This is some of my latest mixed-media animal artwork showing an elephant, a lion, and a crocodile. Go, pets, go.

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TOP: E is for Elephant + Close-up (using a photo from my mom’s as a kid for the hare, and part of a shopping list from my grandmother’s for the elephant’s ear)
BELOW: L is for Lion
BOTTOM: C is for Crocodile

De winter days are drawin’ nigh
An’ by the fire I sets an’ sigh;
De nothe’n win’ is blowin’ cold,
Like it done in days of old.

De yaller leafs are fallin’ fas’,
Fur summer days is been an’ pas’;
The air is blowin’ mighty cold,
Like it done in days of old.

De frost is fallin’ on de gras’
An’ seem to say “Dis is yo’ las’”—
De air is blowin’ mighty cold
Like it done in days of old.

- “Winter Is Coming” by Waverley Turner Carmichael (1888-?).

A collection of Carmichael’s poetry was published as From the heart of a folk in 1918. His works are included in several anthologies of African-American verse.

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Here’s (yet another) image in mixed-media style on the ailing economy.

With the 200th Munich Oktoberfest commencing tomorrow, meet the first-ever English-German Oktoberfest guide in miniature format. Following the grand prize in the 2008 Oktoberfest poster design competition, I have provided the artwork for this little booklet published by Piper Verlag. My whimsical two-color vignette-style illustrations are distributed throughout the book.

Lebuchenherzl                            Dirndl

I have also created an intricate flip book that is featured on the bottom of the book and runs for a little over 70 pages. The animation shows humanoid Oktoberfest symbols like a beer stein, a running heart, a girl in a dirndl, etc. all of whom are engaged in an Oktoberfest parade. >more

Here’s a fun illo of a talking book. I used the covers and interior spreads of some very old books that I have here for this collage.

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The rain is raining all around, / It falls on hills and tree. / It rains on the umbrellas here / And on the ships at sea. (R.L. Stevenson)

This is from Mark Twain’s 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad:

An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech – not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary – six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam – that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each inclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses which reinclose three or four of the minor parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it - after which comes the VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb – merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out – the writer shovels in “haben sind gewesen gehabt haben geworden sein,” or words to that effect, and the monument is finished.

- From Mark Twain, The Awful German Language