Actually, this has nothing to do with wombats, I just like the word “wombat.”

I think we’ve determined the cat’s problem…in an upset reminiscent of David vs. Goliath, my husband’s Siamese, who’s half the size of my poor monstrous beast, has taken advantage of his increasingly elderly mein and beaten the crap out’ve him. It’s really rather sad–she always used to randomly attack him, he’d put up with it for a few minutes, and then, when he was tired of it, he’d sit on her, and that ended the matter. But no more–the king has been dethroned, the Siamese is now the alpha cat, insomuch as that applies to such a non-social species, and the poor old guy’s confidence is shaken forever. I am torn between my desire to root for the underdog (after all, he did beat her up regularly for five years) and an equally diabolical desire to stack the odds by duct-taping her legs together.

It’s sad to see a pet age. This is the first time I’ve ever really seen it happen–I left for college before the family dog got elderly, but I’ve had this cat from a four week old kitten seperated from Mom too early to his current late-cat-middle-age self. I know that he could concievably hang on for another eight years or more, but he’s begun to SEEM old–he moves more slowly, sleeps longer, and just seems to have slowed down a lot recently. Makes me contemplate my own mortality a bit–that I’ve started seeing a slightly taller version of my mother in the mirror doesn’t help–which is not the sort of thing I’m prone to, so I did what artists since time immemorial have done in the face of the big, scary questions of life and death, and painted naked chicks until I felt better.

I was feeling sepia-tone, because I’ve been doing all these black and white illos for the steampunk game Victoriana (Which got a publisher! Forthcoming in May, I think! Can I get an Amen?!) and I’ve been enjoying some of the effects of a limited pallette, particularly since color is kinda my crutch. The original sketch for this was only about three inches high–rather than redraw it to larger scale before scanning, which seems to annihilate a lot of the energy of my compositions, I decided to trust my ability to add detail digitally and just dove in. I was pleased with the result, even if the little dot-eyed lizards are just too dang cute and misshapen to really fit, and I realize it’s sort’ve browser-chokingly long on the vertical.

Also, tripped over this
on the VCL recents, and thought it was awesome–if you haven’t seen Mutley’s work, you owe yourself a tour, because it’s always a riot. Go! Look!