Christmas in July--A Partridge in a Pear Tree

I'm working on a new series of Christmas designs in keeping with my current shop theme of menagerie.  I've decided to limit the series to the first four days of the Twelve Days of Christmas--the partridge, the turtle doves, the French hens, and the calling birds. These will be printed as luxe cards on metallic stocks with gold envelopes and liners.  I'm pretty excited about how they will look in the end...Christmas is definitely the time for luxurious things. Here's the first day.  Because he's the root of all of the gifts, I've nestled him within a pear tree and a pear and holly mirrored border.   Enjoy!

"The First Day of Christmas" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Rosin Up Your Bow

"Hippo with Violin" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Finally another installment in the Dancing Animal series inspired by NYC's Delacorte Clock (still my favorite place in this town and what I'll miss most when we move out of the neighborhood).


The Hippo was a bit daunting to me, but actually, I love the way he turned out.  I started real work on this one on the Staten Island Ferry and it is my first finished drawing since ending the semester grading. It feels good to be back after such a long delay.  It's hard not to think of the Fantasia Hippos dancing in tutus. Maybe this guy plays the music for them...One more to go: the Penguin with Drum.  Happy Summer Break!

For Everett

My family has never been short on imagination.  I was lucky to grow up before the rise of the video game, the iPod, the iPad, the smartphone, and the internet.  My mom filled our rooms with shelves of books and art supplies and games that made us think.  When we were bored, she'd tell us to read a book, but just as often as not, we would be outside playing some made-up game that was desperately fun.  To this day, walking in to a children's book store, especially magical ones like Books of Wonder in NYC, makes me feel nostalgic and sad and yet very happy, all at the same time.  My youngest brother had, and still has, an especially developed imagination, and he would spend hours fighting dragons and roaring like Godzilla as he pretended to battle Mothra or Gidorah or some other nasty Japanese monster.  My oldest brother once made a drawing of Josh as he pretended to be Godzilla. Now that my oldest brother has a son of his own, I thought I'd reimagine that scene.

My baby nephew is awesome. He's perfecting animal noises and will soon be at that age when he'll enter the world of dragons, dinosaurs and giant mutant lizards from the sea.   For a birthday present for my brother, I've drawn his son, now about twenty months old, dressed up for trick-or-treating.  He's wearing his trusty dragon costume, designed to impart courage and to elicit monstrous roars.  Hearing a step behind him, he starts to turn.  What's that behind him?   I was  influenced in equal measure by Chris van Allsburg, Bill Watterson, and Maurice Sendak...three of the 20th century masters of drawing and storytelling.  It's an homage to children with imagination and to that perfect age when a backyard can become a place of wonderful adventure.

"Boy vs. Dinosaur" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Detail, "Boy vs. Dinosaur"                 

Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten

We moved to Northern Germany five days after my tenth birthday. Though we were originally slated to move to Bavaria, the famously beautiful part of the country, it was changed to Bremerhaven, a seaport on the North Sea.  My father went in advance of us and secured housing. I remember that video that he sent back for us of the house. We were nervous to move to a new country. I was in fifth grade and it was the first time any of us had lived abroad.  We didn't know any German and we would not be coming back to the States for three years...an interminable amount of time for me and literally more than a lifetime to my little brother Josh, who was still a toddler.

Bremerhaven had a military base, but the city itself was interesting to my eyes.  We lived a short walk or bike ride away from a beautiful, sprawling wooded park called Speckenbüttel. The downtown, also a short walk away, was cobblestoned and charming.  There were pastries and spaghetti ice to be had. At the port itself I watched boats sailing by and pretended they were pirate ships. I imagined I could see the coast of America and that I could see my friends waving at me from three thousand miles away.  I remember eating my first chocolate crepe there. My dad always got chocolate and banana, a combo I found odd at the time.

Really the best part of the year was Christmastime.  We lived about a half an hour away from Bremen. Actually, Bremerhaven was part of the Bremen state within Germany (West Germany at the time).  During Advent the town put on an amazing Weihnachtsmarkt, a Christmas market.  Vendors from all over I don't even know where came to sell ornaments and toys and the cutest stuffed bears and the most delicious foods.  One of my first really strong food memories was of these amazing mushrooms in this creamy sauce that one vendor sold here. We ate them alongside bratwurst stuck through brötchen and pommes frites.

My family at the Bronze pigs, Bremen.

Bremen boasted three other wonders. The first was a child's paradise, a street called Zur Böttcherstraße, which had this amazing toy shop that sold the best glass marbles and steelies and even a hand crank music box that played Für Elise, a song I loved as my friend Mandy's mother used to play it on the piano while I was at their home.  The second was this beautiful statue of the medieval hero Roland, which got my mind bent towards romance:

Roland statue, Bremen, Germany.

But the most famous part of Bremen was the statue of the Brothers Grimm folktale, "The Bremen Town Musicians," the story of a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster who all want to be singers. They meet each other on the road and have adventures together.  Can you spot me in the turquoise jacket? Hint: I haven't yet gotten my growth spurt.

The Bremen Town Musicians Statue, Bremen

I've been toying around with sketches for this drawing for years.  I finally re-imagined them as singers and musicians. In my mind, they are singing Mozart's "The Magic Flute."  Do you know the song? Then you can picture the rooster perfectly.  This drawing is an ode to those years of my childhood.

"The Bremen Town Musicians" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Because everybody needs one...

"Giraffe Finds a Friend" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

I'm not sure, really, when and where inspiration strikes.  The other night I was paging through an old sketchbook, looking at seeds of ideas for Halloween images, fairy tales, and more, when I found a written line (not terribly common for me), which read, "Giraffe with a nest on his head."

It could happen, you know, as the giraffe is up so high in the trees as he searches for a snack among the leaves.  As I sketched it out, I realized the giraffe was happy to have that nest there, because it was the home of this little bird.  You see, they are fast friends.  Drawing this picture made me as happy as the giraffe seems to be.

Considering that my hair sometimes resembles a nest, and that once a bird actually tried to get some of the hair from my head for a nest, I empathize with the giraffe a bit, too.

The Animal Parade, Part 1

When I was a kid, my Aunt Judi used to sing us this song called "Animal Fair."  It was very evocative, conjuring images of animals playing and grooming under the moonlight.  One line, "the old raccoon by the light of the moon was brushing her auburn hair," always caught my fancy.  I've read other versions where it's a baboon instead, but their rainbow colors aren't as magical in the moonlight.  The raccoon is a night animal; he's a masked menace.  He burgled his way into my trash time and time again in North Carolina, but I still find them intriguing, as if they have another personality hidden under that mask that's mild-mannered, more Clark Kent than Cat Burglar. 

I wanted to pair two animals that you might catch a glimpse of in the woods.  The bear is something I've only seen once in the wild, and though we were alarmed, he was a bumbling sort, more interested in the grass than in the family bathing on the river dock not far away.  Here the bear and raccoon are a happy pair, and they ride in the parade in style, bedecked with bells as they announce their arrival...so as not to startle anyone. :)  This is the first in a series.

"Bear and Raccoon", part of the series "The Animal Parade" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

For Fozzie

My family dog, Fozzie, really should've been named Godzilla. As a puppy, he was a real Jekyll and Hyde, crazy one minute and sweet the next.  When I say crazy, it's because he would go under the couch at nighttime and throwdown with...who knows? The other Fozz? He would bark and growl and then whine. The couch would wobble with his efforts. It was really, really odd.  He's turned into a toothy, noisy berserker butterball, a weird combination to be sure, with a deep abiding love for my family, and especially my brother-in-law.

One day while visiting home I was watching Fozz sit in the family room with his head resting on the stair to the kitchen. All of our dogs, Merlin, Jumper, and Fozzie all sat this way.  For a moment, he looked like a beast, a wild animal, and I thought about how weird it is to have an animal in the house.  Here's Fozzie running in the park not far from our house. He gets so excited he can't really stand it.

"Fozzie Running" Photo by Meghan Boehman

 

 

 

"Sweetheart" Photo by Meghan Boehman

I started to think about what it would be like to have a dragon that acted like Fozzie.  So here he is, with the squishiest squeaky I can imagine. He's a little cross-eyed and his teeth are a little weird, but you can tell he has a big heart and a soft spot for tearing stuffing out of toys.

"My Pet Dragon" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

At the Zoo

I think it's pretty clear by now that I love the zoo.  I've already mentioned that we live within a short walk of the Central Park Zoo and walk by at least once a week, often stopping in to go face-to-face with a penguin or to hang out with the sea lions.  A couple weeks in Singapore this summer with my husband helped that love grow. There, you can get really close to a lot of the animals, feeding giraffes, rhinos, and even orangutans.  They've got an amazing zoo and bird park, and the night safari is a lot of fun.  This past year my brother and sis-in-law had their first child, and I spent a lot of time telling him about different animals and the sounds they make.   I even made a song up about animals he could see in the backyard called, "What can you see when you're sitting in a tree?"  I started to think about what it would be like to bring your own baby to the zoo, at that age when they are excited and curious and the whole world is new. I wanted a mom and baby to be walking through a whole mass of animals; what we see are the animals they've seen for the very first time.  I picture this drawing hanging in a kid's room, where mothers can teach their kids about animals: Can you find the baby kangaroo? Where is the mother giraffe?

"At the Zoo" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Green Ink

Somehow in my life I've managed to start designing tattoos for people. While some are intensely personal, which I would never share, the last few I've done have been a lot of fun.

One of my friends has always had a deep and abiding love for green men.  I remember our first year in grad school together, how she wrote a really fun paper about these guys.  Since we both love Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, a story I'm dying to get my hands on someday as an illustrator, I guess it made sense that we'd do this together.  I'm embarrassed to admit how long ago she asked me to design one for her, and I was having a hard time with it. Then one day she shared a photo and the lightbulb went off for both of us.  It was from a stained glass window (in France?), and the little green man, tucked into a diamond, seemed both joyful and mischievous.   I worked two variations, a long, viney guy and a green man tucked into his original medallion and embellished with leaves.

Long green man tattoo for sienamystic.  Pen and ink. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

I may like the medallion even more:

Green man medallion tattoo for sienamystic. Pen and ink. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The last tattoo here is one I did for a friend I met while teaching in Ohio. It's the largest tattoo I've ever done, and it translated beautifully into ink.

Ornate cross. Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Silliness for my little brother

I made this marker and ink drawing (it's a tiny thing, maybe 5" high) while I was living in Rome. My friend Emily and I had taken a day trip to Viterbo, where we encountered this 12th-century church with an altarpiece with Jesus.  Jesus was oddly perched on the altar, as if he were sitting in a tree.  I may have cracked a joke about it, but the gears started whirring.

It reminded me of a poem called "The Goblin" by Jack Prelutsky, from his book "It's Halloween!"  Read below, it's delightful and evocative.

"The Goblin"
There's a goblin as green as a goblin can be.
Who is sitting outside and is waiting for me.
When he knocked on my door and said softly,
"Come play!"
I answered, "No thank you, now please, go away!"
But the goblin as green as a goblin can be
Is still sitting outside and is waiting for me.

In this poem, a spectacled, pale green goblin perches on  the tree branch outside of a kid's window at nighttime. It was a picture brought to life by the delightful Marylin Hafner.  Her drawings are the very essence of Halloween to me.  It always gave my brother Chris the creeps, but he loved it, too.

"A Goblin as Green" Marylin Hafner

I had a green marker and a red marker on hand (pitiful, but when you pack for a year out of two suitcases, this is what happens) and I began conceiving of the picture.  I imagine Chris as a child, peering out into a green-sky night.  Instead of the goblin, it's that weird Jesus from the altar, only with green skin.  Of course, our toy Godzilla, complete with ejectable fist, stands on the windowsill.  It's one of my odder pictures, but I love the weirdness of it.

"Green Jesus" Pen and Green Marker. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Sneak Peek--Giraffe Liner

This is a sneak peak of my second liner, inspired by the graceful giraffes that I got to feed while in Singapore with my husband. I'm always amazed by the sheer size of these creatures, and by their gracefulness in bearing in spite of their amazing height.

Sneak Peek

Here is a sneak peek of first design for the envelope liner. Currently I have two different designs, with hopes of having a complete line so that card sets will all have different images and different liners.  I am striving to make every aspect of my cards whimsical and unique.  Of course, in order to see the entire design, you'll have to buy a card or card set from my shop.  Enjoy!

Sneak Peek of Envelope Liner. Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The shop is coming along...

Bit by bit, the Hans-My-Hedgehog etsy shop is coming along. I'm assembling beautiful cards with whimsical envelope liners,  prepping images for archival printing, and working on new illustrations.  The business cards have arrived, tags have been made, and rigid envelopes for shipping have been purchased.  My living room has turned into a makeshift studio, with eraser dust and paper scraps lining the floor.  It's making me very, very happy.  Next on my list is to photograph the cards, which I'll sell individually and in sets of 4.  I'm hoping to launch before the end of the month, so stay tuned!

Gruff

"Goat with Horns" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The goat is the fourth in the series of the Delacorte clock animals.  He's the one animal with cultural references.  Playing a double-horned aulos, he refers back to Greece.  Though all goat, he reminds me of the half-man half-goat satyr, the mischievous woodland creature of Greek myth.  Though artists in the Renaissance and points forward have made the goat a devilish or witchly character, the bearded, dancing Delacorte goat is playful, making music in a joyous menagerie.

The Kangaroo and the Elephant

The next two images for the Delacorte series were the Kangaroo with her kid playing the horns and the Elephant with Accordion.  When I was a child, I had a powerful desire to ride in a kangaroo pouch. This was, undoubtedly, spurred by the movie "Dot and the Kangaroo", where one of the songs is called "Riding in the Pouch of a Red Kangaroo".  This little kid seems so contented to be carried by his mother and joins in the music-making. 

"Kangaroo and Kid with Horns" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Elephant drawing immediately followed the "Walking the Dog" drawing seen below, so it was at once familiar and unusual.  Having just realized a very elephantine elephant, it seemed a bit strange to make one more human, playing the accordion.  Both the animal and his instrument remind me of moving to northern Germany.  My memories of this time are childlike, as we moved there five days after my tenth birthday, and are generally colored grey in my mind, likely due to the cool, cloudy weather that predominated there.  Our first house was in a German neighborhood, not within the large American complexes where many of my friends lived.  We lived a short walk away from a beautiful, sprawling forest park where we spent hours upon hours riding our bikes and pretending to be Robin Hood.  We also were a short walk from the cobblestoned downtown area with its tiny shops.  Of particular interest to a ten year-old child were the bakery that served these delicious, swirled meringue-type cookies, and the toystore.  German toystores were a thing of wonder (even if we weren't very welcome there as part of the army of Americans in town). Filled with puzzles and detailed plastic figures and trains and stuffed animals, we spent many hours gazing, wishing and making Christmas lists.  Since we arrived near Thanksgiving, I knew I had a good chance of getting my favorite toy in the shop for Christmas.  It was a blue baby elephant stuffed toy, whose fur was so soft and cuddly. I fell in love with him and couldn't bear the thought of a month of waiting to see if he would be mine.  On Christmas morning, when I found him waiting for me under the tree, I was the happiest a child could have been on that day.  It's still one of my all-time favorite gifts.  The accordion also reminds me of Germany, and not for stereotypical reasons.    After we had moved to our second house, there was this old German man who would come door-to-door with his accordion.  He would play without ringing the bell until we answered the door.  When offered money, he would always decline, asking instead for a Coke.  I always wanted to write to the Coca-Cola company with this idea for a commercial.  So as it is, that elephant with accordion must have been made just for me.  That's how I see him, in any case.

"Elephant with Accordion" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Delacorte Clock

My absolute favorite part of NYC is Central Park. It's where my husband and I first got to know each other, where we spent beautiful fall days, and where we got engaged.  Now, we live within a 10 minute walk to the park and to my favorite spot there, the Children's Zoo and Delacorte Clock. The area around this part of the park is all for children. There is a petting zoo and a larger zoo with pandas and penguins and monkeys.  There are statues of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen reading to children.  There's that famous lake with remote-controlled boats.  My favorite animals in the zoo are the sea lions, which you can see without entering the zoo.  They always make the kids laugh with their belching noises.  As you stand watching the sea lions (which I've named Edgar, Oscar and Lucy), you can also listen to the nursery book rhyme music coming from the Delacorte Clock.

The Delacorte Clock, Central Park, New York City

Its dancing animals making music are a wonder to behold. It makes me feel like a kid again, standing in Germany, watching those old clocks turn in the squares of medieval towns.  I've dedicated a series of drawings to these animals; in fact, they were much of the inspiration for my shop's theme (a whimsical menagerie).  I'll be sharing them one by one. My favorite is the bear.  If you look closely, you can see him; he's the right-most figure. He is joyous, lighthearted and delightful, and he makes me smile.

"Dancing Bear" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Pals

"Walking the Dog" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

It's funny that as an adult I've come to love the zoo. We only went a handful of times as a kid, but since living in closer proximity to the animals while in Rome, Philadelphia and New York, I've gotten to spend more time there.  Last year, I met my best friend in Pittsburgh for my birthday. Together with our fiances, we wandered through the zoo. It was a beautiful, warm fall day.  We spent lots of time enjoying the antics of a baby elephant and listening to the surprisingly loud (and slightly terrifying) sound of a gorilla pounding his chest.  She always loved those elephants and I remember how we both reacted with childlike excitement when we got to ride one (although not together).  The one animal she loves even more is the basset hound, with their silly seriousness,  those large, melancholy eyes, that funny, low-slung gait, and their deep hound dog howl.  We even spent one day in State College, PA, driving to a nearby basset hound farm, where we got to pet those short lil' fellas.  Now that we're both crazy old married ladies, I hope we will never forget those days of childlike wonder and imagination.  So this one is for you, best friend. I hope that life will always bring you elephants and basset hounds, and if you're lucky, it will bring both at the same time.

An ode to Schongauer

Martin Schongauer's  The Temptation of St. Anthony is a riotous explosion of the imagination.  Schongauer renders his saint in the moment of ecstatic levitation, when devils and demons join him in the air (generally the element of angels) and plague him with physical and mental tortures. The print was a major hit in Renaissance Europe, inspiring Michelangelo and Dürer, among others. Leonardo later wrote that fantastic creatures are born in the artist's mind as a mix of the many animals he had ever seen. Schongauer's demons are believable in much the same way, merging fish, fowl and beast into a fantastic new whole.

Martin Schongauer, The Temptation of St. Anthony.  Copperplate engraving. Germany, 1470s.

The left-most demon with the club has always been one of my favorites. I always saw him with a flute for a nose, though Schongauer does not render him so.  Earlier this summer I re-imagined the demon as a musician.  Demons and the playing of music have been joined since the dawn of the Christian age, so it seems appropriate to me that Schongauer's demon may have played his nose as a flute from time to time, singing his own words in accompaniment. 

"Piping Demon" Pen and ink. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Self

A while back I decided to experiment in pen and marker to make some minimalist self portraits.  My natural tendency is to do lots of shading, and these are essentially reduced to line and color.

One was inspired by some printed paper I had on hand from a gorgeous paper shop in Rome.  I only had a red marker and a pen--not so much to work with--so I wanted to keep it simple. Though I've always been a brunette, in these two pictures I experimented with color, first red, and then black.  The last one does away with hair altogether.

"Self Portrait with Spade" Pen, red marker, and printed paper. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

For this image I juxtaposed two patterns of the paper to produce the desired result.  There's something Baroque or Rococo in feel to this one that I really enjoy.  The paper records part of the opera "Pagliacci" by Ruggero Leoncavallo.

"Self Portrait, White as Snow" Pencil, red marker, pen. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

This one was a challenge in pattern.  I wanted to do a play on the idea of a sleeping Snow White, with black hair, white skin, and red lips.  The skin of the face is composed of a snowflake.  The background I made into a pattern of apples and vines. I especially like how they mirror under the neck, creating a sort of collared shirt that also becomes the background.   I continued the idea of flat patterning in this next self-portrait.

I've always had pretty much a hate-hate relationship with my large Italian hair. It obeys some of the time, if weather conditions are perfect. Most of the time it feels out of control. I imagine that Medusa felt much the same way.  The snakes in the hair are repeated in the flat pattern motif of the fore- and background.

"Self Portrait with Green Eyes" Ink and green marker. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Barocco

Ponte Sant'Angelo at dusk. Photo by the author. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

I specialize in the study of Italian 17th-century sculpture. In my many trips to Rome and during the year that I lived there, my favorite place was always the Ponte Sant'Angelo.  This ancient bridge was the site of many a papal procession. It was also touched by miracles: the legends have it that a vision of St. Michael alighted on the topmost crenellation of the Castel Sant'Angelo, then better known as the Mausoleum of Hadrian. At that moment, the Eternal City was in the midst of a virulent plague, and when Michael sheathed his sword, the plague stopped. They erected a statue of him there, which has since been replaced.  That statue was said to bow to a miraculous icon of the Virgin Mary as it was carried across the bridge in procession, on the way back to St. Peter's Basilica by way of the Via della Conciliazione.  At nighttime, when the vendors have left and the pedestrians rule the way, it is a place of peace and beauty. Lights shine on the angels erected in the 1660s by Gianlorenzo Bernini, et al.  The Basilica, lit from afar, shines like a jewel over the Tiber River. 

Basilica di San Pietro at  night. Photo by author. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The procession down the bridge, whether by day or night, is a virtual tour through the final moments of Jesus. Each angel holds a relic associated with the Passion; we'll see the column and whip where Christ was scourged.  Other angels hold the Sudarium, the cloth used by Veronica to wipe his face free of sweat and blood as he carried the cross, the nails, the cloak and dice, the cross, the sponge, and the spear.   It is a pilgrimage bridge that takes you from torture to death, but in the most elegant way. The angels are serene, comforting. 

I've twice used the bridge as a source of inspiration. One was for a drawing for my mother.  This is a sculpture that I know intimately, The Angel with the Cross by Ercole Ferrata. I wrote about it in my dissertation, as its author was the subject of my project.  A drawing can't show the technical difficulties in carving from marble a figure holding a cross aloft, so instead, I concentrated on the challenge of rendering the folds in the cloth, the curls of the hair, and the grace of those fingers that gently support the cross.

"Angel with the Cross" Pencil drawing. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The other was for a drawing for my husband, long before we were married. This renders a wider view of Paolo Naldini's Angel with the Cloak and Dice.  Foretold by prophets that no man would divide Christ's garments when they stripped him for execution, the soldiers instead cast lots for it. The angel becomes a double for the Roman soldier who won the bet.   It was this drawing that actually gave me the inspiration for the Christmas card of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, seen below.  When faced with the background, I knew I wanted it black. One reason I love the Baroque is the rampant use of chiaroscuro, allowing me to sink into the image's inky blackness.  Only here, I decided to make the sky a combination of textures composed of angels and feathers. 

"Angel with the Cloak and Dice" Pencil Drawing. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman