Kat Johnston

Tag: dog

  • Sketch: Spaghetti and Mutt-balls.

    Kat Johnston: Spaghetti and mutt-balls... it's the height of art, don't you think?

    I think we can all acknowledge by this point that I love a good pun. I can’t help it! Good word-play, however groan-worthy it actually sounds once the joke is made, makes me tick. Manipulation of the English language into humorous forms is just plain awesome. And it is often really hard to explain when trying to teach it in another language.

    Oh, there are puns incorporated into humor in other languages too. It isn’t that uncommon to see a joke confusing ‘hana’ (meaning flower) and ‘hana’ (meaning nose) in Japanese, for example. But trying to explain how, ‘A horse walked into a bar and the bartender said, ‘Why the long face?” is funny to someone who doesn’t natively speak English and isn’t aware of the cultural context surrounding the traditional role of the bartender-as-therapist in Western culture is something else entirely. Even after explaining how the joke works, even in English you’re likely to still ask why someone let a horse into a bar anyway. Surely that violates a health code or two.

    So yes. I make no apologies for my pun today, groan-worthy and lame as it might be. Puns may not be the height of humor, but they’re still pretty awesome to me.

  • Woof? Ahh, woof!

    Kat Johnston sketch – woof… umm… yeah, woof!

    So about a week ago, I tried roasted dandelion tea. I have rather a fondness for teas of most kinds, though I do tend to swerve away from the black teas. I prefer herbal, or green, though I am not adverse to an iced black fruit tea… does that even technically count as tea?

    Anyhow, I like dandelions… and I like tea. The two don’t mix. I don’t know if it was the roasting that was the issue, but I have never, ever tasted a worse tasting tea. I’ve tried a fair amount of tea.

    I’m not entirely sure whether to be disappointed, or glad. On the one hand, if dandelions don’t taste all that nice, I’m not sure that all that many people will be swooping onto my lawn to poach my dandelions, roast them and turn them into tea. On the other hand… well… I almost wish that it tasted as wonderful as they look and smell. I guess it just goes to show that some things are far more enjoyable alive and gorgeous than dead, shredded and shoved into a teensie tiny bag to be boiled in water.

    Now that I think about it, a lot of things are better off that way!

  • Another Little Sketchbook Post.

    Kat Johnston Sketch - things get odd when all you have is a sketchbook page telling you to draw, but nothing to draw in mind...

    Another page in that little tiny sketchbook I posted a picture of the other day. This little sketchbook is going to be dedicated to automatic drawing, I think, as I can’t seem to look at those pages with something concrete in mind as to what I want to draw. Instead… just starting with something, anything and seeing where it takes me. I have no doubt that there are going to be some pretty interestingly bad drawings in this book, but I can deal with that… because it does tend to get some good pictures occasionally too!

    I don’t often draw with a ‘just draw, see how it turns out, if it looks bad, it doesn’t matter’ type mentality when it comes to ‘proper’ sketchbooks (as in the ones that I want to be able to look at as an artistic product in their own right, not just as a place to draw)… as in the type of sketchbook that you would be happy showing to someone else. They are generally reserved to margins of notebooks, used envelopes, random spiral-bound sketchbooks and on the back of very important documents (which then get misplaced, because it both serves an important function and as a sketch… you never know what pile it is going to end up in, when looking for it as one or the other. Happens particularly often with assignment details).

    Anyhow… hope you enjoy this quirky little sketch. I do! I think the little octopuppuss is just about as confused as we are as to why we’re looking in on it right now.

    On a side-note, I had a friend pretend to kill me today, so I chased after her with arms outstretched and told her that I’d password protect this post so that she couldn’t see the new picture. I simply stated that zombies seem to exhibit poor motor skills… after all, they can’t even bend their knees right. You’ve never heard about a zombie that’s made it as an artist, have you. If you have, I want to know about it, by the way.

    Dead people who just happen to have art still selling don’t count… they don’t produce it after they’re dead, the enterprising people that still own the creative product afterwards just cash in.