Thursday, June 4, 2009

Adapt...and Failure to Adapt

So, it's the end of the school year, and we are reading Science Fiction in my classes (so I can conveniently end the year showing vintage B SciFi flicks for the last week). Naturally, I have aliens on the mind. This alien ship is attempting to adapt to its surroundings, mutating into the semblance of the first life form it meets.

This was drawn over two days and painstakingly colored with what few unbroken colored pencils are left in my classroom. I wish my scanner did the colors justice without having to up the dpi to un-uploadable mass, because this came out totally awesome. I have several layers of rich color in the sky and ground as well as shading for the alien ship. Sigh.

I have been trying to get this on paper all week, and meant to bring it home and finish/post it last night. But the heat has eaten my working brain cells. My classroom faces south. Our building has great 8-foot tall single pane windows. And the heat on warmer sunny days is.... We have had a bit of a heatwave here, and I just spent 7 hours in an 85-degree room and 2 more hours at an 82-degree (worthless) workshop. I'm wiped out. Plus I slept fitfully, waking up everytime Mr. Feline Furry Furnace snuggled up to me. Don't cats feel heat? Doesn't all that fur make them feel hot? No?

5 comments:

joseph's art and stuff said...

very cool, it looks great! my dog has been doing the snuggle thing in this heat... it went from cold to hot too quick in the inland empire!

Gillian said...

No kidding. What happened to "normal?"

Thanks for the kind words an my mutant alien ship.

Coreopsis said...

I was just going to comment on "the leaf thing"--I know that you're just supposed to treat it all like a big mass, and "suggest" the shape or texture of the leaves, but I've not done much practice with it.

But then I saw what you wrote here....what grade do you teach? I teach a science fiction class to high school seniors and juniors. It's a lot of fun.

Cool pictures. I hate that about scanners.

Gillian said...

I teach 6th-8th grade Reading--mixed. But next year it'll be 6th grade Language Arts. Joy. I'll miss having all 3 grade levels in one group.

Beth L said...

especially love this concept...totally cute (sorry to use that word, I mean good-cute) even with the limited color detail I can see (cursed scanners). Perfect.