Bird Death
AIL… I’ve had this toon sitting in my to-do box for awhile. I was somewhat amused when NBC News did a story about “Cats being bird murderers.” Duh, Brian Williams.
AIL… I’ve had this toon sitting in my to-do box for awhile. I was somewhat amused when NBC News did a story about “Cats being bird murderers.” Duh, Brian Williams.
There have been a few bird corpses out in our back garden recently, and we thought the cat had finally become coordinated enough to hunt (he’s about three years old now and still regularly charges headfirst into walls). Turns out some territorial magpies were the real culprits.
Heh… yeah, at least they didn’t do a research study first in order to find out if cat’s are indeed bird murderers. It still amazes me just how many research dollars get spent to say that something is what it is when just plain common sense would have answered the question in the first place.
In other news, I don’t know if you caught the post I made on the previous page or not but I tossed up a link to my fundraiser so you could get a look at the logo that the artist made for it.
I can’t say enough just how pleased I am with her design and how cool I think it is that thanks to the internet I could make connections with such talented artists from around the world.
Murder implies intent – cats are just following their instincts. We humans tend to forget that since we are only born with 3 basic instincts (grasping, suckling, and turning to face sounds/touches) plus our survival reflex. All of them designed to help us survive just long enough to develop our intelligence and override those instincts with reasoning and deduction.
So, an advantage and a disadvantage, all rolled up in one. 😀 How much of each of those depends on how you learn to use your intellect.
Hey Brig – being encouraged by a few who saw my fan art over on Gregor to try my hand at more, and one in particular has been giving me tips. The most important being to sketch a little every day, and don’t be embarrassed to just mimic others’ work until you find your own style.
So combine all that with my slightly guilty feeling about posting that link without giving a better warning first … I am sitting here at work and doing some sketching practice while looking at your page.
So when I get home to my scanner, I’ll have some fresh fan art for ya. Not much, but hope you’ll like it.
@Dada: none for you, til I get my cheesecake. 😛
Correction: lot of erasures on here, and I am just a plebe taking up sketching as a hobby, so I just use some old mechanical pencils and printer paper – already found out the hard way with that Gregor art how well all my erasures (and boy, are there PLENTY) show up in the scan. Gimme a day or two to clean it up after I scan it later. 😀
(and SHOOSH, Dada – half dozen people have already told me if I am serious at all to get a tablet so I could ink it much more easily, digitally – I know, I KNOW … :P)
As far as I know cats are the only other creatures known to torture/play with their victims before killing them. (Other than people, of course)
One of my mom’s cats brings in everything from birds to baby rabbits. I’m happy to report that the baby rabbit was released unhurt.
Some pets just demand fresh food. Snakes require feeder mice and big fish require feeder goldfish. Ha, but not those giant 4 pound goldfish they’re finding swimming about in Lake Tahoe these days after fishbowl dumps of years past.
Pasha… Yeh, researchers and their home colleges get pretty good at bagging huge research grants for some of the most obvious things. Meanwhile many important studies of those without the connections get overlooked, shelved and canned. I’d like to think the big sequestration budget cuts will change this equation, but it’s not likely. Okay… Great logo (yesterday), very punk, love the mohawk. It’s very neutral in color and ideal for kids with red, blue, green, orange and purple crayons to “personalize.” Around the world by way of internet? Really? How far?
Wolf… Yeh, the catch there is the “developing our intelligence” part. Nice to hear that your next fan art work will have a squid flavor. I suggested you might try some previously but you may not have seen it due to the moderation delay here. grumble. Anyhow, I hope this one will be child-friendly enough to be postable on the fan art page here. And while there you can check out a few stick-figures I drew up a ways back. Same style as what you’re describing, mechanical pencils, printer and/or sketch paper, ball point pens (blue) and lots of erasing before the scans.
Kess… Yeh, that avatar of yours so cracks me up. A crazy snake with a bummer pair of fangs. Something possible resulting from a snake mating with a beaver (the reptile variety with the rodent variety). I left a message before but it got moderation delayed so you probably didn’t see it.
Yat… Good news, the Easter Bunny may visit you yet.
Hey Squiddies… Quick note… I’m not ignoring yer comments… I am recovering from oral surgery… Will be back soon… Punk llama rox!
brig… Ooo, ouch. Here’s hoping they used happy gas and pain killing shots on yooz. Effects that can easily be replicated by a swig or two of your green absinthe straight up. And, while I doubt that your doc can use the swig method as its not medically approved, you’ll be able to give it a shot afterwards because it’ll be medically relieving. Still, get well soon.
I had bird death in my house once. My dryer has a vent to the outside of my apartment building, protected by louvers from the outside. Once it got clogged with wet lint so I had to poke at it with a long pole to dislodge the blockage, and in so doing knocked one of the louvers off. Some time later a bird squoze in there and built a nest. After awhile it began to explore and went too far back (the vent is about 10 feet off the ground), and fell down to the bottom. It couldn’t get out and ended up near the dryer motor – I could hear it scrabbling around. I ended up calling animal control, and they came out and retrieved the dead bird.
/CSB
stick-figurer: I went into the Sheldon archives to see if I could find the comic that snake came from but it will take more than a quick search. The upshot of the comic was something about natures failures or evolutionary dead ends.
It cracked me up so I miss appropriated it. 😀
Cats don’t really “play with their food”; these part-time hunters just aren’t very good at it.
@Stick:
Aha, newp I didn’t see that before. Must have been in moderation limbo first time or two I checked the page after posting, and didn’t thoroughly check the whole list on later visits. Sorry about that. But since you called my attention to it, I went back and read it now. 😉 You stopped over at Gregor to look, but didn’t comment so I knew you were there? Shame! 😛 Didja at least vote on TWC? Tyler could use the bump.
And I think you’ll like this one. It started as just a sketching practice, decided to use Randie’s face. Then I added neck and shoulders. Next thing I knew, I had drawn the whole torso and arms, gave her a cup of coffee to hold. Then decided for variety let’s do Ryan’s face too. Oh look, they’re talking now, and I’ve done his whole upper body.
Before I knew it … what was supposed to just be a face sketching practice became a fan art. o.O Does it happen like that, a lot? Should I go get myself checked, or something? 😀
And here’s something to make all the real artists (and other hobbyists, like me) cringe – then laugh their butts off because it wasn’t them.
I showed some sense this time, scanned in the image then opened it in a layered image so I could put a new layer on top, use that layer to do the inking. Added another layer when I used vectored lines to make some of my lines look cleaner. Then forgot myself and while switching layers around to make sure all was going as planned …
… I forgot to make sure I was back on the inking layer before going back to inking. Put almost an hour’s worth of work into it before realizing I was now inking to the sketch layer, the layer I gotta remove at the end.
Yeah, I’ll spare you all the stream of expletives that came out of my mouth for the next five minutes after that. I’m a coder – rule number one is “save early, save often”. Rule number two is “never write over your backup, just make a new one”. So even for someone who’s just a hobbyist at drawing, that’s pretty boneheaded if they’re a coder at least. >.<
Took a breath, replaced the sketch layer with a clean version from the original, and started redoing the work. Managed to get it done just before bedtime (I sleep in the afternoons, being on night shift), will color it tomorrow. Should have it sent off to Brig by monday, methinks – but no promises, yet.
And sent. Tried to get a bit fancy and use some gradients to give it a bit of shading effect. Could be better, but not bad for an amateur, I think. We’ll see what Brig says. 😀
Oh, my… I fall asleep at the computer and look what happens! You guys go crazy on the comments! I’m sorry I haven’t responded! Forgive me for summing up responses here…
Ironically, there was another newspaper story about bird death in my local paper today… Yes, the bird murdering is apparently an issue. How many people own cats in this country? Ones that are indoor outdoor… each cat kills on average between 1 and 34 a year (factoid in the article)… That’s my Mouse’s monthly rate in the spring… she’ll bring in like 3 or 4 a week. sheesh.
Anyhoo… Your cat/bird/small animal stories are amusing. I love seeing people’s cat murder adventures… or vent birding issues…
Pash… your llama is rocking… and your new venture is exciting… wishing you all kinds of good thoughts!
Grey… Your process is fascinating… and your artwork is posted up on the blog… well done to you and thank you for submitting. AND please… no worries about posting to your artwork the other day on Gregor. Smiles…
You are moving along! More smiles and thank you for your submission! Keep at it! Keep drawing! That is the road to tooning… just keep swimming… I mean, drawing!
Stick, if your question about how far is referring to how far away the artist and I are apart, then the answer would be she lives in Ireland and I live in the US. I think that’s awesome that I can connect with an artist from so far away from to to get such great work.
Thanks Brig! Yeah, I so fell in love with her art for the logo… the safety pin through the ear just makes me giggle. He has such attitude that it makes me think he’s saying something like “What are you looking at?” or “I dare you to come over here and say that”.
As for the new venture, I’m both excited and terrified… The fundraiser has only been going a few days and the only response/ donation we have received has been from my oldest child. So of course my brain keeps cycling with the old questions of “what if no one even looks at it or donate’s… does that make me a failure?” I try not to think that way but sometimes it’s hard to keep a lid on your self doubts you know?
Interesting venture, Pasha. Thinking about tossing in a donation, we’ll see if the budget allows.
As for whether it makes you a failure – HECK NO! I may be a coder geek, but even for an AA in programming they still require you to take Business 101 – and our teacher was an adjunct who actually RAN several businesses, not just teaches about them.
And one thing he drilled into our heads – any successful businessperson can tell you that for every success you have to suffer through nearly a dozen failures (figure he gave as an average was 5-11, results will vary). It’s just a question of how many failures before your success hits, and whether you have the stamina to ride out the misses until you get the bull’s-eye. The ones who succeed first try are just incredibly lucky – and all the more likely to crash and burn later because they haven’t learned how to handle failure.
So if this launch doesn’t make the goal, that doesn’t mean you’re a failure, or that the project is. Just means this wasn’t your time. Buck up and try again, when ready and if your reassessment says the timing is better.
Maybe even start off smaller, if this time around doesn’t catch. You mention adding an apiary later on – can call the current design the intermediate goal, scale back the starting goal? Go for half the land with an option on the rest later, get the goats and chickens and just sell the eggs/milk until you’re settled in and can expand to add the dairy for the cheese.
Kinda like how old-time farmers would buy or build a little two-room shack, but over the years keep adding rooms, adding levels, renovating existing rooms … until that little shack grows into the amazing three-story 12-room deluxe farmhouse that it becomes 3 or 4 decades (or more) later as it’s passed through a generation or two. Sorta neat, when you think about it. My Dad’s current house, you can actually see where the original house ends and the expansion begins, from the inside anyway.
But all that is just my way of telling you to relax and enjoy the ride. I’m pulling for you to get the hit on the first try and hope you just don’t get so cocky about it that it costs ya. 😉