Category: machine embroidery

Day 31 of Drawlloween was DRAGON, and so here is a little dragon keeping warm on a nice toasty jack o’lantern.

Do you remember the Scary Stories series? Of course you do. Because those illustrations probably still haunt your nightmares. Do you remember Harold? He is the only scary scarecrow in all of history. Except he scared people, not crows. This guy here? He is no Harold.

Day 30 was spider. Bill told Alice a very abbreviated and edited version of Lord of the Rings. For some reason, she really latched on to Shelob, the giant spider who lives in a cave outside Mordor. Mainly she snacks on goblins, but she in the story she tries to eat Frodo and Sam. Alice’s love of Shelob has made her very disappointed that real spiders a) don’t have stingers on their butts and b) aren’t the size of our house. This piece is basically a valentine.

THE CATS ARE BACK!

I considered doing a picture of my mom in a witch hat for day 27’s witch, but I knew that day 28 was black cat and I would do Hugo, so I decided to do Linus instead. We like to dress the cats up for Halloween and put videos on YouTube. Linus has his own website. We’re just.. like that. Anyway. One of the videos features Linus in a witch costume on the dining room table. It doesn’t end well for him.

If you’re reading this you’ve probably seen the video, but hey. Watch it again.

And like I mentioned, day 28 was black cat. We have a black cat! Here, kitten Hugo charges his lasers!

I did not know what to do for mummy so I did this sort of clumsy thing with Lying Cat. This is not the best work! but they can’t all be winners. Lying Cat would very much like you to unwrap her now. “Get meowtta here!” and other bad jokes.

And then we came to rat. Rats and rats. If you see one how many are you not seeing? White rats aren’t really that kind of rat, they’re more of a bred-by-humans kind of thing. I originally was going to paint these rats brown or grey, but then I loved how it looked when I left them unpainted, so it stayed that way.

One of the people I’ve been following for Drawlloween suggested replacing ‘gore’ with ‘the Addams Family’ because gore is icky. And I get that, obviously, because I have definitely been bending the meanings of words and abandoning prompts I didn’t like. But I had an idea for gore that I didn’t think would be too bad. As I get older, I’m less and less able to look at gory stuff (real or not) without feeling a bit sick. That’s fine. I thought I could do an abstraction that might imply something fleshy or bloody. I thought about textbook illustrations of dermal layers.

Day 24 was skeleton. Skull was recent, so this felt a little redundant, especially because I chose another animal theme and made it black black blaaaaack. These are some of the skeletal remains you might find in an owl pellet.