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Dark Roasted Blend mentions in a post about British Pub Signs:

The Pig and Whistle’s origin is obscure, but it could be a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon “piggin wassail” which means “good health”.

One fun part is that there is a German expression of surprise, “Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift”, which translates to “I think my pig’s whistling”. As far I could could find out from a quick web search, it dates back to the 1970s or possibly 1960. Variations on the “I think” theme include

• “…mich knutscht ein Elch” (“..a moose is smooching me”)
• “… mein Hamster bohnert” (“…my hamster’s waxing the floor”)
• “…mein Hund spielt Halma” (“…my dog’s playing Halma”)

I hadn’t encountered the last two before.

Links to share:
15th century “typo demon”

Lucky shot: Photo of an “exploding” meteorite
Astronomical Quilts

Madly Awesome Paper Craft
…and cardboard-craft (Some is like 3d graffiti!

Pretty new spider discovered
‘nother article with ‘nother photo

Dragon wings tend to be more or less bat-based, but photos of bats in flight tend to be rarer than ones of birds in flight, making studies a bit more difficult.

For birds I recommend the deviantart account of Cheryl Moore, where you can find a great number of photos of birds in flight – most of them white birds, meaning there is no pattern on the feathers distracting from the shape.

As for bats, during the last week some photos of bats drinking from a pond in flight went through the bits of blogosphere I watch. Looking up Kim Taylor brought up Warren Photographic, which has more (albeit smaller) photos of bats in flight.

On Deviantart I found one compact tutorial on bat wings by cactusart.

The wing tutorial by Kandice Zimbleman-Wang may be a bit weird on the formatting and spelling side, but content-wise I find it very helpful.

For the sake of completeness and comparison, you could look at pterosaurs wings, too. (What intersts me more after a bit of poking around wikipedia are the various head shapes, though. Fascinating.)

In case you didn’t know yet, I like insects, spiders and the like. So, bit of a themed post.

A short video I captured of an ant dragging a rather hefty lunch home:

Bits of my stuff:

Links:
Moths Use Sonar-Jamming Defense to Fend Off Hunting Bats
Dancing caterpillars put off predators (cute photo, found via neatorama)
a bug sculptures photoset on flickr

Origami arthropods found on deviantart, different creators:

That artist of the last one has a lot of other great models in his gallery, only with the thumbnail links disabled.

Digger, my all-time favourite webcomic, finally got out of its “subscribers only apart from the newest page” cover.

As to the comic: It’s epic, the titular character is the only sane person (also wombat) in a somewhat crazy, rich world. I’m also a sucker for black and white art.

Here’s a shortcut to page 1

Speaking of webcomics… I recently got back into Magic: The Gathering (a fantasy-themed collectable card game), and while poking around on their website, I found that they had made some, too, about Planeswalkers… You can ignore “Chandra’s Ultimate”, because it’s repeated as part of Chandra Nalaar: Fuel for the Fire, Part I … That story (all 3 parts together, not only the first) is my favourite on the site.

In Magic lore, Planeswalkers are very powerful magic-users which can travel between planes/dimensions/worlds, and each player of the game is a Planeswalker. The way Wizards of the Coast is pushing that theme lately looks a bit odd to me, because on the table its more of a strategy game with high random factor than anything involving playing a role.

Oh, well, the whole “you are misunderstood and don’t fit in because secretly you are superspecial-magical” apparently can work well for marketing, when you’re aiming at misfit geeky teens*… Look at Spiderman, for example. Bullied goodie two-shoes geek power fantasy to the max.

Lastly, two articles that may be of more general interest I found hidden between the Magic-specific ones:

• Frakkin’ Zounds, about cursing in speculative fiction (nothing terribly exciting, but a nice nudge to think about it if you haven’t yet)
• Tipping the Scales, about ways to make big monsters look big even in tiny images. All those “tricks” of course work for bigger pictures, too, and it looks quite useful to me.

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* Like I was when I got my first Magic cards. I guess now I’m a slightly less misfit geeky twen.

Two of the students’ presentations in the design seminar today had “WTF? ”-moments.

The one on Coco Chanel had the gun-heeled shoes – mind, she coming up with the idea that simplicity is the essence of elegance, and clothes should be comfortable and offer freedom of movement, and the designers using her brand after her death coming up with rhinestone encrusted bling and high-heeled nonsense like this, is weird, too.

My presentation on Alphonse Mucha had this concept, drawn in 1897, for a suggested pavillion for the World Fair of 1900.:

The WTF part is that it’s a remodelling of the Eiffel Tower.

That was not Mucha’s idea, but when people suggested to move the part of the Eiffel Tower above its main platform somewhere else, and were looking for ideas what to do with the base, this “Pavillion of humanity” is what he came up with.

Sometimes, it takes some additional input to understand advice.

One thing is the “draw lines with one long stroke, not by adding up lots of smaller lines” one. I never understood how that would be possible, until I came across advice on how to improve your handwriting saying you should use your shoulder and back muscles, not your wrist and fingers for writing. Doesn’t mean I can magically DO it, but at least I have some idea of what I might try to learn.

Another are the scribble pictures. I remember doing those in art class back at school. Here’s the idea:
You scribble random loops and lines on a piece of paper
Then you look at it, and turn it into an image of whatever you happen to see in it.

I thought the idea was drawing over the lines as they were on the paper, so mostly I ended up with blobby rubbish, like snakes without heads, three-story mushrooms, or faces like this one:

Then I came across a tutorial at deviantart, which is not safe for work due to nudity, and looking at the example… You could add stuff. You could turn a circle into a face, or a hand. Yeah, I see how that might actually be fun, rather than frustrating, and result in more interesting images.

I guess that’s a good time to upload some of the more interesting results of those warmup-practises.

The following four are other sketches, from my figure drawing class, and people who want to avoid nudity should avoid those.