Lizards

I drew these sketches from memory before going to the internet to find photos to reference and before I had decided to sprint over to Florida for a brief family visit.
I did find and take this photo of the lizard in question, the green anole,
anolis carolinensis and was happy to see it again in it's natural habitat.

The multicolored dewlap, the flap of skin that the male can extend to attract females and dissuade other males from entering his territory is a prominent feature among most anoles and can range from pale, creamy white to bright orange/red.

Here is a close-up of the printed keyblock (won't be this color but I had a tube at hand while I was proofing) before color blocks have been cut.

I'm using Italian Cherry for my blocks this time around and it is good to be cutting a nice hardwood again. Cherry polishes to an almost glasslike shine and while this is not very densely grained and is a bit coarse, it is taking pretty good detail and resists chipping or splintering.

Shameless Plagiarism

Sami did another neat drawing this summer of a veiled chameleon after seeing one in an aquarium at camp. I had my eye on it for a while and when my wife suggested that I try and preserve some of our kids youth by making woodcuts of their drawings instead of.....well, you know....how I usually waste my time-- I agreed.
So seeing this as an opportunity and with Sami's permission, I jumped into this little project. When I told an artist friend that I was ripping off my 8-year-old's drawings for content he said that all artists look at and reinterpret the work of others.
I'm not sure if a visit to Kinko's to photocopy and reverse the image can honestly be called a "reinterpretation" but I'll let history decide.
I still plan to tweak this a bit. You can't tell but the chameleon body and the background color are actually different greens and values but once I printed the dark blue-green key block (the outline colors) I lost all that. So I hope to darken the background with a cool glaze and/or change the text color to a nice violet......And I'm thinking of embossing a nice bumpy lizard skin texture on the chameleon body if the paper will tolerate it.
I'm just sorry that I didn't add a sticky pink tongue and fly in the lower right.