Today, I’m mellow. So far, I have three 8 x 10 pieces for Anthrocon, and a fourth in progress. One has a background, making it marginally higher priced, but most are just bits from the Random Moments In Ursula’s Brain collection. At some point, I’ll probably have to do some 5 x 7s, just to cover all the range, but I rather like the 8 x 10 size for vignettes–you can pack in some good detail without getting absurdly priced.

As often happens in cases like this, where I try to cook up a number of little pieces in rapid succession, I find myself revisiting old friends–in addition to the usual multi-purpose mice, there’s a Battle Hamster diva, and the one in progress is one of our old buddies, the Happy Trolls. (I have a terrible soft spot for the happy trolls.) Eventually, I’m sure a pink lizard and a slug will make an appearance, or maybe one of the Snocketbeasts. I haven’t noticed any particular sales spike for recurring characters–the pink lizards do pretty well, but I haven’t heard from anybody actively collecting any particular type of character–but contemplating it does make me realize how many weird little critters populate my brain. I never think of them in terms of “This Is My Character” the way that you see it in fandoms–when I think of a character of mine, I think Digger, or Ed, or Chu, or whoever. Or, to a much lesser extent, Eland the antelope, and the Donkey and Goldfish. Creatures like the mouse-tailed gnomes and the Battle Hamsters and the happy trolls, though, who aren’t really recurrent individuals, are more like…I dunno. They fall somewhere between a sort of personal symbolic vocabulary* and on-site field studies of purely mental wildlife.

Which is way too much thinking about a happy troll, so I’m gonna go get lunch before my sinking blood sugar leads me to write the Trolls In Art Manifesto or something equally absurd.

*This is way too big a phrase to apply to a neurotic pink lizard with a straight face.