Illustration Friday "Primitive"

I am totally willing to admit this quick sketch is probably the silliest thing I've ever drawn.  And that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

This is another entry for Illustration Friday.  This week's theme is "Primitive."  First I started thinking about women who look like Venus figures, then I moved on to cavemen, and wound up with "Primitivism."

I find those art terms to generally be very funny because they're so undescriptive.   Paul Gauguin a was a leading figure in that area and I started to think about where it could (not so) logically go.  The painting is Two Tahitian Women.

Voila!  Hope you enjoy it!  It makes me giggle anyway.  Please view full for maximum silliness.

Illustration Friday "Fail" Paper Collage

This week's Illustration Friday's theme is "Fail."

I immediately thought about stuff like getting bad marks at school, losing races (done that plenty!), letting other people down, etc.

Then my mind started to drift towards worse failure and the cruelty that is Natural Selection. African elephants have hard lives. Many don't survive the yearly trek to the wetter regions. I thought about the strange elephant burial grounds. They are areas where many African elephants who have become too weak or injured limp off to die; frequently where other elephants have died before. The ground is littered with the gigantic bones of these amazing creatures.

Mammoths are, of course, extinct. I suppose extinction is the ultimate failure.

This is a collage of paper bones on dirt. The bones are cut entirely free hand (no tracing or outlines drawn before they're cut) and there's a little trilobite in the corner for interest. Please view full for maximum detail.

Thanks for checking it out and don't forget to look at the other nifty entries!

Henry Dalton's MicroMosiacs

Every once in a while I am just overcome with longing for a certain object. I’m not a fancy car or mega-mansion kind of person at all—that type of status doesn’t really interest me. Unfortunately, most of the things I really adore are not available for sale!

These exceptionally beautiful pictures are collages made from the scales of butterfly wings.

They were made by Henry Dalton and reside at The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles.

The museum itself is an astonishing place! The theme of the museum is about as opaque as the name. There are exhibits of sculptures mounted on the heads of pins, illustrations of common superstitions, a collection of dice, and other peculiar objects.

Please go if you’re in Los Angeles! It’s free and a wonderfully unsettling experience. More like being a Victorian curiosity cupboard than a museum.

After you’ve absorbed a strange film and examined some models of erosion and fetuses, you find yourself in a dim room containing a large table mounted with many microscopes. There’s relatively little explanation, but as your curiosity grows you peek into one of them. Gorgeous iridescent chickens greet your eye.

They are mosaics. Dalton used many species of butterflies and stripped the scales off the wings with a needle. He then positioned the scales under a microscope, positioning each one with a puff of air through a tiny tube. When it was settled to his satisfaction, he would crush a small segment of the scale, using the natural oils to adhere it to the slide.

The slides themselves are tiny, about the size of a nickel. There’s a small case, perhaps as big as a deck of cards, where they all can be stored.

I love the idea of tremendously beautiful objects that can only be appreciated under a microscope, like if you’ve ever examined a spider with a magnifying glass and seen a cute and fuzzy multi-eyed face.