Rewilding

I've spent my first days of 2013 furiously scratching away with pencil and paper. For company at my desk, I have discovered the BBC's Best of Natural History Radio, where they do cute and endearing things like compare a rotten log, teeming with larva, to a "nice plum loaf," and exclaim crikey! over some particularly happy encounter in the great outdoors. They have also taught me my favorite new word, rewilding, which I intend to apply to myself as a new year's resolution of sorts. That does not mean I will practice my barehanded trapping techniques in the thickets of the city... But I will remember all year that life just looks a whole lot less cranky if I spend a minimum of an hour huffing it over hill and dale everyday. No excuses of it being too icy or there being too much work to do.

That word rewilding calls up so many fantastic images for me... So if I am being indulgent, I'll also hope for it to mean this in 2013: feral ponies - herds of them! spotted, speckled, patched and black - will storm out of the hills and smash the pavement with their gilded hooves. Stardust and borage flowers will blow out of their manes behind them, and in their path will be left a beautiful destruction.

Happy January! I hope for something wild and new for you, too.

And then...

...here's a bit of color, to leave you with that not-so zombie-apocalyptic feeling.

Black rain of death...

...that's what I think I'll call this picture. Dark December days can be so macabre.

Winter wedding invitations

I had a lot of fun working on my first commissioned wedding invitation suite, partly because the bride is sweet and lovely, and partly because I got to draw chickadees in birch trees. Who doesn't love a chickadee? And when you put it in a birch tree... it's a nice little color-coordinated bark-'n'-bird set.

Outside, inside

Frosty in the garden/steamy in the house.

Creatures

Matt and I took a long hike yesterday on East Mountain. I like to go out into the woods on Sunday during hunting season - a day of quiet, no shooting allowed, and so I do not have slow-motion fear-visions of bullets ripping our bodies apart. We found a beautifully patterned fossil in some exposed rock - a few feet long and maybe six inches wide - which I declared a dinosaur tail, and Matt thought more likely to be tree bark. With help from google, Matt's ID was confirmed - a dinosaur-era, tree-like clubmoss (they were much bigger back then), and apparently a very common fossil in Pennsylvania. On our way home, we watched a beaver climb out of his pond onto his tiny mudpatch, fold his tail under and out in front of him, roll back on his little round butt, and give himself a good scratch - belly first, then behind the ears.

Still stuck in last week, but this week seems to have begun. I've added three new originals to my Etsy shop, all black foxes, some wilder than others... Happy Monday, everyone.

Black fox

Listening to the book Swamplandia! and dreaming of its dark magic Everglades landscape... This fox is not from the story, but my own gray December imagination.

For Illustration Friday.