Here is the other shirt design for the Turtle Survival Alliance, modeled from a Madagascan ploughshare tortoise (a species that's been dependent on intense conservation action for years due to the effects of smuggling). Shirts should be available from www.turtlesurvival.org by some time in August.
People tend to associate snakes with thoughts of hell for obvious reasons, but how many people have considered a hell for snakes? Thoughts of heaven and eternal life have been considered for conventional companion animal species, but people don't seem concerned with potential spirituality in species that terrify many humans.
Snakes are highly automated animals: they lack the behaviors of other species that convey charisma in settings where human interaction occurs, such as when many pets (from goldfish to dogs) learn to associate people with the giving of food and consequently act receptive towards humans. Snakes live to eat, and they do so without much, if any, charisma. They strike, some constrict or envenomate, then swallow slowly and retire to digest, defecate, and repeat.
Imagine then a world for snakes where prey items are abundant, but are balloons. The hard-wired feeding response of snakes would never result in a meal, just a loud pop. Long teeth aimed to puncture, but never to chew, even coupled with venom or constricting coils, would result in animals that were perpetually starved, startled, and if it's possible for the simple serpentine cerebellum, seething with frustration.
In keeping with the popularity that tribal tatts have with kids these days, I designed a couple of images for Turtle Survival Alliance shirts - here's one of them. The shirts should come around later this summer.
This cartoon was done for a friend who studies evolution in Anolis lizards. The theme here is that as the climate warms in the tropics, habitat specialist species that rely on cool temperatures in the shade of the forest may be displaced by robust habitat generalist species that move into the increasingly warm shadows. Anolis, as well as other types of lizards, have speciated by partitioning their diverse tropical environtment, and may be homogenized by climbing temperatures. The friend for whom this cartoon was made also has a thing for tattoos, hence the ink on that bullisome lizard.
This weekend at SXSW in Austin, Glen Hansard pointed out Ireland was rid of snakes by St. Patrick, which essentially rid Ireland of both the feminine symbol and paganism. There shortly came a plea to "Bring the snakes back to Ireland," so this cartoon was bound to happen.
The 9th Annual Symposium on the Conservation and Biology of Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles (i.e., the joint meeting of the Turtle Survival Alliance and the IUCN Tortoise & Freshwater Turtle Specialist Group) hosted a large group of South Americans presenting various studies from that continent for the opening day session, so it seemed appropriate to paint a turtle from South America for the conference auction night. This stylized rendition of a Big-Headed Amazon Turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus) sold for $5,000 on August 16, 2011. Learn about the upcoming 10th Annual Symposium... at www.turtlesurvival.org.
Keeping with the last post, another cartoon requested of me at least a dozen years ago, for another story. This time I was supposed to produce a gorilla charging a man swinging an axe near an uprooted tree with paper blowing out of the roots' hole. That's all I ever knew. I was told the drawing was spot on for what had been invisioned, right before I was told the story wasn't being written after all.
