Meeting the Rainbow Blanket Octopus

birthday cards and sea creatures that are somehow real

We’ve all, or most of us, drawn birthday cards before, right? It’s some of the first drawing “for” someone I did, and it’s stayed a consistently joyful (when I have spoons for it) type of Making Things. There are no Portfolio Thoughts for a Birthday-Spiderman-with-Witcher-Mario-and-Zelda cameos, you can just go nuts:

Lookout! Here comes Spiderman …with a sword

Trooonk

wee withers

For my nephew, who loves horror and makes the best Halloween costumes

When my spouse and I started dating, we used to leave each other post-it-doodles. Actually, a big doofy monster drawing he clipped to my dorm mailbox answered the “so….does he like, like me?” wondering and started our Define the Relationship talk.

And getting cards and doodles and drawings from folks is always THE BEST
I keep pretty much all of them:

<3

Card of our homebrew DnD campaign’s pet Nothic, Wayne, from Joe and Jen

This awesomeness from Liv, who works at Brown Street Coffee

And these amazing drawings from Courtney Singer’s class, which brings me to last week, when a parent of one of these cool kids spotted me walking Spatula down her block and reached out to chat. Turns out her kid’s birthday was coming up, so a card, right? I love finding out what kids’ favorite animals are because they know incredible ones that I’ve never seen before and Zev knows some fantastic sea creatures that sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole, like the Rainbow Blanket Octopus and the Spookfish

Happy Birthday Zev, thank you for letting me play!