A panda couple, still in this digital woodcut style I've been playing with. Mmmm...bamboo-y.

More...black...and...white. Arrrgh! Brain! Explodign! Anyway, Valentine's day on the horizon, figured I'd make a pre-emptive strike to keep from having to paint froggy cupids or something.

Can't...stop...drawing...black and white....*gibber* Seriously, these go so fast that I keep doing them in sheer disbelief. "I can't do possibly do that AGAIN!" Two and a half hours later..."Well, okay, but I can't do that AGAIN." I dunno, maybe my brain's on the fritz again.

This started as another b&w Painter doodle, but once I'd finished, I decided to add color. Now the little part of my brain that says "I think I liked it better in black and white..." is yammering and jumping up and down, but I'll get those wayward neurons yet. All I need is a sharpened crazy straw and a can opener...

A ringtailed something or other and her bird of paradise (or other). Another random Painter doodle, with a little color washed in over the linework for kicks.

Leroy the antisocial tadpole and his sock puppet--again. This was an X-mas present for my husband's boss, who runs a company called "Gaucho Games" and liked the original Leroy, so voila! Gaucho Leroy! He liked it sufficiently that this image actually appears as skatepark grafitti in the current game they're working on--god knows what the players will think.

I don't know if anthromorphic jade actually counts as anthro, but what the heck. These little guys are jade gnomes. Why their eyes are sewn shut is probably a deep dark secret requiring the generally harmless gnomes to kill anyone who finds out, or it may just be a sort've cryptically goth fashion statement.

I did a painting a few years back of a gryphon, and made some off the cuff remark in the artist's statement about how some of these hybrids made of a dozen different Charismatic Mammal parts made me think Igor had gone to the zoo with a bonesaw and superglue. A number of people suggested I illustrate that scene, so, as a follow up to the garbage dragon--"How Gryphons Are Made." Why, yes, I AM easily amused.

Following a short-lived fad for pet dragons in the Year of the Withered Turnip, and the inevitable injuries and attendant property damage, dragon breeders set out to create a docile domestic lap-dragon. Unfortunately, reckless inbreeding for the desireable traits of placid temper and a diet other than raw meat resulted in low fertility, while failing to deliver the dragon-breeder's Holy Grail of a dwarf lap-dragon. Extensive trapping of wild dragons to improve the strain led to the extinction of wild dragons by the Year of the Gibbering Chipmunk, while domestic dragons grew increasingly fat, sedentary, and omnivorous (although the fertility problem had been fixed entirely too well.) In the end, the dream of lap-dragons was abandoned, and dragons found a new niche as garbage disposals, eating virtually every form of organic trash and converting it to high grade fertilizer. Attempts by the well-meaning to coax the morbidly obese and slothful dragons into a healthier lifestyle revealed that in fact, dragons were perfectly content to sleep twenty-three hours a day and have their food delivered, and had a regrettable tendency to convert anyone attempting to alter their lifestyle into mulch by the most direct route.

Attempts to work to a particular style got sidetracked, as I wound up with a more oil-pastel look. But hey, happy accident.

Ever have one of those nights when you're kinda punchy and you want to draw something, but you just got nothin'? You know you should go read or sleep or something, but instead you lift the pencil one more time and somehow, out comes a badger with a yo-yo. Yes, this is how I amuse myself in the evenings. It's not deathless art, but it keeps me from mutilating a better piece of art in my frustrated creativity.

This painting of a--yep, a samurai numbat--is fairly ancient (by which I mean, at least three years.) I think his name was Nogo or something. I do kinda like his armor still.

Whenever the subject of furriness comes up, I usually find myself saying something along the lines of "I like animal people, but I don't, y'know, think I have the soul of a wombat or anything." Then I started thinking about this statement. And I suppose, assuming the wombat drank tea, lounged around reading books on wombat evolution, and had a secret weakness for Flavor Blasted Goldfish, and acted like a human all the time, that it might be possible. But I'm not holding my breath.

This one is Gryllus's fault...she encouraged me to do something cartoony. Like most of my vague stylistic musings, I'll probably do two or three before I am distracted by another shiny object. This one was more of a warm up, which is why it's the most generic blue canine thingy imaginable. (I have this urge to scream "Generic blue canine thingys copyright ME ME ME!" but I'll refrain.) It's smoking because I was watching TV and one of those damn Target Market ads came on. I don't smoke, but those things annoy me so much that I want to take it up just to strike a blow for personal accountability.

Since I'm well under my token 5% non-anthro limit, and proud of this one to boot, I figured I'd toss it up. I was feeling Art Nouveau, and I've been doing a lot of black and white commercial illos lately, and enjoying the effects of a limited palette, so I decided to do it in sepia tone washes. (The original sketch was about three inches high--I had a composition I liked, so I decided to just go straight to digital and put in the details rather than getting fiddly with it at a larger size and loose all the energy.)

Other than the fact that she's sitting on something called the Lizard Throne, I know nothing about this woman--she could be the tyrant of a cruel empire reading over the day's list of executions, or an oracle who's stuck serving a twenty year term on a chilly stone block, from fifteen to thirty-five, coming up with a list of Things To Do once she retires. Your guess is as good as mine.

Did this piece about six months ago, for a tutorial in the book "Digital Fantasy Painting." Said book has at last been published, so I thought I'd post a jpg of my submission. Doing a tutorial is a little weird--you have to show every stage, so there isn't really a mechanism for quickly fixing things that are bothering you, like, say, the fact that the tail isn't quite integrated with the stump. But overall, I thought it was kinda nifty, and I love dewlaps, so the bizarre top-heaviness of it all appealed to me.

More anime! More big pants! Aiiii! The world ends! And with my first upload of the new year, too.

No, seriously, I was just playing around with an anthro-manticore chick, and have been enjoying this anime stuff immensely. This was the end result. I cut holes in the pants, on the principle that nobody was gonna claim that *I* was too lazy to draw legs, damnit! (She has triple rows of teeth behind the lips. Honest. She's just being polite because she knows that opening your head "like a toothy Pez dispenser," as I've heard it described, creeps people out.)

Dragons, as we all know, are a highly sexually dimorphic species. Males become large lizardlike creatures, dedicated to acquiring hoards with which to attract potential mates. Female dragons, on the other hand, resemble pearly-skinned humans for much of their lifespan, the better to study the arts of gem appraisal, jewelsmithing, and flea-market antiquing, so that they can assess the value of a male's hoard down to the last penny and shop between potential mates. (Many of the original legends of draconic interest in virgins may actually be tales of female dragons in the juvenile stage scouting out a male's hoard.) Upon deciding on a male, the female undergoes a chysalis stage, whereupon, like butterflies, they emerge winged and extremely hungry. Male dragons who plan ahead will stock several sides of beef to forestall this, or else may find themselves backed into a corner of the hoard trying to fend off a ravenous female and uttering such useless lines as "Honey, can't we talk about this?"

(Fine, I admit--I had too much fun with the anime ratgirl, and I wanted to paint something else anime...)

The "anime catgirl" subgenre of furry art takes a lot of flak. In my ongoing effort to find and recreate every cliche known to man, I decided to see if an anime ratgirl would get any more love. I haven't painted anything anime in years, so this was kinda fun. The style of coloring is one I've always admired, although I'm not really sure where it came from originally, since I mostly see it on wallpaper over at Deviantart. It's easy to do in Painter, though, and a nice break from the cel-style coloring I usually do.

I wanted to paint somebody hefty for a change, and this Brazillian tapir seemed like a good choice. There's plenty of skinny chicks in anthro art, god knows--I think she's still cute--for a tapir--despite having a substantial amount of meat on her bones (or if she isn't, I'm not gonna mention it while she's holding that spear.)

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an--aye-aye? They aren't pretty beasts, but I remember Raynflower asking me to try painting one sometime, since it seems like the only lemurs anyone paints are ringtails. So here we go, at long last, my aye-aye--it's not pretty, but it has a weird kind charm (and anyway, I've been playing with foreshortening, and I wanted something with really strange hands.)

Reno Maxwell, inventor of the Gothvark, dug my anteaters and asked me to try my hand at that diabolical and cuddly little beast--so here it is! (I like his little wings.) Also, just to shamelessly plug, anyone who wants anteater merchandise should visit my homepage at www.metalandmagic.com where we have all kinds of anteater goodies.

So I wanted to do something in the Big Pants style that I enjoyed on the kirin, I wanted to paint an okapi, and I wanted a shrunken head. (Really, who doesn't love a shrunken head?) Halfway through, I realized that the joy of an okapi is in the leg markings, so I couldn't use the big pants, but I liked the composition as it was, so--I gave 'im Mondo Calves. The result has a definite Chris Goodwin flavor, I think--equines with big legs, it's a natural--but given that I'm a great admirer of his work, I was overall pretty pleased with how it came out.

I realized t'other day that I've never drawn anything in the "big pants" style. So I cooked up this kirin eating ramen, inspired by all those big pants artists out there, and damnit, it was fun. Even if I realized too late that her coloration reminds me irresistably of Mystique, from the X-men. D'oh!

Somedays you want to make deathless, meaningful art for the ages. And some days, you just want to paint happy gay anteaters in boxer shorts frolicking in the grass.

My husband liked my mooing anteater so much that he asked me to do a follow up for our Christmas card this year. Overall, I'm pleased, except for the ant. Because I know--I KNOW--that ant legs do not hang off their abdomen like that, and despite the fact that it was the only way that really work visually, and anyway it's a stuffed animal, I feel a nagging artistic guilt. Merry Christmas to all--I'll be drawing accurate ants for penance for some time to come.

The anteater says "moo."

Inspired by Michel Gagne's twisted rabbits, and left with some doodling time on my hands one day while my fellow gamers negotiated a tricky pit trap, I cooked up a few weird little beasts based on Siamese cats, a few millions years evolution, and the hypothetical planet Snog. The result--Snogian fauna! (And yet more Snogian fauna!)

Inspired by Michel Gagne's twisted rabbits, and left with some doodling time on my hands one day while my fellow gamers negotiated a tricky pit trap, I cooked up a few weird little beasts based on Siamese cats, a few millions years evolution, and the hypothetical planet Snog. The result--Snogian fauna! Why, yes, I AM easily amused.

I did this one a few weeks back..."Wug" the anthro-foo dog. (You know, those things that hang out outside of Chinese restaraunts. I have two flanking my computer.) I don't know much about Wug, but I like him, and his little cat, too.

My husband told me to paint a dragon, and I already had a vaguely comicky, soft, Art Nouveauish theme in mind, and something about Siamese, plus I wanted to play around with framing effects after seeing some various seriously cool ones at Midwest Furfest, and next thing you know, the pastel really hit the fan. PASTEL! Aiiigh! Too much pastel. I should go paint something in black, scarlet, and hunter green just to cleanse my brain.