Tails to Tell

My family and I got back from Houston, Texas, yesterday.  We visited my sister and her family, then we all went to Brazos Bend State Park to see some cuddly ally-gators :)

This one seemed particularly sinister.  And big.

This one was kind of cute. Its tail is in the first photo :)







None of the alligators desired to converse with us, though my sister did toss some bread to a small-ish gator.  My nephews seemed at least somewhat interested, but preferred to run off-trail and make us run after them.  This here's my 4-year-old nephew with a giant, stegosaur-shaped strawberry he picked at the strawberry farm:



Yum yum!

 Those strawberries were good.  I taught those kids that cows say "woof," y'know.

But back to the reptiles.
Alligators are pretty awesome animals.  I'll just let Wavy explain it all:

Anyway, Texas was fun; I got to see my sister, her husband, (he keeps fishies!) and my nephews; I met a guy with the same hairstyle and style of dress as my AP Physics teacher; I saw some maned wolves at the Houston Zoo; and I got a bag of yummy green apple licorice.  You can't ask for much more than that! :)

Whadda-do, everybody! :D

Happy spring!

Deru Concept- I Needs Halps! D:

Well, there's the Deru v2.1 or so.

I'm having trouble designing this fictitious dog breed; it's not like a species, in which case I can go haywire and place it in a fitting environment afterwards, or just build it off an existing environment and go haywire from there.  Instead, it has to fit human necessity.

It's meant to be an "all-around," hardy, working dog breed. It lives primarily in northern regions and should be able to herd livestock, guard property, track game, and survive on its own, if necessary.
Ultimately, these dogs will become a feral variety in the northern provinces of Raleia that will occasionally interbreed with the local Raleian wolves, producing "wolves" with noticeably dog-like features.  A few of my characters are such wolfdogs, so I figured it would be best to design the dog before the characters.

I aimed for a sort of shepherd-spitz-malamute-pitbull-wolf-elkhound... thing... with a dash of the real-life Balto.  However, it turns out that AKC standards won't help at all; the best sled dogs are mixed breeds (like Balto! Except his owner wasn't a fan of his body type and castrated him. Oh, well.) and the majority of breed standard-meeting purebreds are near-useless in practice. On top of that, many of the breed histories are partially falsified. Not helpful at all, that.



If you can, in any way, critique or redline my deru, it would be incredibly helpful! :)

MEOW

I decided to watch Cats 101 today while eating my Eggo waffles.  Mmm... waffles...
Mumford & Sons was number one on the VH1 Top 20 Countdown this week, so to celebrate, here are some accordion-playing red pandas:

And an unrelated violin-toting raccoon:

It's only toting the violin; it can't possibly play it like that!  The bow isn't even touching the strings!
I'll have to look up these instruments.  My goal is to create the most awesome fantasy band ever, with the cutest (and furriest) musicians and the best instruments known to humankind.  Of course, I think accordians and banjos are among the best instruments.  I may be the pseudo-band's only fan.  They won't even have music, so it wouldn't matter anyway.

Moby Dick fanart may come about soon.  It's a great book to read if you have a lot of time and very little to do.

Maybe I'll make a design or two for my Zazzle shop to raise money for the Japan tsunami relief effort.  Half my family lives over there, (far from the directly affected areas, thankfully) so it only seems right to at least try and help out.

Happy spring!