The Squid and the Birthday Cake

the squid and the birthday cake, originally uploaded by beancollins.

I love cake. And I have a passing fancy for squids. Squids and cakes seemed to be a natural combination to me. Or maybe I was just hungry for cake and calamari.

My constant companion and new old sketches

I have a lovely counter table in the spare room that serves as my desk. It really is wonderful and I love it. (Seeing that, I should probably spend more time at it, drawing and looking for a job.) The best part about the desk is that there is space underneath for my guardian gargoyle, Gunter (pictured below).

He's a fierce little tiger-striped piglet-pug. Best dog ever.

So here are some sketches from one of my China sketch books.















These last three are from a larger format sketch book and are more recent than those above.

Past Lives

I haven't been able to get to my squid drawing yet, though I know exactly what I want to draw. That is sometimes the problem...when things are already finished in my head I lose my motivation to actually put them on paper. But I will probably get to it in the next week or so. I've become somewhat enamored with beetles and checked out a fabulous book on them. It's lovely and filled with beautiful pictures of actual beetles (most of them dead already, so it's a little creepy) and fantastic illustrations. If you have a fascination with beetles, this is the book for you.



Since I have nothing new to post, I thought it would be fun to dredge up some old sketches from the last few years. I recently found an old drawing book from when I lived in Eugene. It covers a messy and painful breakup, which I'm sure is perfectly obvious.











The next two sketches were inspired by this quote:

"Yin and Yang are highly inscrutable and man is only a temporary sojourner in them. With all the glorious prosperity of a short lived mushroom, he tumbles to ruin within a day. With all the momentary glory of a spring flower, he succumbs to frost within a week. Not even the winds blowing through high heaven or the sudden flash of lightening can move any faster. A century is to be likened to the smoke ridden by a meteor; whitening hair comes with the speed of an arrow passing by with a crack. Man appears like a perishing bamboo shoot before he has even sprouted; he meets his autumn and tumbles to pieces."

-From the autobiography of Ge Hong.

Newest Folding Art Book project

Last year I worked on a large folding art book (meant to be a calligraphy book, but I like to draw connected pictures in it) and it seemed to progress very smoothly. This year I have been working on the same size of book for months longer and don't seem to be getting anywhere. I think the stress of this year wasn't very productive. The stress last year was for some reason, but this year it wasn't a creative stress...it was just the bad kind of stress. But I've done a few pictures and the last two frames satisfy me.