A while ago I bought some gouache (kind of a thick water color paint) to experiment with. One of the paintings I did was of Lian, a character in Tom Dell’Aringa’s comic Marooned. Here’s a glimpse of her, but go to the Marooned website to see the rest and read Tom’s great comics!
And if you haven’t seen it yet (or even if you have), scroll down to the Ellie on Planet X Dance-O-Scope, before it moves off of the front page of the blog. We wouldn’t want you to miss out or anything.
Here’s a sketch of what is believed to be the Chromatic Winged Pea Flit, approximately actual size (depending on your monitor).
I picked up my nieces last Saturday for a picnic and hike around the Strang Institute grounds. Aside from the many woods, gardens, fountains, and statues all throughout the campus, they also got to see fun and exciting things like the computer monitor I sit in front of while downloading Ellie’s transmissions here at Mission Control.
What they didn’t get to see was the pair of mastodons that wander the grounds. Violet and Betsy were cloned from two different mastodons who lived here thousands of years ago. Betsy, the older of the two, has adopted Violet as her own daughter, though the two are not related. It wasn’t for a lack of looking that we didn’t find them. The two are particularly stealthy, despite their size.
Here’s a pic of me from back in early April (or late March?) at Wondercon in San Francisco. Jedi Knight Aayla Secura needed to know where the Jedi Council was meeting, or where the bathrooms were, or somesuch. I guess I had the information she was looking for. No Jedi mind trick required.
Photo by my incredible photographer friend Scott Mckeeve. He’s got plenty of other cosplay pics at his flickr page. Go look now and tell him how wonderful his work is!
To our surprise here at Mission Control, Ellie made an attempt to film herself, Jeff, and Muffin performing for the camera (a tiny one that she can set up remotely). Press the buttons on the control panel below to see what antics transpired eight light years away!
Obviously Ellie and Jeff were inspired to strut their stuff by the dance sequence in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
The music behind Ellie is Linus and Lucy by Vince Guaraldi, which was introduced to television audiences during the very same Christmas special.
The music behind Jeff is Foggy Mountain Breakdown by Earl Scruggs, Lester Flatt & The Foggy Mountain Boys. For those not in the know, Flatt and Scruggs recorded the theme to the Beverly Hillbillies.
The music behind Muffin is Baby Elephant Walk, written by Henry Mancini for the film Hatari, and performed here by Lawrence Welk and his Orchestra.