Quite Possibly the Best Food Combination Ever

Quark, for those unfamiliar with it, is a soft, white, and tangy cheese. It reminds me of yogurt cheese, or labne. This delicious product can be spread on toast, or used in place of sour cream. It's lovely. Especially on toast with Nutella slathered on top. Delish! Scrum-diddly-umptious! I make mine in an unorthodox way, according to my German boyfriend, who insists that the quark should be on top of the nutella, and not the nutella on top of the quark. I don't think it makes any difference. If you want to have dessert for breakfast, try this combo (any way you want to).

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.

Full Moon Weirdness

Does the moon affect you? It does me. Every time I'm feeling antsy and crazy and just generally dissatisfied for a few days running it turns out to be around the full moon. It's pretty rough. Yesterday I was so deep in a gray-blue funk that even my yoga class, pho for dinner, followed by gelato and a few chapters out of James and the Giant Peach(Read to me by my wonderful boyfriend! English is his second language but he is just so good at reading aloud!) did nothing for me. I went to sleep at nine-thirty-ish but felt worlds better this morning.

Everything I work on seems to take for-ever. I've been working on this squid drawing for a long while now, and I'm only now starting to get it finished.


Perhaps I should have made it a wedding cake. I still can afterwards in photoshop I suppose.

Since I've been on etsy.com alot I've noticed a distinct artistic style that seems to be pretty popular. I can't quite define it however, it's sort of like creepy children's book illustration. The defining characteristics are little creatures/people, animal costumes, animals in costumes, disconnected objects, and a certain muted palette. Lots of muted and/or flat colors and deliberate naiveté. I love it all, I'm just curious as to how this style developed.

betsywalton.etsy.com
ashleyg.etsy.com
berkleyillustration.etsy.com
timssally.etsy.com
katcharly.etsy.com
OrangeWillow.etsy.com
yumiyumi.etsy.com

Is it an asian influenced thing? The style reminds me of cute Japanese things (but at the same time also of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are ). Jason Sho Green also seems to fall into this category. It also reminds me a little of Takashi Murakami's art if it had been whitewashed. Aya Takano, one of my favorite artists, is also floating on the periphery of this style.

Anyhow, I find it interesting.

A Very Merry Un-birthday to you!

I've finally started on my squid and cake picture. Aaron Brothers had a big sale so I picked up some nice bristol pads for half off. It was fabulous. Lovely thick paper that will take ink beautifully. The paper is actually white, not tan. I took this in the living room, so the light was a little orange. Haven't decided whether or not to put candles on the cake.

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.

40,000 Leagues

For those who like to be well informed, a league is a distance of about 3 miles.


When I was in Hainan last year, I was eating in a open air restaurant that had its own aquariums. If you wanted to, you could choose your dinner fresh from the tank. There were these strange shellfish swimming around in one. I thought they were adorable until I realized that I was looking at them the wrong way. And then they weren't cute at all, just another run of the mill arthropod...one without huge, charming eyes.

Anyway, one of these days those imaginary protostomes will make an appearance in my art. Until that day, however, I will have to content myself with drawing giant squid. The next panel (or two) is going to have two giant squid basking in a shallow lake, one with his tentacles wrapped around the hill that the shipwreck survivors are climbing up, and the other will be making sweet, sweet love to a large layer cake with lots of icing.

I'm telling you, eyes are hard to identify on sea creatures. For example, what if the eyes on this vampire squid are those two dark spots near the top of the head (right under the angel wings)? The animal then looks cute and harmless for the most part. But, what if the eye is that menacing pearly blue thing in the middle of that bulge (which it probably is, judging from the top picture)? All of a sudden it's a killer with crazy eyes. Never trust a vampire squid.

From Shipwreck to Salvation

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.