Tonight’s story on The Twilight Zone is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction. This as you may recognize is a maintenance service elevator, still in operation, waiting for you.

While not the same image you may see on the attraction from which this quote comes, my sketch of a door drifting into a starry field certainly brings the scene to mind.

The illustration is ink & blue highlighter on 3-inch-square “sticky note”.

A quick marker sketch.

I was thinking about how the written word sometimes doesn’t quite convey the manner of speaking intended by the writer. Consider this sentence:

That “a bit ‘O home” may sound to the ears of those on the review board as somewhat uneducated hadn’t occurred to me but, what the heck, what’s done is done.

Of course the whole of the English Language is a hot mess ( [dialogue], [wiki] ); but as I see it what the heck is a sort of rhetorical question. Would a special mark help the reader? Probably not, but it was fun to design one anyway:

Introducing: The Rhetorical Question Mark

With my new invention (©2009 Mike Figueroa) you can craft sentences with rhetorical questions all you like, pretty neat huh

All this silly/serious talk reminds me of Victor Borge, awesome as he is:

I had a couple new shades of green marker to try out (including Green Tea), so here y’ar.This is marker on vellum, and is more dynamic in real life.

I forget why I did this hack job in Paint.Net, I hope you either like it or dislike it. No ambivalence please!

Once & some time ago, while dreaming up other things, an image came to mind of very little folk living in a damp and ancient wood. I wondered about the sort of ways these tiny forest masters might make their homes, and how they would spend their time.

I did a few quick (and now lost) sketches, imagining these little gnomish fellows at a variety of tasks:

• Mending a mouse’s broken tail,
• Placing a baby finch in a grass-weave basket and carrying him back up to the nest from which it fell,
• Collecting wild berries and leaves,
• Helping possums to set up traps (presumably to ward off wild cats).

But there was one activity that seems to me both idyllic and daft. I thought, “Perhaps they may like a fireplace to gather around.” Yet, in the stead of perhaps more conventional building materials such as stones, I sketched them using something more unexpected: wood, by way of a felled tree’s stump.

I wanted to explore the concept, so I started with someone’s very nice drawing of a tree stump I found online:

Then, I added lines on top to visualize what it might look like:

I also made a small excercise of the idea in clay:

Click for full-size.

Click for full-size.

Now you’re probably thinking it unwise; or that it may be a short-lived actvitity to place a flame inside of a tree’s stump. I can only think they would not do so if it didn’t work quite well, so spare your naysaying should you happen upon such a chimney.

Here’s a little (literally) project I made a while back. It’s all balsa, colored with markers and detailed with a 0.005mm inking pen.

Click for full-size.

As you can see, before placing the roof & door I placed several pieces of wood inside to make a workspace & various non-descript (but useful-looking) items. It’s hard to catch with a camera all the details that are inside there, but it’s clear someone has been working. It’s very lived-in.

Full-size on click.

Good evening. Here’s an inviting space: a darkened warehouse.

Click for full-size.

I took the time to document some old creative output of mine for days when I don’t have the time or gumption to post something new. A day like today for instance.

I could have worked on something after coming home from a memorial day party, but I got stuck orbiting :

Half and hour past wikipedia

So here is today’s yesterday project; it’s something that you could do yourself with only a pencil & box-cutter and a failure to understand that you could seriously injure yourself:

Click for full-size.

It looks like the meat may have gone bad. A pink or red color pencil would work much better, though I suppose you could paint it. It’s also missing many of the trappings common to the modern weiner. A miniature set of condiments, along with one of those paper boats would round this project out nicely.

I’ve talked myself into it. Maybe I’ll do that sometime in June (nice Hot Dog Weather!)

The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus.

It is often claimed to descend from the Greek γνώσις (gnosis), meaning knowledge.

It more likely comes from genomos (earth-dweller), in which case the omission of e is, as the OED calls it, a blunder.

Paracelsus includes gnomes in his list of elementals, as earth elementals. He describes them as two spans high, and very taciturn.

Click for full-size.