Monica

@keystricken.bsky.social

849 Followers 276 Following

she/her, President of the Too Many Projects club, has a lot of thoughts about robots. ardentfigments.com

A gray cat perched wide-eyed on a tall cat tree, photographed from below, with a lamp illuminating her (also from below) like she’s telling scary stories around a campfire. Half her face is in shadow like she’s wearing the mask of the Phantom of the Opera.
Screenshot of a meme describing a life hack, which I will summarize: “For some reason I can’t comprehend, pretending that I’m a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like ‘Your head gets screwey when your apartment is messy’ just doesn’t carry as much resonance as ‘The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered’ because then I’ll be like, no shit? The tiger? I’ve gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.”
A three panel comic of a woman being slowly buried in blackberry canes. In the first panel, she says: “It’s Make a Terrible Comic day! I swear I’m gonna do it this time!” Only a few leaves are creeping in at the corners. Second panel, she’s drawing. “The blackberries will have to wait. Bad art cannot be denied!” Meanwhile, the blackberries have already breached the panel borders. More are invading from the third panel. Third panel: there is nothing but a speech bubble choked by blackberries everywhere. “On second thought, maybe my priorities are misplaced.”
A cheerful lemon pig on Day 1, with a quarter in its mouth.
A photo of handcrafted fabric birds, some entirely fabric and some with inner skeletons poking out (e.g. beaks). They’re gathered loosely on a shelf and inside of a large wire bowl. Paper tags around their necks describe them by number and date.
An ink wash before/after portrait of a “lemon pig”, i.e. a lemon with clove eyes and toothpick legs that had little “ears” cut out of its skin. In the “before” portrait it appears cheerful (for a lemon) and is holding a quarter in its mouth. In the “after” portrait its ears are crumpled, the quarter has dropped to the ground, and its mouth is open in a gape of pure despair as the skin around the cut begins to turn brown and desiccate. Dates indicate the lemon pig lived from Jan 1 to Jan 4.
A hasty photograph of a library book (bar code visible) titled “Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body”. On the cover is an illustration of (one of) the earliest walking fish, Tiktaalik, complete with interior skeleton showing the flat skull and complex wrist bones.
A profile photo of a three dimensional bird sewn from of stiff fabric panels. The background is a solid black, and the fabric is white with tiny black hand stitches. The chest panel is attached loosely with a brad, allowing it to move up and down with the neck.
A partial sketchbook page of messy handwriting and thumbnail sketches of pumpkins with eyes — really just circles with two smaller circles inside them. One note says “don’t forget the vine!”
A black and white inked page of illustrations: pumpkin leaves and vines, pumpkins and squash with glaring eyes, and handwritten notes saying things like “skull eye sockets: trite?” and “squashes are exoskeletal”.
A sketch of a two-panel comic. The first panel shows two hands gripping a cliff face, with the caption “Every return to project work feels like a desperate scrabble for elevation.” The second panel shows a person lying flat on the floor, gripping the top of a box and reaching helplessly upward, while a cat watches quizzically. The second caption reads: “Any elevation.”
A red chalk study of the Libyan Sibyl by Michelangelo — a super buff woman drawn from the back, with a few extra line sketches of her incredible shoulders. The long hatching lines on her right hand and the side of her head clearly shows he’s modeling her with flat planes at an early stage.
A portrait of the artist as seen from the back, adding light green accents to a large wall mural she’s drawn of cute boxy robots swarming a kitchen and trying to be helpful.
A two-page spread of illustrated notes in cursive handwriting with a piece of LED circuitry laid over the paper, featuring thin red magnet wire and decorated with silver jewelry ornament. The notes read: “For a while now, I’ve been working on the challenge of how to have sleek, solder-free mechanical connections for my projects that don’t have to be shamefully hidden away. Enclosures are all well and good, but I’m hunting the techniques that will give me a more organic form factor with, let’s call it, a jeweler’s finish.
An earthenware tomb figurine of a squat, curly-eared dog wearing a harness. He’s standing inside a display case in the Art Institute of Chicago.
A meme of a shark that reads: You aren’t a disappointment. You are super great and if people get down on you for not being perfect all the time then bite their faces off. You are super great and faces are high in protein. Super great.
An issue cover from Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan graphic novel, showing the main character reclining while smoking and making a weird face.
A hodgepodge of line drawings of robots and text.
Car exit meme with the options being “Jar Jar” and “Divorce”
A large embroidery hoop holding white cotton fabric with a detailed drawing of a skeleton drawn with a hot pink thermal pen. In the background, a book of Bernard Albinus’s anatomy plates open to the page that shows the same skeleton, as a means of explaining the source.
Appendix 1, titled "What drove me to write this comic in the first place". Woven fabric is made of horizontal (weft) and vertical (warp) threads, and the diagonal is called the bias. A small cartoon of the author pops up to say she knew all of this already (defensive much?).
Panel 1: Explaining a tech tree in video games and how orderly the progression is to greater and greater things.
A bookshelf with Cat and Girl vol. 1-3 on prominent display, and the zines stacked up on small display frames for easy access.
Handwritten and illustrated notes on graph paper with a highly structured rectangular flowchart on one side, the word “vs.” in the middle, and a curvy “mind map” style network of lines on the right. The notes read: Do I fulfill my dreams by methodically conquering one goal at a time, or subdividing fractally in pursuit of everything at once? BOTH CHOICES ARE INSANE.
A square of green cotton fabric and hair canvas stretched over a small embroidery hoop, with leaf designs drawn over it in fabric pen, balanced on the author’s lap in an airport. Not shown: embroidery needles.
Two gray cats snuggling on a gray couch. The bigger one is draped over the kitten and almost appears to be smothering him in her elbow.
A 3x5 index card with a grid drawn on the left side, each box representing one day (seven days per row). You’re meant to fill in each day as it passes. On the right side, a hand drawn legend where a line inside the square (horizontal, vertical, etc.) represents one kind of activity. The activities are: writing/drawing, building, electronics, code, and “published something” (represented as a dot in the center of the square).
A painted clay sculpture of two grinning hedgehogs by Kim Slate, on a glossy wooden base. The hedgehogs have narrow slitted eyes and are grinning in a very sinister way, but the overall effect is endearing, or else I’m just built wrong.
A two-page spread of hand-drawn and illustrated notes on A4 graph paper, with a micron pen, ruler, and circle template in the background.
A red LED is plugged into a pair of female headers, each of which has a VERY short post which nonetheless has stripped magnet wire wrapped around it. The LED is lit, proving the technique creates an electrical connection.
A lit red LED against a white card, proving that the crimp tubes do create a solid electrical connection.
A red LED with magnet wire wrapped around both legs. One leg is wearing a crimped tube, and one is wearing a still-uncrimped tube for sake of comparison. There’s just not much that can be done to make a crimped tube attractive or finished-looking.
A red LED on a workbench with one leg tightly wrapped by stripped 26 AWG magnet wire. The wire wrapper tool is in the background.
A small plastic Easter basket with two Peeps, some fake grass, and two colorful plastic eggs lit from within with LEDs. Each egg has a glowing red button installed in the shell that makes it look a little like a festive bomb.