Watermelon

Have a watermelon! It's summer (where I live, anyway), after all! XD



Completely with acrylic pens this time, partially diluted with water and paintbrush. The suuuper wide black acrylic pen was a gift from Emily Adams who sent me a very generous art supply care package (with some awesome things I still need to post!) a while ago. I like pens with wide tips, but drawing with this one (look at the picture...) turned out to be kind of extreme. XD Nothing wrong with it, though - it's a very nice pen, I just have to get used to it.

From a technical standpoint, the drawing was a failure: initially, I wanted to make this without any red paint, just the paper background color with white and black (and, obviously, green for the green parts), but it simply did not look right, so I had to use a red and a pink pen on the melon slice. Oh, and I learned the hard way that the paper doesn't like water - it buckled quite a bit. (So, no watercolor sketches in this book, I'm afraid...) I kind of like the end result, though: it's every bit as cliché-summery as intended.



Materials:
- suuuper awesome sketchbook; a red page again
- Acrylic pens: Marabu Art Painter in black, Uni Posca PC-5M in white, Amsterdam Acrylic Markers in Yellowish Green, Permanent Green Light, Pyrrole Red and Permanent Red Violet Light

Hare!

We all like cute animal pictures, right? Right. XD Anyway, yesterday, I had a bit of a surprise:



Yes, that's a hare. (If you've never seen a hare: imagine a giant rabbit with slightly off body proportions, lighter eyes, and black-tipped ears. But mainly, you can tell them apart because a hare like this is really f*cking large, think medium-sized dog. LOL) In the middle of the day - and it's not the mating season for them. Oh, and in a park populated by humans, too. The thing is, usually, you don't see hares up close. (Unless you're a hunter and/or very patient.)

They are there, and they're not officially counted as a threatened species anymore, either, but you just don't see them, because a) they're nocturnal (unless it's mating season), b) they're extremely shy (and smarter than rabbits, and they remove themselves immediately if anything approaches), and c) they're really f*cking fast (Wikipedia says, "Hares can reach maximum speeds of 35 mph (56 km/h)^[68] in short distances of approximately 90 meters, and a top speed of 50 mph (80 km/h) for about 20 meters.^[69]"), which means that once they've noticed you, typically, all you see is that famous zigzag blur. (They change the direction while running in order to confuse predators.)

Admittedly, the Rhododendronpark (in Bremen) is kind of quiet during lunchtime, but really, a hare deciding this is a good place to feed during the day is kind of unusual, and a human getting close enough to get a picture with a "normal" compact camera (no tele objective) is just unlikely... I was actually kind of worried in case the animal was ill. But nope...



Sure enough, as soon as I began taking pictures, the animal heard me (when focusing, the camera makes a beeping noise that I can't seem to turn off - maybe I'll have to destroy the beepy speaker thingy physically, because animals really dislike this sh*t) and decided to leave in a hurry - which, of course, is exactly the behavior you would expect when its sasse (sorry, I don't know the English word - you know, the earth hollow that hares fixate on) isn't anywhere close, so it can't simply crouch down and play dead.



Ultra-slow (by hare standards; I still only got two pictures) zigzag run! XD

I wasn't paying attention to the plants at the time, but in the first picture, you see the likely explanation why I got so close in the first place: poppies. (These seed capsules are unmistakeable.) What a lovely place for a hare to get high... *headdesk* (Scientific note: no, that's not the poppy you use to make drugs; it would be kind of illegal to plant that in a public park. But even something with not enough opiate content to work on humans would likely be sufficient for a smaller mammal.) So, um, that hare was perfectly healthy and well fed (slightly overweight, even) but with a seriously slowed-down perception and reaction time due to, um, botanicals. Great. I mean, I would love to pretend I'm just that fast, but...

...we all know it's not possible to out-race a hare by fair means, right? You have to out-wit them. Maybe you know the famous story of The Hare and The Hedgehog, but apparently, drugging the poor beast will also work. ;)