her as the equivalent of the kid in junior high whose father taught at the school, or whose mother drove the bus. You know, the cocky ones who thought they could get away with anything (and usually could), but who people tended to befriend because it was a good idea for them to do so.

Sometimes this is evident when Audrey is around other dogs that don’t recognize her status—she has a tough time accepting their disinterest. After she had followed this wee guy around the lake for a bit and he kept ignoring her, she finally made sure he couldn’t help but notice. She got down to say “Hey there! Hi! How’s it goin’? Nice jacket,” but all he said was “Move it.”

Fanatic is a strong word, although it may well have been used to describe me, had anyone stumbled across me in the middle of the Nevada desert, crouching in the middle of a yellowed field, talking to the translucent-eared hare that insisted on pretending he wasn’t listening to me.

I had the good fortune to attend the HOW design conference in Las Vegas a couple of years ago, and I stayed a few extra days to explore the surrounding area. I expected to love the dry heat, which I did, and to spend plenty of time swimming in Lake Mead, which I also did. But I wasn’t expecting the place to be teeming with bunnies, which it was. The cottontails were incredibly adorable, and I chatted with them a fair bit as well, but it was the hares that won my heart. They are the gawky teenagers of the rabbit family—I suspect they have six-sided die in their furry pockets and excel at math. Their back ends are so disproportionately large and their ears so goofily long that they are downright cartoonish, but you know they could knock your teeth out with one kick of those hind legs. I have no interest in returning to Las Vegas, but I intend to spend much more quality time just outside it, squatting in the middle of the desert at 6am, telling my secrets to the hares.

And luckily, I don’t have to worry: what happens in the desert outside Vegas, stays in the desert outside Vegas.

Go ahead, make my day.

I have twice received the “You Make My Day” award from fellow bloggers, and as tough as it is to choose the five blogs that make my day, here they are, including the two who awarded this to me—it may be against the rules, but there was no way I could make this list without including them. Please check these folks out, they’re incredibly talented (and, as an interesting side note, two of them use the oft-ignored square bracket characters in their names):

Sketched Out
free[k]hand
The Cats Demand Answers
Wagonized
An open [sketch]book

I realized today that while sure, I have managed to crank out a drawing each day for nearly four months, I have neglected a key feature of any product: packaging. So I opted for something modern and edgy, and above all practical for holding a large flat sheet of paper. No flies on me.

For the second time this week, I was awakened in the wee hours of this morning by what sounded like intense catfights. Each episode sounded worse than the time before, and both nights I stumbled to the window and found this scene. My favourite raccoon pair, in the middle of the street, directly under the streetlight, staring in my window and putting on a little valentine’s day show. Tarts. I know it’s my pair because the male lost his tail a couple of years ago (Davy Crockett hat, I suspect), and now he looks just like a tiny bear when he lumbers through the yard.

Anyway, they keep serenading me, kind of like an r-rated version of John Cusack holding his ghetto blaster. They obviously want to be featured here for today’s occasion, and I figure I’m wise to heed their request. Some of you may recall the prediction I made awhile back, and yesterday the cat came home sans collar. Seriously. They’ve got me now—I have no choice in the matter from here on in.

But I’ll tell you one thing: when you see raccoons mating, you know precisely where the term “hump” came from.

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When I was a kid we lived about 15 miles outside of a small town. We owned a Volkswagen Rabbit that had been acting up, and we also owned a goat. The goat was named Boomer, and he was about the worst animal on the planet—I was even aware of this at the time, but I still loved him. I had made a rope halter in 4-H and was determined to halter-train him, and I would have to literally drag him down the road away from our place, all four of his hooves digging into the dirt in front of him and his head cocked to the side with eyes bulging, and then when we got to the end of the road and turned back, he would take off running, and practically rip my arms out of their sockets until I let go of the rope. Training a goat is not an easy task.

Boomer and my father were mortal enemies. He was always leading the other goats out of the pen, but we could never catch them in the act and see how they were escaping. I can remember my dad out there, stealthily sneaking on tiptoes around the shed to secretly watch the escape plan, and after he had reached his lookout spot, he would wait a sufficient amount of time for all suspicion to die. He would then ever so slowly eke his head around the corner just enough so his eye could make out the corner of the pen, and there would be Boomer staring straight at him. Every single time.

Anyway, the Volkswagen. One day my dad was fixing the carburetor, he had it all taken apart and was following his propped-open Compleat Idiot manual step by step. He realized he didn’t have the proper tool for one part, so hopped in the farm truck to go borrow one from a friend. Out where we lived people often had uninsured vehicles for home use only, so it’s not like he could drive this into town—just to clarify the Rabbit was our only real vehicle. So, he zipped over to a friend’s place, it took him ten minutes—and by the time he got back, Boomer had not only escaped from the pen, but he had also eaten the page detailing how to put the thing back together again. Have you ever seen a man who has been tormented by a goat, and the goat won? It is NOT pretty.

It has been awhile since I did a drawing in the collective nouns series. The rest can be found here.

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Though disliked by the majority of humans, bats and rats are rather fond of each other—and they love to spoon. Don’t fool yourself into believing it’s not happening, they are having affairs in attics everywhere…

In this sequel to the well-known bestseller about the struggle between two of sport’s greatest legends, we take a deeper look at what motivates our two heroes, really getting to the bottom of the hare’s grandiosity complex, and the tortoise’s self-esteem issues. A riveting read for all ages.

The Illustration Friday theme this week is “tales and legends”.

I finally gave in and bought a new Rapidograph, since I managed to somehow lose my old one. My $3 pens I have no trouble keeping track of, but my favourite and more expensive pen went missing not too terribly long after I got it. I keep expecting to find it in the bowels of the closet or amid the dust bunnies under my bed, but no dice. So, I got a new one. It had been long enough that I had forgotten how fantastic they are to draw with—if you’re into thin lines, these boys can’t be beat…

A couple of weeks ago I came across the wonderfully-named blog Who Needs Friends When You Have Pens, and read about the Parker Slimfold fountain pen. It’s a lower-end pen, certainly, but has a flexible gold nib, so it seemed like a good one to try—I like the idea of a nib that allows for a thick-and-thin line. I bought one on Ebay, and it arrived today, in its original box (with instruction sheet) from the early 1960’s. It has never been used or filled with ink. I filled ‘er up and played around a bit, and it is so different from anything I have used before—it’s going to take awhile to master, but I must say I’m beginning to understand this fountain pen obsession. I love the smell of India ink. Below are a few of my test-out-the-new-pen doodles.

Things have been so crazy the last while, I haven’t had much time beyond draw-scan-post—so not only am I behind on all of the blogs I regularly visit, but I also completely missed the fact that I made my 100th post the other day. I must admit that lately I have had moments of “why, oh why did I say I would draw something EVERY DAY???”, but they have passed, and I’m feeling energized again (thanks in part to new pens). I’m proud to say I have managed to stick to my self-imposed rules that the drawing must be completed the day it is posted, despite sometimes really, really wanting to go to bed instead. Thank you all so much for continuing to visit—and for leaving kind comments and birthday well-wishes—I promise to catch up with all of your blogs soon.

I’m not quite sure how to explain my need to provide these animals with their own modes of transportation, but they certainly don’t resist. They got places to go, man.

So, this evening, a friend sent the following in reply to the panther I drew yesterday. I’m not sure which is crazier, the similarities between the panther and Scoob, or the fact that he just happened to have this image on hand…

It is a little known fact of the animal kingdom that foxes are, above all, hedonists.

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For some reason when I think of bears, I think of being in the small town in the interior where I grew up. It was a few years ago, and I was staying with a friend who lives many miles out of town, up a very remote road where she lives with her llamas. Yes, llamas. She has an incredible straw bale house (that my father helped her build) on top of a hill, surrounded by beautiful pine trees and overlooking the snaking St. Mary’s river. I had been visiting friends in town and returned after dark, so I had been given a can of bear spray, just in case—there are often bears lurking around there, and you never know what they’ll do. I parked the car outside her fence, and loaded my arms up with the multiple items I needed to carry up the hill with me. Now, remember this is in the middle of nowhere—there aren’t exactly streetlights, as you can imagine. So, here I am, with an armload of teetering detritus, and I have to try to navigate in the pitch black towards the gate in the fence, through tall grass and over uneven ground. I get through the gate, and as I turn from latching it, I lose my footing and I can feel myself stagger. I will never forget that moment, as the realization hit that I was stumbling in the direction of a high-voltage electric fence—but knowing that the only option other than falling into the fence was forcing myself to reel in the other direction, which would very likely result in me bear-spraying myself in the face. At the last possible moment I caught my balance, and though I laughed out loud, it was a laugh filled with that sickly rush you get after a near miss while driving.

Looking back, I almost can’t believe I managed to avoid it—macing myself in the face is so something I would be capable of.

This week’s theme for Illustration Friday is “100%”, and after I spent an hour wandering around today trying to find a sign somewhere that said 100% anything (there should be many: 100% organic, 100% Canadian owned, 100% guarantee—I guess no one wants to claim 100% anything these days), I returned to work thinking that the expedition had been 100% useless. Which made me realize I have been meaning to draw a group of 100% useless characters: a sloth of bears (not to be confused with a sleuth of bears, which is much more active—and inquisitive).

Pigs have always held a special place in my heart, and I find them to be rather elegant, as the above silhouettes suggest (especially with a parasol). They are impeccably clean and extremely intelligent, but, to their detriment, they can also be pathologically gullible.

So, it seemed time to revisit the collective nouns. By most accounts, the poetic terms for groups of animals (and other things) were mainly created by writers in centuries past, but I suspect that this one dates from the glory days of Southern Florida in the 1970’s, when you were every bit as likely to see another type of green bale bobbing offshore as you were a group of turtles. Coined also by writers—the writers of Miami Vice.

Sidney owns the house my suite is in, she lives downstairs—and pretty much any time I go on vacation, or on a date, or even just out with friends, she says “just remember Bambi, no dogs and no babies.” Of course my standard response is “if I came home knocked up and carrying a puppy, I really don’t think you’d kick me out.” It’s our schtick. However, tonight while I was playing around with my watercolours, I realized nowhere in that statement does she forbid pigs. Look out.

Where to begin? I realize that the twelve days of Christmas actually start on Christmas day and extend into January, but that simply does not seem right, so I’m taking a stand and starting the countdown now. It doesn’t make sense to still be drawing Christmas-related subjects into a new year, in fact it’s downright criminal (like the stores that put out Christmas items before Halloween—a guarantee of a one-way ticket straight to the hot place, if you ask me).

But the countdown beginning so late is nothing, compared to the other obvious questions. First, why is a seed-eating ground bird in a fruit tree? And moreover, how does one “give” a partridge in a pear tree to someone? Unless they actually buy the land surrounding the tree—which is highly unlikely, since that would be the most valuable element of the first day’s package and would thus be mentioned in the song—I expect a cage must be involved, or some sort of chain or rope, which doesn’t seem very Christmas-y. My true love wouldn’t remain my true love long if he were to chain a bird that likely has an issue with heights to a tree that has been uprooted, never mind that it is incredibly presumptuous to give someone a large orchard tree without first ensuring that they have a) enough space and b) a second tree of the same species for cross-pollination purposes. All in all, this is a poor gift. Not a good way to start the twelve days.

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“I’m tired of eating just beans,” says I,
So I opened a can of sardines.
But they started to squeak,
“Hey, we are tryin’ to sleep.
We were snuggled up tight
Till you let in the light.
You big silly sap, let us finish our nap.
Now close up the lid!”
So that’s what I did…
Will somebody please pass the beans?

- Shel Silverstein

Where the Sidewalk Ends was one of my favourite books as a kid, and I still know many of the poems by heart. The humour in them was so subtle and perfect, and the fact that the author looked more like a criminal than a writer of children’s poetry only increased his appeal. I once read an interview with Shel Silverstein, and he said that his publishing contracts stipulated that he had final say over the book’s design, and moreover that his books were never to be published in paperback—and a glance through Amazon seems to indicate that this agreement has not been broken. Turning down additional book sales to protect the book’s design is a hell of a move, in my opinion. I knew I liked that guy for a reason.

This is another in my collective nouns series, for this week’s Illustration Friday theme “little things”.

Tonight as I was pulling up to my house, I was trying to decide between a car drawing, or breaking out the watercolours to paint a raccoon, something I have been meaning to try for awhile now. As I came up the porch stairs I heard scrambling in a tree in our yard, and sure enough there were two coons tumbling around, playing at about 20 feet above the ground. Show offs. Needless to say, my decision was made—after all, they could see right in the window, and they don’t take kindly to being ignored.

As for the smoking, raccoons always remind me a bit of surly teenagers lurking in the shadows—acting cocky, playing it cool, trying to put on a show of force despite being awkward and self-conscious.

The difference, however, is that I rarely hang around in the dark talking to surly teenagers—but I assure you the raccoons roll their eyes at me just the same.

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For those of you who have spent much of your time wondering why bees allow grasshoppers to hang out with them, now you know: it’s because they can reach the pedals.

Another in my ongoing collective noun series, this one is for this week’s Illustration Friday theme, “little things”.