Image source: Merlina McGovern
I didn’t really have a long weekend to speak of. And, of course, this particular long weekend is filled with controversy. As I’ve mentioned before, as a freelancer, weekends no longer have any meaning to me. All that matters is the almighty deadline. As I juggle multiple projects this month, I’ve had to work through quite a few weekends. Days blur one into another. This has been purely a function of the feast-or-famine nature of this type of work as I learn how to better schedule my projects (and work on my pricing).
But enough of that work stuff, I mention it only because I had only a small amount of time this weekend to actually work on my Inktober prompts. And today, I was just so extremely fatigued after all of my chores and friend engagements. I was almost going to put off today’s prompt until tomorrow; it was oh, so tempting. But the beauty of Inktober is that I tell myself, just sit down for five minutes. I mean, as busy as I am, I know that I have five minutes to sit down and put pen to paper. And, of course, once I do that, I get immersed in the drawing, and pretty soon an hour has passed and my prompt is complete.
Today’s prompt was “Bounce.” A lot of times I feel that the daily prompts can be a bit lazy, and this one felt especially lazy. And a lot of the “drawing” that I do with Inktober prompts is just thinking about what to actually draw. A lot of times, my thoughts are purely literal. Of course, my mind immediately went balls bouncing. But, how could I make that interesting? Well, I’ve been posting my drawings on Threads and Facebook, and one of my cousins made a specific request to incorporate a hippo (or hedgehog) into my drawings. So you know what? I thought, why not combine the two? And, even though it’s not one of my more detailed drawings, I kind of like the image I eventually came up with of this very large and hefty mammal bouncing blithely through the landscape. They’re so cute, aren’t they? Well, that’s if you disregard how dangerous they are. I didn’t know until I looked it up just now that hippos kill around 500 people in Africa every year. It’s a number that far, far outstrips the five people that were killed by sharks in 2022, and we all know how terrified everyone is of sharks.
My husband and I have traveled to Africa on safari twice in our lives. We loved seeing the hippos, but I do remember being just a tiny bit terrified when we went out on a river in a small, brown canoe, and the guide told us to mind the hippos. Um, how exactly do you mind the hippos? I’m quite sure it was a bit of a joke, but I’m also quite sure he was a bit serious as well.
Ah well, these animals that spend so much of their lives in the water look harmless with their wide noses and folds upon folds of leathery skin. For me, it’s their tiny little ears that poke out so out of proportion to their gigantic heads, their large, flat, and sparsely spaced teeth, and their large toenails that make for cutesy critters perfect for drawing.
So, here, as we bounce into the next week, let’s all appreciate a happy, bouncing hippo.
Comments