Yes, I love that man of mine!

My yearly Pinki in Halloween costume picture comes in right before the 31st! Here she is as Lydia from Beetlejuice in her wedding dress.

This is a costume that I've actually wanted to wear, but it looks hard to make, and many people wouldn't know who it was. A quick red and black ink sketch from a screenshot of the scene.

A Sailor Travels to Many Lands...

The yearly Pinki the bilby in costume picture. I've been wanting to dress in a sailor outfit for a while now, but they're all very tiny and revealing and cheap looking. Some day...

Watercolor in the Japanese watercolor pad I got for a dollar, so it's not very good quality.

Underwater Pineapples

Pineapple fish look very cool. Swimming bilbies like to chase them around.

Watercolor and heliotrope ink sketchy painting.

What Big Stripes You Have

Inattentive Little Red Riding Bilby stumbles upon the Big Bad Tasmanian Wolf (AKA thylacine). Another small sketchbook marsupial doodle. What a big head you have, Grandma!

The Devil you say!

Noodling around, looking for new and improved ways to draw Tasmanian devils. Did not achieve.

Here are some strange and nautical ones. They have weird flat heads and their eyes seem to be lower than their noses.

This is a bonus bilby with a pet cloud. Whatever, sketchbook!

Ex Libris

I like books. I like fancy bookplates. I like bilbies. I made myself a bookplate with a bilby on it to stick in my books.

I drew the picture with my crowquill and ink, then colored it blue digitally and added the border and lettering. I found a fun map font with flourished letters. Now I can't bring myself to stick them into any new books.

She thinks of him, and so she dresses in black.

It's become kind of a tradition for me to draw a picture of my little bilby character in a Halloween costume. This watercolor sketch is a very tiny painting of Pinki as Paul. This is why I don't draw her with shoes on -- look at how weird those Beatle boots look!

Double the consonants, double the fun!

Hmm, been a while since I posted. Nothing more than sketches and scribbles lately, but here's an update. I hadn't drawn my cartoony bilby for a while. Here she is with puppets of a kultarr (little mousey marsupial) and a quokka (medium kangarooy marsupial). She looks like she has dinosaur feet!

The sketchbook this is in has the oddest paper texture. It's kind of rough, but the surface gets destroyed as you erase. It left big smudges all over the doodle (drew it in purple pencil, then inked and colored with watercolor pencils that I left dry) and pills of paper stuck to the eraser. It actually took up some of the ink too. It's better for straight ink or a very hard lead.

The Last Course

With these five, I have posted 100 different mammals eating. Whew!

This is a Peary caribou, a subspecies of caribou with a white coat. I like push-ups too!

A Sulawesi palm civet with an artichoke. This is one of my favorites out of all of the paintings.

A tricolored disk-winged bat eats a spoon full of rice. Note the suction cups on the wrists and feet.

Hutias are another grayish rodent. But they deserve love too! She has a wax bean.

If you know me, you could probably guess what mammal #100 would be. Greater bilbies have become "my" animal. I love cupcakes too, so she has one (mmm, red velvet). Hooray!

Thanks for indulging me in this repetitive phase. When I started, I had hoped that I'd paint 100 mammals from 100 different families. Well, taxonomy is an ever-changing science, so by using different (sometimes outdated) sources, I ended up repeating a few. I may go back and paint more so I can have 100 different families. Stay tuned!

Chomp!

I like Halloween a lot! Too bad it'll be over tomorrow :(. I wanted to do more art but didn't get around to. So here's a sketch I did in like a minute, then hastily (poorly) colored. Explorer bilby bobbing for a donut -- it's apple cider flavored, yum! Please excuse the horrid quality of the picture. It's watercolor on drawing paper with no under sketch again.

Costume Time

Halloween is fast approaching; time to come up with crazy costume ideas! I have always liked the cute look of the mock turtle from Alice in Wonderland. Here's a design for a costume of it, modeled by Pinki the bilby. It didn't take long to see what an impractical costume it would be, with no fingers and the big hard shell. Plus the hooves had to be big enough for long bilby toes to fit in to. Oh well, it was worth a try.

Small blue pencil drawings, plus a bonus gouached painting!

Slow birding day

I haven't painted a bilby in a while. This is a gouache sketch of a bilby looking for some Australian birds. Things to notice:

* The tiny tiny bird on the cover of the book is an accurate representation of a species of Australian bird, who can ID it?

* Binoculars are very hard to draw.

* The bird is a Southern emu-wren. It really does have only 6 tail feathers.

There are lots of cute Australian birdies that I want to paint! P.S. My scanner decided to die after many years of service, so this is a picture taken with my camera. I had trouble trying to get it clear but color-accurate.

Wombat Divine

I'll admit, I like looking through the picture books. I've seen some great illustrations, great stories, boring stories, and hideous illustrations. There are so many picture books out there; it must be a very competitive field.

I found this one called Wombat Divine by Mem Fox, illustrated by Kerry Argent. It's about a wombat who wants to be in a Christmas pageant. It has a bunch of different Australian animals, from kangaroos and emus to the more unusual numbat. And guess who else is in there. Yes, a bilby who gets to be the Christmas angel.

It's a rather strange book, and it makes me wonder who would read/buy it. Some people might be attracted to the religious aspect, but then possibly be offended (the wombat gets to be Jesus in the play). The pictures are taken with a camera, not scanned, so you can see my shadow on them.

Boba Bilby

Someone help me, I need new animals to draw! A quick bilby, again. I like the big straws they give you to drink boba with. This is meant to show their weird toes (two claws on one toe, whaaa?!?)

Jellybean Joey

Baby bilbies, the horrifying truth! A quick digital doodle. It looks like a shiny balloon.

I've been drawing a plethora of bilbies lately.

Piña Power!

I still have been sketching every day, I just haven't been on the computer in a while. I got out the good old purple pencil to do a picture of a bilby with a baby pineapple. I've almost filled up my watercolor sketchbook. I should get a new one for the new year.

Bilby Time!

Time for bilbies!

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I decided I wanted to have a little picture in my Blogspot profile. Since I hate every photograph of me, a drawing it was!

I used my crow quill pen, my Dr. Martin's Bombay Black ink, my Winsor & Newton Artists' watercolours, and my W&N Series 7 brush (number 3). Yup, only the most expensive and high-quality supplies for my drawing of a super-deformed me drawing a bilby.

Cuteness, defined

The majority of my sketches fall into three categories. In this post, I show some examples of the first thing: overtly cute animals. I went through various sketchbooks and found these images as examples. Looking at them all together, it seems like to me, cute involves something with a big head, most likely with its mouth open, and maybe an arm raised or a hand on its chin. Big eyes are not a necessity, but they do help. Fuzzy is good, as are small legs and feet.

Clockwise from the top, I've drawn a tarantula (who says mammals are the only cute animals?), a confused bilby, a puppy, a kitten with bat wings for ears, a goose, and a kangaroo.