It was this particular character that drew me into Renee French’s work. This fellow was the subject of a daily drawing series, and each one was amazingly expressive. I love this little lump with limbs.
A deeper look in her portfolio brings us a plethora of creatures; some impossibly wide-eyed and cute, others appearing content, trepidatious, shocked or frightened.
She does a brilliant job creating very nuanced emotions in her non-human subjects.
In 2009, Rotocasted posted this impossibly adorable vinyl brain toy, designed by the talented Junko Mizuno, manufactured by Kidrobot.
There’s very little information about it anymore, but (just seeing it for the first time now), I wish it had been mass produced.
My cat looks at me like this when she’s hungry:
What a great item.
I wasn’t searching for antique driving garb…but antique driving garb, I found. And I’m very glad I did.
According to the Source these are Images from a 1906 issue of the French women’s magazine Femina…These strange array of pictures are from a competition in which the readers were asked to identify the famous female ‘artistes’ of the day obscured behind a bizarre variety of women’s driving headwear.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t place a single celebrity.
Dustin Bailard paints decadent sirens with lush lips and lashes.
They are spindly fallen angels, kitten-like vixens, innocent caricatures of femininity who possess impossible beauty…all depicted in fabulous, eye catching color.
The eyes frequently convey a sparkling sense of sadness which belies their exaggerated beauty. It’s a very striking effect; quite well done.
Have you noticed that humans are strange creatures? Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in our rituals and traditions. Take Dyngus Day, for example; an Easter Monday Polish holiday on which boys throw water on girls they like and hit them with pussy willows.
According to tradition, they sneak into girls’ homes at dawn and drench them while they’re still in bed. The screaming girl is sometimes dragged to the river for a dunking afterward. The water might be accompanied by a rhyme, such as Dyngus, dyngus, po dwa jaja; nie chce chleba tylko jaja (“Dyngus, dyngus, for two eggs; I don’t want bread, only eggs”). Apparently, painted eggs can be given as ransom to avoid a serious dousing.
The Wiki page is filled with fabulously unironic sentences that are a treat to read. “This [the dousing] is accompanied by a number of other rituals, such as making verse declarations and holding door-to-door processions, in some regions involving boys dressed as bears.”
On Easter Tuesday, girls take their revenge by throwing plates and crockery at the boys (well, that’s what’s supposed to happen, but in reality both sexes tend to just drench each other on Monday…which might be for the best because flying plates can do some damage).
HAPPY DYNGUS DAY!
Read more here.
Thanks, B, for introducing me to this!
Just some favorite Easter images from around the Web…
Happy Easter!
SheWalksSoftly 