Artwork by Ursula Vernon

[Shan]

The Root Gate




Quoted from her website:

"Ideally, there'd be a story behind this--something that neatly ties together that Mesoamerican door and the Northern European dwarves, the key and the glow and the tree and where the hole goes and the misty forest and my favorite dwarf's male pattern baldness.

But I got nothin'. I just wanted to paint something with big-nosed dwarves and tree bark. Sorry, gang.

This painting was actually featured on Tech TV for about five seconds. I'm jazzed!"

[Shan]

Egg Bait




Quoted from her website:

"It was rapidly becoming obvious that the chicken was up to no good.

This was obviously a very quick little piece--I was really just wanting to paint the guy, to experiment with that particular head shape, and I had a vague desire to paint a teal wall. (Whyyyy do I keep doing things in shades of blue when I know my scanner can't take them? Why? Am I some kind of color masochist?) The rest just kind of turned up, and of course, I'm never one to turn down an evil chicken. (No, I don't know what the chicken is plotting. If I did, the painting would be of the OTHER side of the wall.) For what was meant to be a glorified figure study, it was fun, though, and I kinda like the weird little guy's muzzle."

[Shan]

Elric and the Stone Eggplant




Quoted from her website:

"This was a more ambitious experiment with oil pastels. I know there's a story there. Bugger if I know what it is--I only came in at the moment when Elric is clinging to his beloved stone eggplant. But there it is."

[mobbie]

I like.......... Tribal Wombat! Absolutely wonderfully cute, lovely lovely. He looks so.. cute-tough
The only downside is the similarity between him and the starwars creatures ^^

[LaFille]

Oooh, new Ursula Vernon pictures. Good pick, the first one; I like the colors, the tree, door and the little characters. The second one I think is one of what she calls her "Christensen craze" or something similar... The stone eggplant one, I find ok; nice, funny, but not remarkable.

Mobbie... Why is looking like a Star Wars critter a drawback? ;D

[Shan]

"Egg Bait" does in a way look like a James Christensen. The way it is drawn has alot of his style to it. Maybe that is why I like it. I love his work.

I think why I liked "Elric and the Stone Eggplant is because I could see a story behind it and I like the story I saw.

"The Root Gate" is a good call. It is very well done and if you look at it and think, you can find a story there.

[Shan]

I found some mice elementals that really appeal to me. I especially like the air and fire ones.

Air Mouse




This was kind of tough. Not in actual painting, which was the standard watercolor/colored pencil/acrylic ink, but getting the colors to hang together.... I originally had planned to do something very like the fire mouse, but I immediately ran into snags--the sort of gritty, textured earth with dark shadows look in the background just didn't work for the light and airy element of air. So I had to start over and go really light, sort of cloudy. And unfortunately that ran into another snag--I wanted to use yellow, but yellow wash background, yellow cloth, tan mouse, gold metal doodads...it was starting to look very washed out, and lacked the crispness that I'm sort of psychotic about. Even purple shadows didn't quite pull it out. So I wound up inking bits here and there in a medium brown, and that helped quite a lot, and before I quite knew it, I'd gone and inked most of it, and between the heavily stylized smoke and the harder outlines, it had turned Art Nouveau on me. Back in the day, I used to do a LOT of Art Nouveau styled digital work, but I've never really tried it with real media because...um....I'm scared. (FEAR! FEAR! Geometry SCARY!) But I do love Art Nouveau dearly, so I figured hey, what the hell, added the curly twisty bit down on the left, and called it good.

[Shan]

He's a cutie too.

Fire Mouse




would love to do a series of elemental mice. Heck, I'd love to do a series that included the oft neglected elements from the Chinese system and include wood and metal in the series. But I know myself, and thus will not commit to doing such, because my attention span is short and my schedule is long, and...y'know. More might occur, but I promise nothing.

Plus, as a beady-eyed little rationalist who despises pseduoscience in all its incarnations, there is some part of my soul that rises up and mutters "You know that fire and water and earth aren't REAL elements..." and I am then struck with a mad desire to do elemental whatsits that include, oh, Manganese and Hydrogen and Einsteinium and Molybdenum or something. Obviously there's way too much on the periodic table to do them all, and all those short-lived superheavies would tax my creativity after awhile, and I can think of better ways to spend an evening than tearing my hair out trying to find something exciting to painting involving cute fuzzy animals and Samarium. But the desire is still there.

[Shan]

This one is OK, but the first two I like alot more.

Water Mouse




Still not a series. Nope. No series here. Pure coincidence. Can quit any time I want. Anybody seeing a series in the fact that there are now three elemental mousies is simply being paranoid and inventing mental connections where none exist.

*adjust tinfoil hat*

I don't actually like water. I mean, I shower regularly, and I drink it, and I know that I am some ungodly high percentage water myself, but I am Not A Fan. I fear drowning. I swim poorly. I have inhaled a good solid lungful of seawater, and the projectile vomiting that follows such a happy occurance is firmly etched in my memory. And I grew up in Oregon. The water there is cold and icy and doesn't like you, and harbors pointy rocks and sulky jellyfish. Things in the ocean are very beautiful, but I have no desire to join them. I will cheerfully get up at dawn to go tidepooling, but I will wear boots and jeans to do it.

I do like koi, though. My stepmother had a spectacular collection of koi, and they were gorgeous little fishies. And smart, insomuch as one can apply the term to a brightly colored unprocessed fishstick. She insisted they had personalities. I cannot naysay this, as I had never spent a prolonged period of time with a koi. For all I know, they do.

[Shan]

This one is my least favorite of the four. Maybe it is the colors, I don't know. I do like the idea of him holding a spade and a little seed in amongst all the rocks. Cute idea.

Earth Mouse




This was probably the hardest of the lot. I had a helluva time thinking of how to incorporate the Art Nouveau element with an earth mouse. (Plants would have been the easy way out, but I still have a vague notion of tackling the Chinese elements at some point,* so Wood would get plants, and Earth was left with rocks and dirt.) So I went to my trusty blog and asked my readers what was both earth and swirly. They had lots of good ideas, but the one that kept coming up was marble. So I tried it. And it didn't come out quite how I think of Art Nouveau, and it may just look like he's trapped in a giant box of decorative chocolates, but I thought it was kind've a neat effect anyway, if a bit overwhelming. We used to have rocks like that in Arizona, sedimentary with big marble veins swirled through.

Earth was hard for another reason--I wanted him to be DOING something. Air and Water can just swirl around being swirly, and Fire is just kind've aggressive, but my gut feeling is that Earth needs to work for a living. Earth has stuff to be doing. Earth is busy. Earth is solid and responsible and works hard. Earth is reliable. Earth is the designated driver of the elements and will always come over and feed the cat when you're out of town. So I cut down on the froofy adornments, much as I love a good froofy adornment, and gave him pockets to put seeds in and a trowel to dig with, and set him to work planting seeds in a rocky and somewhat barren landscape (although you might have to look at the big version to actually make out the little seed in his hand.)

[Shan]

Here is another one that reminds me alot of James Christensen's work. If you are familiar with his work then I think you can look at this one and guess why.

Packrat




Having finally finished a dreadfully long professional gig, which was keeping me from doing anything large or in depth, I had to unwind. So I hammered out this little scrounger, one of the many hooded critters of obvious Christiansen influence that I seem to keep painting. He's a packrat. I can identify with this, being one myself. I can imagine how it happened--first it was just the one bag, and he kept cramming it full of stuff, but he resisted buying another bag, because once you go to two, you can never fit all your earthly possessions in one bag again. Now he doesn't even know how many he's got, and things keep getting jammed in between the ropes. He should really go through and get rid of the useless crap and the ugly crap, but you know how it is, you might need it someday. Like big cardboard boxes. Every time you move, it takes so long to find a cardboard box that'll hold the TV that you twitch at the notion of throwing it out, so you wedge it in the hall closet, and deprive yourself of much needed storage space and wind up using the vacuum cleaner as a hat rack.

What was I talking about again? Anyway, fun piece. Built it up in layers--first the big bags, then the smaller stuff and ropes, then I just started adding random items like the slug and bottle and the obligatory goldfish, testimony to the coverage power of acrylic.

[Shan]

This one reminds me of a head statue that I have seen in some pictures. I think one reason I like it is that with the mouth open the way it is, it looks as if it is the doorway to inside. Think game crypt or dungeon there.

Jungle Rat



Readers of my webcomic Digger will probably be familiar with the fact that there are a lot of big stone heads scattered randomly about the landscape, serving as A) signposts and B) opportunities for me to draw a big stone head, damnit. There's always room for big stone heads! They're somewhere between the big Olmec stone heads and the Barong masks of Bali (which I collect, because hey, who doesn't love working with a dozen leering toothy gargoyle heads in lurid colors staring down at you?) and they just...err...show up. No explanation is ever given, and so far, nobody's asked for one. Thank god.

Anyway, I was doodling cute things and in between hamsters slaying mimes and various oddities involving chickens, I wound up with a stone head. The critter on top is a degu. It's a type of Chilean rat. I've never heard of them either, but they're cute, and evidentally closer related to guinea pigs than rats, but for my money, they fall into that vague category that my stepmom used to call "rattymouses," and...err...y'know. If you wanna believe it's a little brown rat, the Species Nomenclature Police aren't gonna hear about it from me.

[Shan]

Hmmmmm, so she does a webcomic too. If anybody is interested here is the link to it.

Digger


And here is the first page. Kinda cute.

[Shan]

I like the feel of this one. I also love the story that comes with this one. Friends do come in all shapes and sizes and each brings something unique to the relationship. The caring and sharing is so much more important than sight and size.

Tea with the Griffin




The griffin knew that the mouse was blind, and thus had no idea that he was having tea with an enormous monster that, despite the foreparts of a dodo, nevertheless posessed a carnivorous feline stomach. But it's lonely being a monster, particularly when your front half is extinct, and so he pretended to be a much smaller creature, and drank tea very cautiously out of the mouse-sized teacups, and kept his voice down to a whisper whenever he visited the mouse.

The mouse was, indeed, blind (being descended from one of a moderately famous trio) but was also nobody's fool, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with his hearing. The griffin's breathing couldn't come from anything smaller than a bull elk. He occasionally wondered if he should offer his guest a bigger teacup (or possibly a barrel) but figured that if the griffin wasn't going to say anything about it, neither was he.

[Shan]

He's a cutie.

I like the lighting and shadows in this one. It is like he is hidden, but then smiles as he finds out that someone does see him.

Afternoon Shadows




An old piece, but a good one. To take the photo reference for this, I had to belly crawl behind a dumpster with the camera. The neighbors probably thought I was crazy, but I'm resigned to that sort of thing. He's actually got his chin on an old chunk of curb.

[Shan]

Interesting piece and the idea does work. I love rocks too, great big huge ones down to little tiny ones. I find them very interesting and it is amazing all the things you can see in some of them if you take the time to look.

Donkey and Goldfish



At long last, after many travails--particularly that awful thing with the water buffalo and the kumquat, he'd be waking up screaming for years after THAT--the hooded donkey had arrived, his goldfish at the ready. Nothing could stop him now!

I love rocks. I mean, love 'em. Passionately. Anyway, this was my chance to try a wildlife art technique you see a lot--you put the critter in the middle of a big rock expanse of some variety, and then all the cracks in the rocks lead to the critter, so it's suppose to draw the eye. I was pretty pleased.

[Shan]

This one appeals to me a little more than the first one. I think I like the idea of him going over the edge, but yet still taking goldfish with him.

Donkey and Goldfish 2




In later years, he was never able to explain how it happened. It had all seemed terribly logical at the time, one thing leading to another in series, and after Cairo, it was simply inevitable that he'd be scaling a cliff with a pear, a voodoo doll, and of course, the goldfish. (Always the goldfish. The goldfish was the crux of the matter, after all, even if he hadn't known it at the time.) But when he tried to explain this to other people, it began to sound increasingly crazy, until finally he gave up completely. After that, whenever anybody asked, he said he'd been in a cult, but was feeling much better now, and that seemed to satisfy everybody and didn't lead to nearly as many awkward questions.

[janggut]

Ursula Vernon draws very cutie pix of cutie creatures. i like them all.