“Cynical Woman (with Pookie)” by Helen E. H. Madden, Sharpie pen on sketch paper, July 28, 1993
Long before Cynical Woman became me with horns, I drew her like this. And I think when I’m older, this is exactly how I’m going to look, so consider this a prescient self-portrait. The bug in the picture, Pookie, is a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a nod to the original Cynical Woman, Joelle. Joelle studied entomology and wrote her master’s thesis on cockroaches. I remember sitting through her presentation. I didn’t understand any of what she said, but she did mention the word “ootheca” an awful lot.
Anyway, sorry for posting this late today. I’ve been busting ass on my current commission, a book cover for a publisher I work with. I’ve been posting screen shots of the work-in-progress on Twitter and on Facebook, so if you follow me on either of those, you may have seen what I’ve been slaving over the last couple weeks. (If you don’t follow me on either Twitter or Facebook, why not?! I’m a perfectly nice social media person, and I haven’t bitten anyone on Twitter in days, and the guy on Facebook that I did bite did NOT contract rabies, contrary to popular belief. He was already rabid to begin with.)
But I’ve been working very hard on this digital painting and staying up way too late too many nights and today it really caught up with me. After the Hubster left to take the girls to school, I went back to bed and had nightmares for the next few hours about Hubster switching out our phone for a complicated media center remote that I couldn’t operate to save my life (don’t laugh, he does this to me in real life all the damned time!) and it was very important that I call 911 because an undead Anne Romney might or might not have invaded our home and I was not putting up with that.
Needless to say I woke up in a cold sweat and all the coffee in the world cannot help me feel normal and fully functional today. Oh well. Back to the digital painting.
Work-In-Progress by Helen E. H. Madden, Photoshop, 26 April, 2012
