fauna – Lunamatic

Lavender Harvest

A brown and white cat coiled up in a brown basket, exactly the right size

Hey, look at all this help I got harvesting the lavender this year.

Bluebird

The fox excitedly points towards a robin! The bird informs him that he's not a robin, he's a bluebird. The fox looks ashamed and says he's colour blind.

So, I’ve been chugging away with my experimental “CSS illustration as comic” project for a while now, and posting .png outputs of the results on forestfrenemies.wordpress.com. Today there is a new character, who is definitely not a robin.

At this point I have prepared about five pretty sturdy characters, (fox, rabbit, bluebird, wolf and bear), with a variety of modular facial expressions and postures. Creating a new panel without any new content only takes about half an hour or so, which is pretty handy. Scaling is lovely and clean, and every time I add a new element, it can be stashed away for reuse later, saving more time in the future.

If you’d like to play around with the CSS on this page, here it is on jsbin: https://jsbin.com/roride/42/edit?css,output. It’s pretty scruffy and not cross-browser compatible right now, so consider yourself warned.

All Alone

She was all alone in the meadow, but closely observed by a nosy caterpillar and an ungainly ladybird.

Page 3 of my comic, no dialogue, but a super bendy worm provides some narration.

The comic page is presented here in png format, but over on the comic site, Emma and the Granny Fairies, it’s an SVG.

Good Dog

A dog ponders the human hand patting his head.

The other day I found myself wondering, what do animals think of the human hand? It’s such a weird appendage.

First Butterfly of Spring

A cabbage white butterfly makes to land on a drooping chive flower

Saw the first butterfly of the season in my tiny urban garden the other day. I was super chuffed. Hopefully it’ll come back when the cherry tomatoes are ready to be pollinated.

Hedgehog Sun

A spiky yellow hedgehog takes the place of the sun

If the sun were a hedgehog,
it would sleep all the time,
because they are nocturnal.

Elephant with a Flower

A blue elephant stares out solemnly, and salutes you with a flower

I miss doing a drawing every day. So I’m going to take it up again. That said, here is an elephant with a flower.

Forest Frenemies Holding Page

Here is a holding page for one of my future projects. It’s called Forest Frenemies. I’m in the process of turning all the creatures pictured into knitted finger puppets.

Blue Tit

Bluetit, perched on a snowy branch

It’s been a hard winter so far, and it’s only December. There have been terrible scenes of starling-related violence outside, and all kinds of species are turning on each other. But poking around, completely unchallenged, is one tiny blue tit. Maybe he’s too small, and none of the other birds see him as a threat.

Messy Eaters

Spider struggles with four knives and four forks

Spiders are messy eaters. It’s really hard to manage four sets of cutlery.