Putrid and Pugglesnug pretended to be peach preserves…
Illustration Friday
All posts in illustration friday
I decided to give the Illustration Friday topic a try and came up with this… well, I had a lot of immediate reactions to VACANT. For example a vacant stare, vacancy, empty houses, etc… so I rested on a sketch of a bear trying to get honey out of a vacant beehive 
. Oh golly. Well, maybe I’ll do better next time! Thanks for visiting!
This weeks Illustration Friday topic was ‘Detach’. While several more strange and bizarre ideas came to mind I thought it would be better to stick with something more normal. I haven’t had time to finish this one up so I’m just uploading the sketch. Enjoy ala’ Christmas Story.
For my Illustration Friday Entry this week I decided to pull one from the archives. This was published in Cricket magazine alongside a poem called First Snowflakes . I think ‘poof!’ sums it all up !
Well, I’m a week late on this Illustration Friday entry… too much to do! I had started this on Monday I think and never got back to it. Some day I’ll post a completed IF instead of sketches .
“That’ll grow hair on your chest!”
Ha! I know I’ve heard someone say that about something sour… must’ve been my Dad!
Below is another idea I had for ‘Sour’. I will try to develop it later today or tomorrow but I thought the sketch was funny… Something super sour always makes me feel like my body wants to shrivel up and turn inside out .
Illustration Friday has a weekly competition / drawing exercise on the their website. They invite anyone to create and post a piece of artwork based on a weekly theme. Every Friday they select one from all of the entries and feature it on their web page. I have yet to enter anything but this week the theme is ‘Fierce’. It seems like the perfect opportunity to do a quick Mantis update!!
When last we heard from the Mantids I had a huge buggy family on my hands in as little as an hour when the egg case hatched. Quickly I decided to save 2 of them in separate containers and let the rest go in some shrubbery outside.
I started feeding them fruit flies and soon they were getting pretty big! Since their skin is rigid they need to molt it regularly and let their bodies expand. Super cool and pretty gross . Their bodies are kind-of shiny and soft looking after molting and it seems to take a few hours for them to stiffen up again. Unfortunately one of my Mantids had a molting accident and got kind-of tangled up in his own skin. He sat on the floor of his cage for over night and so, in an effort to save him, I tried to perform emergency surgery and cut him free. Alas it was not to be. He was too far gone and had to be flushed 
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Mantis number two, whom I’ve named ‘Slim Jim’, is still alive and is a little over an inch long now. He just molted today and he’s look especially ‘Fierce!’
I found an article today about a Mantis that caught a humming bird!!! It’s cool although not for the faint of heart. Click the link at your own risk!
