Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (”..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (”…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (”…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: art, astronomy, crafts, interesting stuff, languages, links, spiders

Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: art, birds, links, resources, tutorials

Been listening to video lectures, will start on studying the script soon. I'm not too worried about it; a lot of the topics were covered in other subjects already.

I don't feel much like drawing, more painting... I bought a 30x40 cm canvas months (years?) ago, and now that I have acrylic paints around I like working with, I might as well...

Also playing around with paint textures some more. The Daler Rowney FW Acrylic Ink in sepia does this neat thing in wet-in-wet where it partly separates into coarser/heavier dark brown pigment, and finer/lighter red pigment, which makes for some nice effects.
Of course, if you get a nice effect by chance, and try to reproduce it, you usually get stuff that looks like shit. XD

My biorhythm is weird. I'm OK in the mornings, more or less horribly tired all afternoon, but at some point in the evening I wake up again and can't find my way to bed.
I think today I'll cut that short by going to bed early(ish).

Tags: art, studies

In case you didn’t know yet, I like insects, spiders and the like. So, bit of a themed post.

A short video I captured of an ant dragging a rather hefty lunch home:

Bits of my stuff:

Links:
Moths Use Sonar-Jamming Defense to Fend Off Hunting Bats
Dancing caterpillars put off predators (cute photo, found via neatorama)
a bug sculptures photoset on flickr

Origami arthropods found on deviantart, different creators:

That artist of the last one has a lot of other great models in his gallery, only with the thumbnail links disabled.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: animals, art, arthropods, images, insects, interesting stuff, links, origami, photos, spiders, videos

I passed. It could have gone better, but with a bit of nudging, I passed. (no grade on this one, just that result.)

I think I'll take two days off before starting to study for the next stuff, which will be in September.

I ordered some basic supplies to try my hand at linol print. I know the principles from years back (having an arts teacher for a father has its perks), I'll see how it goes some time this summer.

In other news, Firefly will be aired on German TV, for the first time, in September. Maybe I'll see it, after all.

Fun stuff: On the 14th July, someone added, among others, this picture of mine to their favourites:


On the 15th, they submitted these:


I don't think I'm too full of myself when I say: Woot, I gave someone ideas! :D

Tags: art, studies, tv

Well, what with cold and otherwise induced brainfog, this was a dead month, blogging-wise. Let’s start the next one off, then.

I’m way more proud than I should be about finishing the Zodiac Chickens series. If you want to see all on one view, try the “Zodiac” tag.

Insect Photos:

Stag beetles are supposedly very rare, yet we keep finding them in our garden. I think it’s because our family tends to leave treestumps in the earth; the beetles’ larvae feed on rotting wood.

Flowers and other Nature stuff:

And some old-ish buildings:

Originally published at ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Tags: art, daily drawing, gallery updates, images, photos

Quite a bit of time I should probably have spent studying yesterday was instead spent cleaning up my "desk". However, now after having taken it, I think if I failed that one I'm officially too dumb to live.
Most people finished and left after 20 minutes.
There were 4 or 5 of 28 write-in questions, and two of those were just names ("name two post-impressionists" and "name two surrealists", respectively), with one of the others asking for a definition of "collage". The rest was multiple choice. I probably mixed up some names, but half of the the points? Yeah, should be no problem.

While sorting out the stuff cluttering my desk I also found a small sketchpad which I filled up in January, mostly with knotwork designs. Some of those are definitely worth saving. <3
Moar stuff to scan.

My grandfather got surgery to get a piece of metal bone yesterday, and 11 days of hospital and 3 weeks of rehab are expected. My mother took the opportunity of him being not at home to clean up the downstairs bathroom thoroughly. It needed it, considering it's also his smoking room.

Tags: art, enthropy, family, studies

Can somebody explain to me what comment spam that consist of nothing but utterly random links that lead nowhere - y'know, like kntrxt.com - is good for?
Luckily that's stuff Akismet caught for me, so I won't have to delete the well over a hundred posts by hand. @_@

Anyway, today... the part of the morning that I did not spend sleeping, I spent catching up a bit on deviantart messages.

Later I finished the overdue image, Made up the pairings for the next round of art exchange, got one more character profile ready to publish, made some minor edits to the wiki part of my website... and a few RPG posts. I wanted to get more done, but, ehwell. Not feeling particularly bad.

Tags: art, productivity report, website

Today I installed the printer on my desktop PC, and it worked fine. I'll need to calibrate stuff so printouts look more like what I see on screen (on test of an image scan turned out way too red), but, basically, it works.

Then I looked up the matte photo paper four sheets of which came with the scanner for calibration on amazon.de. They listed as accessory for the paper an SLR camera priced over 1.100 € XD

Otherwise I've been copying around files from both my desktop and laptop to my external harddisk, and from it to the other computer, so I don't have to go "WTF where is that file?!" as often as I have been recently, and uploaded the few images I drew in the last two weeks to deviantart.

Also inked and partly coloured an image that was due yesterday. oops. ^^°

Not taking part in nanowrimo or anything of the kind, but did have a bit of a plot/worldbuilding discussion with Mutt.

Tags: art, computer, productivity report, writing

Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-27426-8

As the title suggests, a book on drawing animals. Ken Hultgren was an animator for Disney, the former showing in poses and walk cycles, the latter in some of the “carricature” examples.

Ignoring the preface, here we have 134 pages full of black and white illustrations, with a few explanations thrown in. Quite many of the example drawings are shown as one roughed in and one finished version.

After 18 pages of general notes (the division of the body in three parts, rule of the thumb for placement of eyes and ears, boxing in forms, examples for simplified skeleton and mannikin frames, “mood and feeling”, “use of line”, and some examples of textures you can achieve with a brush) the book is divided into “chapters” of very varying length devoted to one animal or group of animals each. Nearly all of those have action poses like leaping, and a page or two on carricaturing the animal(s) in question.

The first one, “The Horse Family”, goes over 29 pages into most detail, starting with how the different parts of the skeleton are made up and fit together, the assumption being that the reader will be able to apply the same methods to other animals without being walked through all of the steps again. In addition to random action poses throughout the chapter there are sequences on leaping, kicking out, trot and canter. For a bit variety from the “generic horse” there’s a page on draft horses and zebras each, as well as a double page on colts.

The 20 pages of “The Cat Family” is mainly devoted to lions, with a page each on Tigers and Domestic Cats.

“The Deer Family” (including stags and fawns) is covered on 9 pages including sequences of walk and jump. It only shows a “generic deer”, no note on different species. By contrast, the later chapter “Dogs” of the same length has only a page of random sketches for general information, followed by one or two pages each with sketches of a particular breed. “The Bear Family” and “Elephants”  are similar in page count, with the elephant chapter being noteworthy for a for the species unexpected variation of poses (albeit none “leaping”).

Five pages spared for “Cows and Bulls”, four for “Kangaroos” (including a jump cycle), three each for rabbits (and a hare which wasn’t labelled as such), foxes, pigs and warthogs, and gorillas, two for giraffes, and camels (both, like the elephant, sadly lacking any information about pace, their main or only gait), and a single page on squirrels.

The book is capped by a 7-pages chapter on “Composition and Animal Grouping”.

I was slightly disappointed because the title implies more variety than is actually shown; “The Art of Mammal Drawing” would have been more accurate. The “The X Family” chapters are more concerned about showing (presumably) commonalities, rather than going into details of differences between species.

There is nothing like the staple of how to draw humans books, the figure divided into head-heights, so you need to be able to see or measure the proportions from the examples, or photos or models.
On the other hand, I think the many examples of “roughed in” mannikin - simplified skeleton and/or basic shapes - next to a finished image can be very helpful.

In my eyes the greatest strength of the book are the dynamic poses, and particularly the running and jumping sequences.

Considering the low price, this for me was worth it.

Originally published at ankewehner.de. Please leave any comments there.

Tags: art, reviews