http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/ ursulav's gallery of images en-us 120 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/418863

Big-eyed, vaguely cartoony girl. Sparkly magic. Some days, you can actually feel yourself going to the dark side as you paint.

This was done entirely to appease my inner teenage girl, who gets surprisingly uppity granted that I'm nearly thirty. And yet, I regret nothing! Nothing!

Except possibly all the tea I drank while painting. This could have been done several hours earlier if I hadn't had to keep running to the bathroom. Anyway, Painter 7, Intuos 2, several gallons of Earl Grey. I actually own that teapot. ]]> Wed, 18 Oct 2006 16:42:53 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/417942

Every morning, Elder Porcupine would set his claws to the back of the petrified pine, the oldest and tallest and deadest tree in the forest, and climb to the very top. There, he would watch the sun rise over the woods, and commune with the ancient spirits of the earth.

Well...that was what he told his grandkids, anyway.

It wasn't exactly untrue, but by the time you were Elder Porcupine's age, you were practically an ancient spirit yourself, and your communing mostly consisted of "Hey, spirits." "Hey, Porcupine." "You good?" "Can't complain." "All right, then." And you really didn't need to get up at dawn for that.

In actual fact, the top of the petrified pine was the only place in the whole damn forest where Elder Mrs. Porcupine would let him smoke.

***

This painting started out, and it was missing something. Finally I realized that it was the cigarette,* and the rest of it all fell into place--I knew WHY he was on top of the tree, and something of what his story was. I'm not sure why he's such a snappy dresser, but I assume the Elder Mrs. Porcupine is involved in some fashion.

I'm also not sure why the yellow-rumped-warbler is there, but possibly it's planning to bum one off him.]]> Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:37:05 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/417943

My inner child is usually not a problem.

My inner teenage girl gives me no end of trouble.

Every now and again I'll be goin' along, minding my own business, and then I'll get this screaming urge to do a noxiously cute, big-eyed princess type, with small fuzzy animals. I have no actual control over this. All I could do was keep adding lemmings and pray that the horror would pass quickly.]]> Mon, 16 Oct 2006 14:42:00 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/365694

I have been abusing my brain terribly in preperation for an upcoming con art show, and this is how it retaliates against me. The title should probably have been "Because you made me paint My Little Dinosaurs, you tyrant, so I'm going to do this and not explain any of it, and maybe I'll even write pretentious free verse about it, HA!, and you can't stop me because I control the hands, muahahahahahAHAHAHAHH! -- Love, The Brain" but that was a little unwieldy to fit in the box.


I'd call it an exercise in personal mythology, but that would only be to hide the fact that I have no idea what this is. It's not based on any real creature. My goal, if I had one, was to make it look wrong, but in the right way. Or, er, something. Yeah. Comments are welcome, and if you locate any meaning in this piece, I hope you brought enough for the whole class.



Painter 7, Intuos tablet, kind've a Boulet influence...]]> Sat, 03 Jun 2006 14:39:56 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/369768

Another one of my random...err...gods? weirdnesses? things? My husband patiently modelled the hands. While working on this painting, the biggest turtle I've ever seen turned up on my lawn, which is probably a coincidence. Almost certainly. (God, I hope!) I finished the painting quickly anyway, lest Mother Terrapin send more minions to check up on me.
***
Mother Terrapin is as old as hills and wisdom, and if you lay any crap on her about crones being the kindly keepers of ancient goddess mysteries, she'll have you pissing Cheez Whiz for a month. Mother Terrapin is not kind, or enlightened, and nobody's quite sure if she's a woman or a turtle or a goddess. She's definitely a witch, though, and not the froofy kind you meet at the coffee shop. She's petty and small-minded and malicious and proud, and that's exactly how she likes it.]]> Tue, 13 Jun 2006 22:43:31 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/364969

I was supposed to be painting My Little Hadrosaurs in watercolor for an upcoming show, and instead my brain informed me that today we would being doing a Weird Thing digitally. "But--show--" "NO! PAINT NOW!" "But nobody's gonna buy a--" "PAINTNOW!" My brain is kind of a bully.

So, it's an owl saint. I don't know what an owl saint is, except that it's one of those. The face was particularly tricky--I didn't want it to look like an owl, or a human, or really a standard anthromorphic owl either--I wanted it to look wrong. But in the right way. If that makes any sense. Anyway, lots of texture work, kind of a bleed over from the scribbly effects I've been working on with real media, so it's got a kind of Susan Seddon Boulet influence. A few people have commented elsewhere that oh, they get the hidden meaning. I wish they'd tell me what it was. ]]> Thu, 01 Jun 2006 13:17:23 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/336678

Bob had a sinking feeling that his correspondance course, "Learn Ancient Enochian Summoning Rituals By Mail!" had left out a few important bits.

That, or the Easter Bunny had gone REALLY goth...]]> Sun, 26 Mar 2006 17:06:40 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/339092

Some days, you just want to paint a chunky fairy taking her frog for a...hop? I dunno. ]]> Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:10:28 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/336164

Most eggs are pretty inoffensive. But sometimes an egg goes bad...and Mortimer was a very bad egg indeed.




This is an older piece, but still one I'm pleased with. Had a kind of evil Christiansen influence. It appeared in Expose 3 and the cover of Simulacrum. People occasionally ask what the heck was behind this painting, and my only explanation is that I always found Humpty-Dumpty kinda creepy as a kid.]]> Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:17:44 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/336167

The naked mole rat knew that he was dreaming. For one thing, he wasn't in the tunnels any more, and there weren't any other mole rats around, and he could have sworn that he hadn't been bipedal earlier in the evening. But all that was immaterial. He knew he had to be dreaming, because even naked mole rats know that you can't get blood from a turnip.

Um. Every now and then I get in these surrealist moods. They all seem to involve giant hulking shapes (often vegetables) and tiny animals watching them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I do remember that this was one of those paintings where Painter fought me every step of the way, crashing to desktop every now and again, eating files...I love that program, but sometimes it's like wrestling a cranky digital alligator.]]> Sat, 25 Mar 2006 16:22:07 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/335884

This image occurred to me years ago, as I was walking along an old logging road and thinking that the wet, lumpy ground looked almost exactly like toadskin. (It took over a decade before I got around to painting it, mind you.) It's a mistier, less detailed work than I usually do, meant to resemble a rococo landscape painting. Only, y'know, with a giant toad. There weren't many of those in classical rococo paintings, and I can't imagine why not.]]> Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:27:52 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/335866

I was having a kind of Lewis Carroll moment, and somehow, out came the valiant Sir Bunny and the ravening (but probably not terribly bright) Wockwurm. One thing I've found funny is that whenever this painting goes up, people write in to speculate on who's going to win this encounter, and it tends to go overwhelmingly for the bunny.]]> Sat, 25 Mar 2006 00:54:43 +0000 http://ursulav.cgsociety.org/gallery/335877

It was a beautiful morning at Innsmouth. The sun was shining, the frogs were croaking, the spawn had been dropped off at the pool, and Mabel, great-great-granddaughter of the priestess of the Deep Ones, She-Who-Devours-Whales-Alive, just couldn't wait to tell her friend Susan about what that Helen had said to Shelley about her own sister-in-law, and in public, no less!


See, this is why I don't take many commissions. As soon as somebody expect something, my brain veers the other way. If I was set to rewrite "Goodnight Moon," the bowl full of mush would be holding the mittens at spoonpoint, glormphing about blood offerings to the porridge gods, and if I had to illustrate "The Shadow over Innsmouth," it'd become either a heartwarming tale of amphibious small-town life in coastal New England, or perhaps, "Are You There, Dagon? It's Me, Margaret," in which an awkward teenager wonders if she will ever grow gills like all her friends.

Anyway, a sort of Christiansen-meets-Daniel Merriam-meets-Lovecraft influence here...]]> Sat, 25 Mar 2006 01:08:20 +0000