If you have logged on to the internet sometime in the past few days, you may have heard about the guy you see above. In case you live in a cave that only has access to crappy blogs like this, here is the link to the story of the purple squirrel. Of course, my friends on my other forum always keep me up to date on the latest sciurine news, so I knew about it a few days ago. Now there really aren’t many squirrel stories out there that actually interest me, but this one caught my attention because he seemed to be a refugee from my art archive. I mean, given the many colorful critters I’ve drawn over the past 4 years, certainly at some point I drew a purple squirrel….
Um…. no, actually I haven’t. The closest I have is this:
He looks awfully blue for a purple squirrel.
That is a slightly doctored version of an avatar I used last February when I ran into a horrific streak of bad luck on a trip to Oklahoma that resulted in everything from getting sick to causing a wreck. That is ES in the avatar. The reason he appears purple is that for some reason, and I know not why, the subject of turning ES purple came up in the chatroom a few months ago, and I wanted to do a quick retouch on an old avatar to show off to the others. But since I was on my laptop, where I rarely do any artwork, I had limited old pictures to work with… and this was the best one to make a purple ES.
Now red is by far my favorite color, with blue a close second. But I like just about any bright colors, and purple is a guilty pleasure of mine. That made me dig in the archive to see how often I’ve used the color in my previous artwork, and I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t very often. One of the reasons for that is when I was doing the original portrait series back in 2008, I was trying for realism (in an anthropomorphic way, of course), and generally used natural colors, both in animal fur and in hair. Towards the latter half of the series, after too many similar looking characters, I finally began expanding my horizons a bit more…. but for whatever reason, purple didn’t come up over that horizon very often.
Now, there is one of my more frequently drawn secondary characters who does flash the purple, and that would be Buster’s favorite tormentee Holly…
It takes a scavenger to know one.
Holly’s purple hair, which you first got to see in Buster’s introduction, was one of my first attempts at coloring outside the box. One of these days I’ll give Holly her own post, and I feel bad now for neglecting my only prominent purple creature. And while Holly stands alone in the violet part of ES’s world, there are several one-and-done characters who got the purple treatment in their only rendering…
This is the most recent, and one of my favorites from the series of “tattoo” avatars I drew for people on my forum. Merlin was based on the beloved former dog of one of the gals, and I got extra crazy when designing this character by not just going with purple hair , but two-toning it with blonde on the other side. Purple and yellow are complimentary colors, and they work doubly well since the canine character herself is black and white… for which any color of hair will go well with.
I have a feeling you're about to experience the worst of it, pal...
Here is a picture I drew for a game I run on the forum where you have to guess the song from the lyrics provided. The song is “Chelsea Dagger” by The Fratellis, and was requested by the person listed, who we know as megaaddict. Since the song describes kind of a wild child girl, I wanted to let the imagination run away with me when designing her for the picture, and that almost always seems to take me to the right end of the color spectrum on Paint, where the purplish colors reside. While Chelsea never crossed over into another picture, she does stand alone as the only actual purple furred character I ever drew and posted…. unless you count this pic I drew for the girl at work who supplied me with my cats.
Or the non-descript groupie of Clem's in the background there.
And then there is my purplest creation of all, a character I was inspired to draw once that I haven’t shared much with anyone, though I may eventually share her story on the blog. And that would be the weasel Caitlin…
Yes, I am certifiably insane. Why do you ask?
So what have we learned today, other than I need to start drawing more purple characters? Absolutely nothing, of course. But you did get to see even more of the crazy crapola that emerges from my warped mind and onto my computer. Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to visit my store and support a sometimes-purple squirrel!
