Wild Earth Integration

Well well well… if it isn’t Monday again.

Today, I thought it would be nice to show you an illustration I’ve been working on for awhile. Ta-dah! As many of you know, I’m a bit of a plasticine fiend, so it’s nice to get to show you these as I finish them.

But what’s Monday without a few facts that you could whip out at a cocktail party. I think it’s high time for a Wild 5 again.

And so I give you, the Wild 5: Bear Edition –

• Never ever try to outrun a bear. It just won’t happen. Although they look big and lumbery, they can run as fast as a horse. So picture them as large, furry, carnassial-toothed horses. *nods*

• Most people know about a few species of bears – the grizzly (like my clay friend), polar bear, black bear and of course, Yogi, are fairly famous. The spectacled bear, Asiatic black bear and sun bear are less famous. But just as awesome. Go Google them, I’ll wait.

• If you ever ate even a small part of a polar bear’s liver (not that you should, just sayin’) – you would most likely die. Like most arctic seals, a polar bear’s liver is insane-o high in retinol (also known as Vitamin A). To put it in perspective your liver should have about 575 IU of Vitamin A per gram. A polar bear has roughly 24,000-35,000 IU per gram. Moral? Please don’t eat polar bears.

• Some bears faced a pretty cruel past. Bear bile farming is one example. Kept in small cages known as ‘crush-cages’, many Asiatic black bears are unable to move or stand for their entire lives, while an IV removes their bile. Needless to say, this is an awful fate for any animal, so efforts are constant to stop bear bile farming in Vietnam and China. If this bothers you as much as it does me, you can pop by here to learn more, or make a donation directly to my site and I’ll send it to the right people.

• A male bear is called a boar, while a female is called a sow. This is not because they are related to pigs. In fact, I actually think if you encounter a male bear, you ought to be calling him ‘Sir’. But that’ just me.

Have a beary good week, all!

(Can you blame me? Really?)

Good morning on this snowy day!

Just wanted to pop in and show you a teaser of some new clay illustrations I’ve been working on for some Wild EduCards (flash cards for your little one, done Wild-Jess style)!

These cards will be available by download in the Trading Post soon (that flashy new link up top) for a very reasonable price – one buck!

This sort of reminds me of Willy Wonka’s lickable wallpaper, no? Please don’t lick your computer.

First item: It’s Friday. This makes me happy.

Second, I finished a new pic. You like?

In the spirit of Friday, I thought I’d write a little bit about input and output. No, I’m not talking about hooking up the DVD player, although that is an experience for the books also. I’m talking about the other part of the creative process that many people often ignore.

Here’s the way I see it. Creativity is output. It comes from inside of you (this is starting to sound a bit like Alien, but bear with me) – and then something is formed, stitched and melded together from your own blood, sweat, tears and imagination. It could be writing, dancing, sculpting, basketweaving – it’s all coming from you and ends up representing a snapshot of your life and mindset at the time. You put a lot of yourself into it. That’s why people use the phrase “it took a lot out of me.”

What I’m trying to say is, it’s really hard.

But this is only half of the equation. These are the awesome-super-fired-up-gungho-I’m-the-king-of-the-world moments where you’re buzzing with the excitement of creating, or having created, something entirely you. What’s the other half, then?

The other half of the equation is input. I think of input as a time of mindful, active rest. It is the second piece of bread in the creative sandwich, but too often people ignore it and make a huge mess trying to eat it open-faced style. Input is the time you allow yourself to delve into those activities that you used to enjoy as a kid, or feel niggly, naggy little feelings towards now. Input is the stuff that you want to do, but won’t allow yourself to do because you’ve got work to do.

Maybe your version of input is seeing an opera. Or watching Die Hard for the eighth time (shush, it happens). Maybe it’s sneaking a read of Twilight to see what all the fuss is about (guilty), or sitting on a park bench watching the squirrels. It could be eating an incredible meal with your main squeeze or going to the bookstore and poring over the children’s books you used to love. Input is the stuff that many people see as absolute fluff. But they’re wrong.

Input, unlike creating, is letting the world come to you.

I hear you – “But Jess! I can’t just escape my life and master the art of french cooking! I’ve got pieces to finish, papers to grade, books to write!”*  *(Pick your poison there). But what we’ve forgotten is, input is part of the job. If you don’t have input, you’ll have nothing to turn into output.

You’re no super(wo)man. Neither am I. But for a long time, I gave myself a hard time about needing the time to gain those inputs in my life. I would get frustrated if I caught myself staring out the window, feeling like a desperate spaniel pawing at the outside world. I would steal glances at the latest novel beside me and say to it “in a minute, in a minute”. (So I talk to books sometimes, what’s it to you?)

But you’d be surprised what a little input can do if you allow it into your life. Watch the movie. Take a walk. Get over yourself and how serious you are about your work and do something you actually want to do. The funny thing is, the more you allow yourself to be human and work with yourself (by that I mean, accepting that you need inputs), the more you’ll notice your outputs taking off! When you allow yourself to work with your own process, you’ll become more productive. Promise.

This isn’t just me telling you to go easy on yourself and take a break every now and then. It’s me telling you that input (walks, books, movies, friends, tree climbing) is necessary to any sort of creatively successful life. It’s filling up your mental dictionary. It’s expanding your brain, making new connections and sorting old files. As soon as you realize that input is part of the job, things change.

So go ahead. Don’t ignore half of your job. Enjoy some input time. Yippee-kay-yay – John McClane would be proud.

Details:

“Many things take time to create and to come alive. Be patient.”

I’ve been working on some new illustrations for a book I’m putting together. This is the first one. Incidentally, chameleons are great self-help gurus.

Details:

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful..."

The macaw is a beautiful creature that is quite well known for its intelligence, bubbly birdsonality and downright eerie ability to mimic human speech. But since it’s International Macaw Day (I just declared it), I thought I would treat you to some trivia on our flashy, florid, feathered friends.

5. They are rowdy party goers. In other words, they love spending time in a big flock of 20-30 individuals. There are 17 different species of macaws and they’re all the life of the party. Just don’t ask them to keep it down, because they just won’t listen.

4. Don’t let the cute face fool you — the hyacinth macaw is the biggest of its kind, with a wingspan of four feet. They also have a tongue that has a bone in it, that helps them easily crack through the tough shells of nuts and seeds. Take that, Tweety.

3. They self-medicate. You know how you run off to the drugstore and grab yourself some of that pink stuff when you have a stomach ache? Animals do that too, they just don’t have ready access to drugstores. Instead, they use what’s around them. Macaws (and a whole truckload of other animals) have been known to eat damp soil, which helps to neutralize their stomach and all of its fruity-diet induced erks and aches.

2. They get married. Ok, so that was wildly anthropomorphic, but macaws really do mate for life. (In fact, I bet their ‘divorce’ rate is much better than ours…) Once a macaw has found its other half, they will breed together, groom each other, share food and quote Tennyson. Bottom line: if your marriage is in trouble, perhaps you should talk to a macaw.

1. Most of them are lefties. Yeah, you heard me. Lefties. Scientists have determined this by carefully filming and documenting dominant hand/claw preference for hours on end. They probably could have saved some time by trying to high-five them.

So there you have it. Up next, International Buy Me A Sandwich Day. Any takers?

My first plasticine zebra!

It is a truth universally accepted that if you don’t stand out, you’re much less likely to rock the boat. People might call this being a wallflower, but in the wild, blending in can save your hide. What can we learn from the camouflaged creatures out there?

Tiger stripes make sense. The shimmering gold and black plays tricks with your eyes, so much so that you can’t make out their bodies, which are inevitably stalking their prey in the grass with a ghost-like coolness. (Admit it, tigers are to cool as Tom Cruise is to kooky). They look like the grass, the grass looks like them – score one for camouflage, the world makes sense again.

So, what about the zebra? A black and white horse in the middle of the browns, yellows and greens of sub-Saharan Africa? What kind of a monochromatic joke is this? Would it not make more sense for them to blend in? The secret lies in the bigger picture.

It’s called disruptive patterning and it’s pretty much one of the coolest tricks of the wild trade. Here’s how it works. Of course, if a zebra were out there on its own, its stripes would stand out like a sore thumb. Or more accurately, it would stand out like something bright, black and white in a land where browns and greens abound. They’d be eaten up in a heartbeat.

But here’s the catch. Hardly ever is there just one zebra. Instead, they’re always hanging out together in large groups. Social animals have safety in numbers on their side. Zebras take it one step further. Disruptive patterning works so well because their predators can’t tell where one zebra ends and other begins. Their audacious stripes confuse everybody, so lions (or anyone else looking for a meal) don’t know where to attack. To a lion, a herd of zebras can look like one big, black and white blob. So, even though they stand out, they’re really as safe as almost anything else in the Sahara.

What can we learn from this? If it suits you, you can choose to blend in. You can be like everything around you and never worry about rocking the boat. But if you decide to be different – like a zebra, fear not.  Because soon enough, others will notice your bright stripes and they’ll join you.

Then, before you know it, you’ll be running with a whole crowd of zebras and you’ll wonder why you were so worried about standing out.*

*In case you missed it, I’m not just talking about what you wear!

New art, new art! Here’s the original:

And here’s the clay version!

So who is this guy? Archaeopteryx (besides being ridiculously hard to spell a few times in a row) is also known as the ‘original bird’. He is thought to be the missing link between birds and dinosaur evolution. In other words, he’s a pretty important discovery!

The first Archaeopteryx (let’s just call him Archie) was publicly announced in 1861, right after the late and great Charles Darwin published the infamous Origin of Species. Fine timing, I say! We have since found 9 other specimens, all of which have lent evidence to the theory of evolution.

The coolest thing about Archie isn’t that he was around 150 million years ago (crowsfeet, anyone?), but was that he had one awesome feature — Archie had feathers. Now, whether or not Archie was a real flyer or more of a ‘glider‘, we don’t really know. But his tail feathers were quite broad, which tends to imply they were used to get his body off the ground.

Of course, if there’s one thing scientists are notorious for, it is not being able to agree. Some folks think that Archie was a tree-dweller – climbing his way through the branches to find food. These guys think that flight evolved as animals glided down trees. (This is known as the ‘trees down’ hypothesis.) Other scientists believe that birds evolved flight by running along the ground and finally lifting themselves into the air. Surprise, surprise – this is called the ‘ground up’ hypothesis.

Either way, Archie was a pretty awesome find and although the combination of reptile + feathers may sound menacing, he was only about the size of a large chicken!