updates! features! dead things!

Yeah just a general purpose journal update that will contain all those things, not necessarily in that order :> I'm gonna go ahead and apologize; I have one more trade coming as I said, but it may be a little more of a wait than I anticipated. I've been sick for about a month, and it turns out what I thought was a particularly persistent cold miiight possibly be pneumonia. I won't be back at college (and my art computer) till tuesday since I'm skipping monday (not having tuesday classes at all is amazing). This does mean missing a midterm and I don't look forward to that, but hey maybe I can get it at some time /other/ than 8AM now :U 8AM isn't the best time for a midterm. I'm not a person before at least 9AM. Some of the medicines I'm using right now (the breathing treatment, ugh) make my hands really jittery too so that'll be something to work around. I'll do my best though! ^^ _{I have made so many typos today asdfg I love spellcheck.}
(Edit: Two trades! Oh my gosh I can't believe I drew a sketch to one and forgot. But that will get done. xD  Also, not pneumonia! Yay! )

Yesterday though my brother gave me a skull he found in the woods and it's a coyote : D It's just so beautiful and unexpected. I've never given any of my skulls names before but this one almost makes me want to start. I just wanna show it off to you guys. So I got them all together for a picture since I've never actually done that before.

The left coyote skull is the one from the woods; it's weathered to a sort of gray color which is really interesting and reminds me of that clay that's supposed to imitate stone. It's missing all its teeth except for the carnassials and molars, and also doesn't have a lower jaw. But I mean it's an incredibly lucky find as it is. The one to the right of it is from northern Indiana, I got it at some small town street fair thing we happened upon. It has all its teeth, the jaws are hinged together with some kind of flexible bone glue, and has made for fantastic drawing reference. Judging by the wear on the teeth (or lack of) both seem to have come from fairly young animals. Then there's a turtle skull that I found at a large lake, and I'm still surprised we managed to find the lower jaw too. It was in the sand a good distance away. The rabbit I found in a field one day I think. It has all its teeth they just fell out, and I don't trust myself to slip them all back in for the picture at the moment. The mouse was on a shelf in a machine shop (there's a skeleton that goes with it but I'm not about to try to position all those tiny fragile bones right now), and the white-tailed deer was a gift from my papaw. He just hung the head in a tree for years until it was clean haha. Like I'm pretty sure I remember it being there all throughout my childhood, just casually in a tree at the edge of the property. Then he eventually decided it was clean enough and gave it to me. xD Behind all the skulls is a shed antler that I think one of the dogs might have found and then got tired of. It makes a fantastic back scratcher.
You know, in case you just wanted to know the stories behind all the animal skulls I own. I don't know. I'm kind of waiting for my hands to be steady enough so I can try to paint. Which I don't think is actually going to happen at all today. I'm just killing time at this point.

And now a feature! Pretty simple, the standard setup: if I feature you I'd like you to do a feature as well putting me in one of the slots (you don't really have to though, haha). For the first ten people to comment I'm going to feature your icon and three pieces I like from your gallery.

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2. <da:thumb id="453999032"/>
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4.   _{(I hope you don't mind I pulled some stuff from your other gallery)}
5.   <da:thumb id="472412604"/><da:thumb id="472410110"/><da:thumb id="466864783"/>