Wedding Collateral

In case you haven’t heard, I’m getting married this September! I designed my own save-the-date cards and invitations.

The invitation features watercolor cartoons of some plants, animals, and fungi that hold significance in our relationship. I’m blurring the address here so nobody tries to crash. 😉

The save-the-date card features a stylized portrait of myself and my fiancée.

On the back of the save-the-date, I snuck in a drawing of our dog, Marlowe, inspired by midcentury illustrators like Robert McCloskey and Louis Darling.

Bug Wizard

Character portrait for a wizard I made up the other day for a role-playing game.

His name is Mike, and the colony of bees he carries on his back is possessed by his familiar daemon, T'odd. What are they building in there??

I understand the rules will be pretty loose for this game, so in advance of a proper character sheet I wrote this list of his possible abilities.

  • Lift objects up to forty times his weight, put them in a pile, and live in it. 
  • Build sophisticated tools and structures out of mud and his own saliva. 
  • Produce hauntingly beautiful music from his armpits. 
  • Eat, and live off, practically any organic substance—including poisons designed specifically to kill him. 
  • Generally SUPER hard to kill. The trick is to maneuver him between two fingernails and then squeeze like the dickens. Or, put him in a trash bag for two weeks so he suffocates. 
  • Enchanted fly-wing robe makes the most annoying sound imaginable, right in your goddamn ear. Also it lets him fly. 
  • Walk on water, walk up walls, squeeze through cracks. Gets into your food somehow, even if it's in a sealed jar. 
  • Emit a pheromone cloud that, when inhaled, perfectly communicates a specific message, thought, or feeling. 
  • Mind control, but only if he can trick you into swallowing the pungent "royal jelly" that he horks up from a gland in his throat. 
  • Other excretions include a nutritious honey, silk, slime, venom, and an overwhelmingly rank substance known to grasshopper enthusiasts as "tobacco juice". He also smokes real tobacco, so his breath is generally pretty bad. 
  • Shrink down every night and sleep in a cozy matchbox full of fluff.

Mike was born human but he's metamorphosized many times since then, both for fun and for profit. The first time was the hardest; he didn't have any spinnerets back then, so he had to get his friends to help out with the cocoon. He's much better at it now, but his skeleton is always pretty floppy for a day or so afterwards.

Mike's favorite food is potato chips — and yes, he can make his butt glow.