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I spent so much time being awake thinking of this image, that it was the first thing I did in the studio today.
I am sure that happens to many of my illustrator friends. You just can't let it go and it nags at you until you
give the image some time. Here is the rough sketch and the image.

After a long winter Camille wrapped herself in the freshness of Spring.

The wildflowers are still exploding here and the blues and pinks seem to have given way to yellows and reds. I don't remember them being quite so spectacular last year. Perhaps the weather conditions are more favorable this year? Or maybe I just wasn't getting out much around the same time last year. On a morning walk, I stumbled across a steeply sloping field of Mexican Hats:
Indian Blankets quite literally blanket the ground along my husband's drive to work. He also located another large field of the flowers on a different road much to my delight:













I can't think that I've ever lived somewhere where I could walk through such a picture postcard flower-scape until we moved here to Texas. Scattered throughout the dominant Indian Blankets are various other flowers. I think these are coreopsis:

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To Pick or Not to Pick

O.K I have a bone to pick! (no this post is not about picking bones!)

Yesterday, am taking a walk with my daughter. Its gorgeous outside, my little boy is in the stroller.

Along the way, my daughter is skipping and singing.

At the end of our street, there is an apartment complex. It has windy sidewalks through it and we always go through there because it is a nicer walk than staying on the street. (Don't even get me started on the sidewalk issue here!)

As we are walking through the complex, we come to a ratty old bush. And growing in the bush, is one single pink rose. My thought goes to: it only takes one. Which seems to be my daily mantra as I sift through the query process.

My daughter is thrilled and says: "Look, mommy that's pollination!" (She loves the Bee Movie). She squeals and proceeds to tell me all about pollination and how seeds move from flower to flower.

Then she says with wide, hopeful eyes: "Can I pick it?"

I usually always say no because most of the flowers we come across are in people's yard and that would be rude, not to mention probably illegal trespassing. I certainly don't need a 5 year old fugitive.

This time, I give in and say: "Sure honey."

She squeals again and picks the long beautiful rose, which again is not from anyone's rose bush or garden. Keep in mind, this is an apartment complex with hedges around it that are in the common area.

So who would care right?

Wrong.

Just as her little fingers pluck the puffy, sweet smelling pink bloom, a lady screams (and I mean screams) out from across the court, "OH NO!!!"

Now, first of all I never see anyone in this apartment complex because we usually walk before people start getting home from work.

Second, we NEVER pick anything. We don't even roll over grass and we don't even try to sneak into the apartment pool.

So of course the ONE time I let my daughter sneak a sample from nature is the ONE time some crabby old lady decides to make a stand.

The lady yells at us again, "Why did you just do that? That's awful!"

My daughter's eyes grow wide, almost as if she is about to cry. She whispers, "Mommy, am I in trouble?" This is a little girl that ALWAYS follows the rules. The one who actually reminds me of the rules because I actually forget them.

I turn to the lady and say, "Hi, my daughter found this random flower and picked it from a this bush."

Lady: "Why would you do that? It wasn't yours."

Me: "Oh no. We didn't take it from anyone's garden or anything. It was just stuck in this random bush."

She shakes her long, wiry white hair and proceeds to ash her cigarette as her white cockatoo perches on her shoulder squawking "hello, how are you?" in his polite birdy manner (which was actually much more polite than the old lady)

I apologize and say, "I'm sorry, have a good day."

I walk away (OK so I Stomped away) steaming. For 1/2 the walk home, I kept telling my daughter "It's OK. We didn't do anything wrong. Some people are just grumpy. We apologized."

Was I trying to convince her or myself?

You see, I am someone who cries if the person next to me cries. I am someone whose feelings are made of some kind of really fragile stuff even though I may come across as tough. I cry at commercials, I cry in movies, I cry to songs. (Sounds like I cry all the time but I dont) I am also someone who gets stuck on certain things. Someone who gets appalled at other people's actions. Someone who feels awful and beats herself up for days if she does anything wrong or hurts anyones feelings. (obviously - b/c I am still bothered today)

But to imply I am disrespecting nature? I celebrate Earth Day. I recycle. I pick up trash when I see it. I pay money every month to plant trees to offset my family's carbon. I even give enough to offset my neighbors carbon. I never let my daughter kill bugs and teach her to respect nature. I spend some time every day appreciating this world we have. So I am slightly offended and annoyed that it was implied I disturbed something sacred.

Maybe we shouldn't have picked the flower. I get that.

So what is my beef???

1) Why did she care? Granted maybe we should not have picked it. But technically it was a weed right? I think people focus on these smallish things when there are huge things to care about. If we all focused our energy on something bigger - like war or plastic or criminals, we'd be better off than yelling at a small girl for a single flower.

2) Why did she have to yell? Didn't she see my little 5 year old cringing away in fright. Didn't she see the joy on my 5 year old daughter's face as she help the rose in her hand, proudly. Was it necessary to yell and disrespect us like she THINKS we disrepected a flower?

3) Was she really so "earth conscious" that she was bothered by the picking of a single rose that was not even hers to begin with? Or was she mad because she wanted to pick it?

I don't know but here is my take on Flower Lady?

If you are smoking and ashing on the lawn with a wild rarish bird confined as a pet that lives in your dingy little apartment whose wings you've clipped so he remains a prisoner while you make him learn dumb human phrases as he dreams of flying in blue skies......

....then my daughter can pick a flower.

Who's with me!

What do you think? Was it awful to pick the flower?

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I'm just wrapping up on the tail-end of my book project, so hopefully I'll have some art to post soon. In the meantime, more photos...

It's wildflower season here again in central Texas and although I really haven't had much time to get outside lately, we did take a quick jaunt a couple of weeks ago to shoot a field of pink evening primrose. Chris happened to spot this distant field as we were driving on the elevated highway you can see in the background and figured out how we could reach it using back-streets.





















The ground was a bit marshy, but well-worth the mud to take some good reference photos.

Hopefully we'll get outside for a bit this weekend before the summer heat sets in. We've already had some uncomfortably warm days this spring - just a prelude to what's coming...

Cactus

PollinationIn celebration of Linneaus

Got a chance to play with some shapes yesterday and built this weird little flower. Amanda and I have a small amount of flowers around our townhome, some planted by the association and some that are ours in pots. We've been spending a lot of time tending them recently, removing dead blooms, weeding and pruning the herbs. The biggest surprise this year has been how well our herbs have done. I really should have had more uses for thai basil in mind before I planted it, the thing is monstrous.

Earlier in the week I went to the Farmer's Market by the University and picked up a bouquet of wildflowers for Amanda and delivered them to her during my lunch hour. (Because I'm smooth like that.) I've had flowers on my brain this week, so it's really no surprise I drew this.

Our theme this week for our blog is "Flower/Flowers". The above is an adult greeting card design I did for Ronnie Sellers/RSVP cards a number of months ago. Not in my usual style, is it? I've been focusing on line work this last year but previous to that, I had done a lot of jobs with collage and mixed media. Over the last decade-plus, I experimented around for a style that would be enjoyable, creative and marketable, and ultimately (or at this point in time), I'm back to my initial style of humorous line work.

I still get jobs for collage and mixed-media, and this card is one of them. I do enjoy working in collage and pushing paint around (in this case, digital paint), so jobs like this are a nice break from my primary style.

by Rafe Martin
illustrated by David Shannon
Scholastic / Arthur A. Levine Books 2001

In this adaptation of a native tale from Hawaii, two children, a boy and a girl, find a shark tangled in netting on the shore. Their attempts to get adults to help them are met with derision so the decide to free the shark themselves. The shark can sense the children mean to help and once freed gives them a bit of a nod of thanks before disappearing into the ocean.

Jubilant at their rescue, the children run through the edges of the jungle, stumbling on the king's sacred drum. In their excitement they long to sound the drum, to announce their achievement to the world, but to do so would be kapu (forbidden). But they're kids, they lightly tap the drum anyway, under the watchful smirk of the king who sees it all. Having waited until they have hit the drum the king then calls out his guards to seize the children and have them held for punishment.

Their parents plea to the king, hoping to appeal to his softer side, but his heart has grown cold to the entreaties of his people. Likewise, appeals to the other members of the community are cold and the parents decide that they must make their case elsewhere.

Seeking out the cave of the Shark God they place their lives on the line as the mountain-sized god swoops them up for a snack. After hearing their story the Shark God agrees to help and sends the parents home with instructions to prepare a canoe filled with goods and to wait for a sign.

The Shark God brings about a massive wave that floods the village and frees the children from their cells. The parents, having seen the sign they were waiting for, launched their canoe before the wave hit and were well at sea when their old village was destroyed. They quickly found their children (with the aid of a friendly shark) and the king's drum and with it sail to anew island where they hoped to find (or start) a new community, one with an open heart.

The author points out in an afterword the differences between the original folk tale and the modifications made for this version. The differences mentioned appear slight and motivational and make a good case for maintaining the essence of the original. A little casual Internet research shows that this story has many variations across the South Pacific and not all of them pleasant. In one, "Kauhuhu, The Shark God of Molokai," the children belong to a priest and they are killed for beating on the drums when the chief is away, no mention of freeing a shark. There are greater details about the ordeal necessary for avenging the children's deaths and the wave brings a hoard of sharks who feast on the cold-hearted villagers.

So on the one hand we have these tales collected by a couple of German brothers that are filled with all sorts of strange dismemberings and transformations and gore, and despite there being no solid evidence they were meant for children we consider them as such. On the other hand when we get a story from a non-Western culture we see a need to make it more palatable and perhaps soften the rougher edges? True, many a Grimm tale are themselves softened to the point of innocence though they are far from their original spirit and, for the most part, have been co-opted by Disnefication. But where we have the original tales in translation for ready comparison such isn't always the case and a lesser-known tale like The Shark God, without research, becomes practically gutted and filleted from the original to a piece of nicely presented same at a sushi bar.

In the end, I'm not taking a stand on this book either way. No, really. I read it knowing nothing about its origin and enjoyed it. Had there not be the author's afterword I might not have gone searching for the original story and not known what had been changed. I think I would prefer that when we introduce stories from another culture to children -- especially if there is little to suggest they will one day be taught it's true origins -- then I guess I'd like that "one shot" to be an accurate one. I wouldn't want any child drawing all their knowledge of ancient Egypt from watching mummy movies and don't like the thought of children learning about the culture of our island state in such a sanitized manner.