A Mating Menagerie

It’s amazing how quickly one’s ideas can change, or at least, more focused. A lot’s happened over the past couple weeks: breakups, breakdowns, and breakthroughs. The three B’s. Last I wrote, I was still doing a series of illustrations based on collective nouns. Now, I’m planning on illustrating and writing a book about mating habits and animal sexuality (A Mating Menagerie: Illustrating the Diversity of Animal Sexuality…tentative title). And to a degree, I kinda feel like I’m starting over, but I feel really good about this project. Here’s the sequence of events.

I was having trouble organizing my collective nouns into some sort of cohesive theme—my ideas were all over the place, connected only by the fact that they were based off of these nouns and that I was drawing them (i.e. similar style). One of my GSIs, Ann, suggested that I list out my ideas under various categories like puns/wordplay and political/current events. And by doing that, I realized that most of my illustrations fell under the latter category. From there, I looked at the ideas by themselves, isolated from the collective noun, and realized that I didn’t need to draw multiple animals. So the collective noun wasn’t the base concept for the project, it was just the jumping off point.

But to where I asked myself.

I then made a list of 10 additional animals that I found interesting and would enjoy drawing (hippo, ostrich, jellyfish, armadillo, panda, etc) and read up on their natural history. Certain key phrases or facts just seem to jump out of the text and scream “I need to be illustrated! Pick me!” Things like:

-Hippos, while defecating, will spin their tales to distribute their feces over a greater area (fertilization? So that they dilute it?)
-Ostriches, when two parents and their chicks come across another ostrich family, the two pairs of parents will duke it out in a winner-takes-all-the-children battle. Seriously.
-Pandas, known for their inability to breed in captivity, have been shown panda porn as a form of sex education. Interestingly, it’s not the visual images that teaches them how to copulate, but the sounds.

So for a couple days, I considered doing some sort of illustrated encyclopedia of animal natural histories, of random facts that I found intriguing. The trouble was, it was just too random. I needed to find some sort of umbrella that could organize and provide structure for the illustrations. I reexamined my list of ideas and found that over half of them had to do with mating, sex, or parenting. Aha!

This has led me to check out every single book on animal sexuality in the library (well, I only allow myself to check out ones published after 1990, because research has changed so much with DNA mapping). And I’ve suddenly found myself with even more ideas of illustrations to create, as well as some possible narrative structure…which allows for me to return to the book form.

Here are some notes from my rough outline:
Why even sex in the first place? Asexual reproduction. Hermaphroditic animals. The advantages of sexual reproduction (sharing and fixing genes, less susceptible to diseases and parasites, natural selection). Creation of the sperm and egg cell. Evolution. Male vs. Male competition. Physical and Behavioral adaptations. Female (the ultimate) choice. Symmetry=good health=good genes. The actual act itself. External vs. Internal fertilization. Phallus variations. Sperm competition. Pregnancy/nesting. Parenting, raising the young until they’re able to reproduce themselves. Cyclical.

And out of this research, I have about 40 illustrations I could do. I’ve started to limit the size of my work, to 5x7, and am working at a faster style. See the previous post about the puffins for an idea of what I’m going for.

I’m getting tired of writing, but before I sign off, here are some facts you might find interesting:

-the male mosquito, after inseminating the female, injects a hormone that effectively turns off the female’s sex drive, thus preventing her from mating with any more males.

-the male deep-sea angler is much smaller than the female and when he connects with the female, he remains physically attached until his body joins with her’s, living off her body and providing sperm whenever she desires. For awhile, scientists didn’t realize there was a male sex for this fish; they just thought these smaller dangling parts were some sort of parasite.

-cats, and especially the tiger, have penis’ with backward facing barbs so that they are unable able to disconnect from the female until the erection has subsided.

I’m really excited about this project, and it’s fun too. More later…