Illustration Friday: (Ant) FARM

Before this week’s theme (Farm) was posted Friday morning, I was trying to take close up photos of some ants that were carrying around a chunk of kitty kibble on the bathroom sink. I don’t think they carried it there–maybe the cats dropped it? So when I saw that the topic of the week was “Farm” I immediately thought of those Ant Farm kits that I always wondered about when I was a kid.

My whole house is really an ant farm. The bathroom ants are the stupidest since usually there’s nothing for them to eat but toothpaste. The living room ants are travelers. They come in through one crack between the wall and the floor and go out through another nearby. The ones in the yard travel around managing their herds of aphids on the roses and bushes. The kitchen ants stay away from food or trash and instead hang out by the sink which makes it quite convenient to wash them away. The ant problem is minimal these days, since I discovered Ortho Home Defense (doesn’t smell and safe for kids and pets). Before that I felt like I was living in an ant farm! You just spray the stuff around the perimeter of the house once a season and the ants are gone. I guess it’s the end of a season (sadly).

I did this in Painter, which I’m trying to learn. It’s taking some time to get used to drawing on a piece of plastic that you can’t turn to draw in different directions. And when I moved the file from my laptop to my desktop computer I discovered that the colors were appearing much lighter on the laptop than they really are. My desktop monitor is big and calibrated and the laptop isn’t, but I can use it on my drawing table.