Tag Archives: Monster

Succulent words this week! Acrylic painting on text collage on canvas, 6"x6"

Succulent: Acrylic painting by Leah Palmer Preiss of a green monster resembling an aloe plant in a succulent gardenNothing is more delicious than a good, juicy word, & A.Word.A.Day provides one every morning. I’m honored to be illustrating for Anu Garg’s succulent site again this week, & especially delighted to be given this word this year. In June we visited The Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, & saw the most astonishing collection of succulents there in the Desert Garden. My East-Coast eyes couldn’t get enough of their curious shapes & colors. There were a number of lizards enjoying the landscape as well, & I would not have been very surprised if an aloe-esque creature like this “S”-shaped fellow had appeared in one of the beds. Even an alien or a dinosaur would have seemed right at home!

(By the way, the Desert Garden is just one of many, & we were so entranced by all of them that we barely had time to pop into the Library at the end of the day before it closed– which was a pity, because their collection of rare books & manuscripts is as spectacular as the collection of plants.)

Original sold but prints still available in my Etsy shop, Curious Art Lab.

Goodly Creature Acrylic on collaged text & diagrams on six canvases, 6"x6" each

acrylic painting of head of creature or monster, curious art

Finally I have prints of this piece available on Etsy! Individual parts or all six elements in a bundle, in case you’d like to genetically engineer your own example of Zoorobotany!

GoodlyCreature-LeahPalmerPreiss

p.s. If you’re interested in how this piece came to be, there’s a slide show on my process page.

Gateway Creature Acrylic on vintage catalogue page

Oddment103-Otoroshi-LeahPalmerPreissLately I get the feeling that Illustration Friday has been making up topics just for me! I love painting creatures of all sorts. I’m actually working on a new piece that fits the topic AND the last, but until that’s done, I’m offering Otoroshi, as previously posted in my Oddments blog (which is chock-full o’ creatures, by the way):

“This week’s entry for AlphaBeasts is Otoroshi, an exceptionally hairy, tusk-bearing, gate-guarding monster. Normally he hangs out on temple gates, but this time he’s gracing a Marvel-ous wire number from Jim Brown’s Catalogue, 1939.”