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Please vote for my entry in the Spoonflower Retro Halloween Design Challenge: https://www.spoonflower.com/design-challenge/retro-halloween-2025-07/vote Voting is open until 3pm on 1 July 2025.

my entry: pumpkins & wormfetti You don’t need an account to vote, but it requires a captcha.

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Pumpkins were drawn, faces were drawn, there was Frankensteining in Photoshop… and then I made the pattern, and then waffled on the background. It was supposed to be flowers, but I started that and then it was too busy / too much the same colors. So, I considered some solid backgrounds (green, purple, maybe stripes in green & purple) and then I reused something….

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As you can see by the water level in the bottle — Dalton and Persephone have been thirsty, and enjoying the hummingbird feeder.

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It may have taken slightly longer than planned, but the tree swallows are fully rendered (and also scanned, and I've cut the scan… so, now I have to plop them in their calendar illustration and then finish the flowers for that picture).

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Drawing tree swallows for the calendar illustration for June.

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male eastern blubird

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The mock orange bloomed. There were bumble bees.

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It's hummingbird season! Dalton & Persephone have returned (okay, they've been here since May, whatever)

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The eastern bluebirds fully rendered from print-out to fixing it with gouache to completion.

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Redrawing some eastern bluebirds.

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The lilacs are having their moment.

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Last night's sunset.

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The great blue herons flew over the backyard…

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Spring… the daffodils, the flowering quince, the end of the magnolia, and the hyacinths.

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The magnolia has bloomed.

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Hopefully the Easter Bunny brought you some chocolates 😉

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Anyway, I was putting dishes in the dishwasher when I noticed something bigger and more exciting than a robin way out in the backyard. Yes, it was a Northern flicker. So much more exciting than a robin. Technically, for the non bird nerds — a flicker is a woodpecker. This one is female. The males have a mustache on their chin (that no one calls a beard… I didn't name these things or their parts).

Filter provided by the glass in our screen door.

There were robins, a starling, a pair of chipping sparrows, and some juncos. And I got no pictures of the nosy chickadee who narks on me to all the birds every time I go outside, even though it literally came up on the porch to glare at me thru the door. Also not pictured is the brown creeper than snuck around the tree trunk as soon as I got the camera to focus. Oh, and there were a pair of bluebirds — I thought male and female — looking at the box and then fighting (mating) in the tree branches… the male is scoping out the yard to see if this is gonna be his turf.