the MALE project

People ask me why I don't write a children's book, and illustrate it myself. Here's why. I'm good at drawing, but I'm great at drawing only a handful of things, and I will only let my book be about this handful of things. Ultimately this will be a children's book with no animals, toys, or landscape scenery. And Scholastic will reject it. 

Same goes for topics I give myself to build my portfolio. My husband observed that all my topics are girl-related and feature an unreasonable amount of pink.  So, this time, he gave me something to draw on. My project was to show a soldier coming back home from war. I could have shown the silhouette of a ripped man walking with his backpack on his shoulder, against a backdrop of yellow bomb blasts and planes hovering over his head, and a patriotic flag floating conceptually in the background. But I'm a girly girl, so sue me:) This is what I did.

Nessie is my friend.

I believe that the Loch Ness monster is real. I believe that Nessie lives deep in the Loch and has chameleon like properties that help her merge with the sea weed, or rocks. That is why the skeptics don't see her. If I lived in Scotland, I would move somewhere close to the sightings and try to be a sighter. "Ey saw nessie ey did. Real as me nickers she is."

Nessie could be a boy, but I think she's a girl. I wholly support procreation of her (or his) species if we can find her ( unless he is a boy) a mate, because obviously she (men cannot survive alone for a century) does not seem to be a predator. Legend has it that she survives on fish, seaweed, and other small sea creatures in her neighborhood.

Here is to Nessie. May our faithful Nessie hunters find her, take pictures of her for facebook, but leave her unharmed.