I kept my eyes on it the whole time. Now it was moving so slowly that you couldn't really see whether it was coming towards you or not. Occasionally its shape changed just slightly and its black tummy swept over the concrete floor. I could hardly breathe. I knew that I ought to run away and hide bur I just couldn't. Now it moved diagonally again towards the wall and wasn't to be seen any longer. It was in the pile of junk behind the modelling stand, it was somewhere behind the sacks of plaster and might appear again just anywhere.
It was getting dark in the studio. I knew that it was me who had let the creature out and I couldn't capture it and lock it up again.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
What a wonderful Kirkus review!
(Paired here with my favorite improper contraction.)
"A thoughtful look at life, in all its beauty and strangeness.
...
This delightfully deadpan musing on life urges compassion for others. Howden’s straightforward text is on the philosophical side, though also rooted in the absurd. Hahn’s spare black graphite pencil watercolor, mostly set against a white background, are imbued with humor and empathy for the pickle, with the foodstuff’s expressive eyes conveying many emotions at once. "
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sarah-howden/the-wise-pickle/
THE WISE PICKLE
by Sarah Howden ;
illustrated by Sabina Hahn
RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2026
Last spring we had nineteen canaries. I must tell you, once and for all, that canaries are very virulent birds.
It starts with the mother bird and the father bird.
They have babies. And before the babies get a single feather on their bodies they have to leave home and the father bird sings again and the mother bird lays new eggs. That's how things go with canaries.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
#dailydrawing #tovejansson
Look I give my cats when they pee or break something. It's like why? You have boxes and why you need to be breaking things? Half the time you don't want me. I don't own cats...they own me. I should have known this.
Continuing to consolidate the colour profile of the White Bird. Even if the photo fails to capture it, those pale shades are actually a sophisticated mixture of grey, sky blue, pink, and purple shades, managed with eraser and finished with white.
Have been working on my ability to manage lighting, softening the shades and contrasts. Colouring white things are actually not easy, because you will notice all the minute colouring differences much more easily.
Words something so simple but yet so destructive. They become your inner voice, your torment they become the demons you try to appease. But when there is one that shines brighter than the others. It becomes charming, alluring, but yet the most destructive one of all. All you do...is feed it.
#28 - A collection of ballpoint pen sketches drawn on printer paper & scanned. This is what my lines look like when I'm not using a stabilizer in digital software to get the nicest clean lines. I tried to separate my scanned lines from the various shades of off-white that the scanner picked up. I adjusted the brightness and contrast levels in photoshop but I'm not very knowledgeable on how to achieve the best results.
For some reason, I had to prove to myself that good art does indeed take time. Anyways, this is an angel character (they're not real angels, they're a fictional species of mine) in my "spacefluff" style. I think I want to name her Mosambi, because she's sweet.
I made my golden calf in the arbour because it was a pagan place and a circle is always a good setting for sculpture.
It was very difficult to get the legs to stay upright but in the end they did and I nailed them to the socle just to make sure. Sometimes I stood still, listening for the first rumble of the wrath of God. But so far he had said nothing. His great eye just looked right down into the arbour through the hole between the tops of the spruce trees. At last I had got him to show some interest.
- Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
#dailydrawing #tovejansson
