Toads and sprouted cobnuts.

A few times lately I've been moved to get out the colouring sticks. I used to draw and paint quite a lot at various times in my life. Than I discovered digital photography and my idleness realised it had come home. I always wished I could be more loose and imaginative in my style, I always end up labouring, and as often as not my pictures look as if they might be illustrations for (slightly weird) cookery or children's books, bold/unsubtle; I suppose I feel a bit the same about my photos. These are done in Derwent watercolour pencils, and I kept them to A4, so they'd scan. Photoshop and Picasa are handy for tarting them up a bit and ironing out somewhat the wrinkles in the paper which occur because I never think it's worth using good watercolour paper, then wish I had.


The first was done to illustrate a poem I wrote about toads, herewith included. This one obviously wouldn't do for a cookery book. Unless you were one of Macbeth's witches. Apologies to lovely (toad-phobic) sister for any distress caused.

Toads

From the fervour of their parents' pilgrimage
- who, in passionate self-abnegation, urgent
with procreative zeal, hung their spawn
about the pond in viscous rosaries -
are born toad tadpoles. Innocent
of the orgiastic rites from which they came,
these oblates feed on slime, slowly
putting on arms and legs, to undergo assumption
onto land. They'll live as eremites
in cells of earth and stone, unmortified
by cold and damp, until the spirit moves them to intone
their chiming canticles on moist spring nights
and calls them in their turn to make
their progress to the water.

~

[Still can't quite decide between 'eremites' and 'hermits' in that line...]
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The other painting was of a sprouted cobnut I dug up in the vegetable beds. The voles bring them over from next door and bury them all over the garden, then forget where. Inspired by Marja-Leena's gorgeous scanner art, I tried to scan it, but it didn't really work, so I drew it instead.

~

Poem and cobnut were inspired by qarrtsiluni's new 'Transformation' theme, which is yielding some wondrous things, as ever. They've accepted some of my photos, which is nice, I'll say when they're up there.

~

Molly's brighter, and has bursts of cheerful energy, though she often flakes out immediately afterwards, and sometimes seems uncomfortable, and is a little distant. I was able to clean round her ear by giving her a gentle, warm, not all-over, shower, which rather distracted her from the fact it was actually the hurty place I was cleaning, and Betadine I was using. She has to go back to the vet next week and I don't know what they'll want to do, but in the meanwhile, we're all just relaxing a bit in the sense of relief. Thanks again for kind words and concern.