Albino Kraken

Pa: Here you go, Jimmy. I’ve got a present for you.
Jimmy: But, Pa, I feel a healthy indifference toward radishes!
Pa: I know, son. ::Pats Jimmy on the back::
Jimmy: But Pa! Are we mutants?
Pa: From the look of our hands, old chap, I’d have to say yes. Now shut up.

Thanksgiving and Halloween are really quite similar, you know. I mean, they’re practically on top of each other when it comes to the calendar, they’re both bursting with your standard fall color scheme, and while you worship the devil during one, the other has you paying homage to a wad of congealed berry juice (practically the same thing).

I think combining the two would definitely save time. Who needs to spend hours cooking a full turkey dinner when you can just go collect some candy? Though I guess one drawback would be the name, since it would most likely come out sounding like “hollowgiving”, which might make some people doubt the sincerity of the love and thought behind the candy and bits of deli meat being tossed into their sacks.

Over time the story became somewhat cloudy and muddled (sometimes it wasn’t a squirrel, but a rat), but the smith ever after maintained that it was the most stunning revelation he’d ever had. “If that vermin hadn’t decided to relax on the sun-warmed hull of my latest creation,” he told his chair (he was pushing 80), “I’d never have realized what I’d been missing all these years.”

And medieval war-fashion was never the same.

Excerpt from the diary of Hedgewold von Bufhousen

July 15, 1992

Dear Eloise,

This may come as a shock to you, but I was right all along. That creepy bear from the Wellinghouse Foundation’s annual Donation Drive and Chariot Race hates me.

I woke up from a deep, and what would have been rejuvenating, sleep around three o’clock in the morning to see it standing in my doorway, an eggbeater gripped in its villainously-stuffed paws. I was so startled, that I believe I fainted quite away. Upon rising in the morning, I found my entire shoelace collection a horrendous mess of frayed tangles - as if someone had taken an eggbeater to it. I believe this is more than mere coincidence.

From now on, I shall take a can of Raid to bed with me.

Excerpt from the diary of Hedgewold von Bufhousen

July 10, 1992

Dear Diary, or should I call you Elsa? I know we’ve been through a lot, and I’ve had my share of, shall we say, episodes, but even you can attest to the fact that I am categorically not insane.

Having said that, I now have the duty to report a most intriguing turn of events. I was sitting quietly in my reclining chair, my lovely hand-carved tobacco pipe firmly clutched in my handsome knuckles, when my eyes fell upon the mantle above my fireplace. More specifically, upon the small ballerina music box which Aunt Reginald had the foresight to bestow upon me last Easter.

I know this may sound strange to one such as yourself, but I’m quite positive the girl was holding one of my spatulas above her head! Though how she came upon it in the first place is a mystery to me, as is the apparent discrepancy in my spatula’s size from when I used it to get taffy off the cat last fortnight to now, as it sat, no more than an inch long, in the handless grip of a plastic doll. I must be getting old. In fact, I find myself not even liking fudge the way I used to.

P.S. Did you know a ballerina can also be called a danseuse? I find that rather humorous for some reason.

That’s right folks. With the redesign comes not only new colors and a new header, but a new name (and domain name – take a look at the URL). And while I, for one, cannot doubt the absolute clarity that a title like Nathan’s Blog brought to this website, I also knew that it was, to put it bluntly, hideously boring.

This is less boring, hopefully.

As Rachel was quick to point out regarding the problem with drawing trees (in the previous post), “Dead and/or leafless trees are easier and more interesting.” This is quite true, of course.

However, it also works as a general rule of thumb for other subjects. Cats, for instance.

I’ve come to realize that trees do not lend themselves well to accurate sketches (without spending an undue amount of time on them, that is). For even if you’re looking straight at the thing during the moments when you’re not bent over your sketch pad, the only mental notes you can ever take back to your drawing hand are things like: “The edge kind of gets really wiggly about here… and then there’s that lumpy darkish bit below the squiggly mottled lightish bit just to the right of that extension with the blots of leafiness at odd intervals.”

And so you sort of improvise within the confines of that general description, until you end up with something that does, in fact, look like a tree, and would probably even have a similar shape as the subject. Though if the tree ever managed to get a good look at its supposed portrait, it would probably give you a fairly condescending bit of glowering and stomp off in a huff.

Leaving you to wonder how in the world it had just done that.