All images are hosted on Flickr – click through for a larger view, and for image descriptions (Alt Text equivalent).

First up: not Squirrel, but Mouse. She’s checking out the cheese section of somebody’s well-stocked pantry library.

Next up: Squirrel and Fox did all the tourist things in DC – in addition to and a drawing I posted earlier, there is this snapshot:

Squirrel enjoying some quiet time, while I experimented with Procreate:

New one! Like many mammals, food is an enormous source of motivation for squirrels. It will even make them do math and physics. How will this end?!?

Things I learned from a year of drawing squirrels and other animals:

• I still need to work on a consistent style for my squirrel, if I want to present him as a single character. It’s ok to switch between a more anthropomorphic and a more realistic/animal representation, but they’re not the same squirrel throughout.
• Some squirrels look more like a kangaroo I need to work on the face.
• Finding the balance between enough detail and sufficient simplification is really hard. Cartooning is a real skill and takes a lot of practice to develop.
• I’m loath to give in to the trend of 3 fingers + 1 thumb for cartoon characters, but drawings get crowded with 4+1.
• Squirrels are fun to draw, but so are mice and foxes!

Would you like to see more cartoon-style drawings of Squirrel and friends? Let me know in the comments!

I’m with Squirrel…but for different reasons. (I mainly worry about falling off the treadmill). I really do NOT like those hamster wheels for humans, and unlike other people I routinely run slower and less far on them than I do outside. In June I was forced onto one due to the Lehigh Valley reaching the unenviable status of “most polluted air in the world”, when the smoke from the wildfires blew our way and made me wear a face mask outside when I had to go out briefly. I still wanted to get a run in, but not in this pea soup (Youtube video). Hamster wheel in the gym it was… I returned to running outside as soon as the Air Quality Index returned below 100 and it feels much better to be outside!

Do you like running on a hamster wheel or are you with Squirrel and me? Let me know in the comments!

The portraits are based on real portraits from the Gallery – my original drawing is small so I couldn’t squeeze in a lot of info for you to guess which ones, and they’re not to scale. I selected them from the 1820s decade if you want to go hunting them down. Post your guesses in the comments!

A timeline is an obvious solution to make that clear to a tenure committee consisting of people who don’t even do history. But if “my history” is that long and covers allegedly five thousand years (historians have issues with that claim), it’s a squeeze to fit it all in. One solution is to borrow the scroll format, like Along the River during the Qingming Festival. I felt I already was pushing the format of my file by including illustrations for a non-Art tenure case, so I let that go for now.

Squirrel to the rescue! He can unroll the timeline like a garden hose to its fullest extent for display purposes, and can reel it back in anytime to tidy it away. And while we’re at it, I might as well point out that any East Asian historian worth their salt at a SLAC (Small Liberal Arts College), ends up covering Japan and Korea as well. It does help to have a little hippo on hand to model the correct reaction, of course! This ended up being a full page in my file, because… East Asian history is really long, you know? And just to be clear, I highlighted my area of scholarly expertise in purple, although I will happily cover it all “from Yao to Mao” and beyond.

The top panel has become a very regular feature at the start of any premodern Chinese history class to orient us for the session that day, and I use little coloured pointers to indicate where exactly we are. Reusable, and fun: what more do we want out of tenure file products?

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He’s just putting the finishing touches to the composition, overlaying PRC over the United States. Add some text in a standard comic book typeface, and voilà: there is an inviting illustration of the territory I cover in my courses. And Will you look at the size of that?!?! It actually is larger than the US! Who’d have thunk? Squirrel also got to show off his mind-bending map-comparison at the start of every China-course already, so this is definitely a “multi-use” illustration!

Oh, that little blue hippo? If you’re not already familiar with him, I’ll introduce him next week Monday! Until then, I’d love to hear how you convey scale in your courses. Leave a comment!

Turns out if I can put squirrels on it, I can reframe even writing a tenure statement as a (somewhat) fun task. QED:

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During our online era (2020-21) I offered exploration packs for my classes, and students told me they liked that: even when neither of the two options were something they really wanted, they could at least choose against something. I wrote a bit more about the how and why of this approach on my other blog. I opted here for an engaged and energetic European Red Squirrel who goes on an adventure, here choosing between two options for Shang dynasty history.

This squirrel also acted as the cover card for my tenure file’s Canvas course shell. And I can easily go into the drawing and write something else on the arrows to represent an active choice, so he is very re-useable. Where should he point next? Let me know in the comments!