Playing Pretend

I’m on an animal illustration kick and having sooo much fun with it. It’s like being 7 again. Playing house, choosing who gets to be who or what.

When my sisters and I were little, like most kids, we played house. We used to create our character’s out loud to one another…you know, get the background on our supposed friends or enemies in the game so we knew who we were talking to. This was always my favorite part.

It wasn’t always sugarplums and lollipops though. We would argue over who got to be the singer or the figure skater. Sometimes one of us would choose to be a famous person, then the rest of use would struggle to think of our own famous person to be… it wouldn’t be long before we each had 3 different professions or a really hot boyfriend, a kickass job, and of course lots of money.

We had the most awesome collection of costumes. It makes my wardrobe today look tiny in comparison. There were 80’s prom and wedding dresses, cat and clown costumes, little house on the prairie clothes, and outfits from my old dance recitals.

Well, now I’m all grown up and I still get to dress up and play pretend, just in a slightly different way. Meet Mear the meerkat. He’s an explorer and thinker with a burning desire to get down to the bottom of things.

Today he is on an archaeological hunt with a messenger bag, his own design, specifically for these missions of discovery! The bag contains very important tools including a bucket, sifter, brush, hand pick, containers and pouches for organizing fossils and dirt samples, as well as a pouch for his colorful one of a kind glasses, made specifically for dating his findings in the field.

More characters like Mear are on their way, so keep on the look out.

Update: A few more characters I've created since writing this post.

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