This was started last year, as the Plague was kicking in. This is about Ostara, the Goddess of Spring from Germanic folklore. She’s associated with the Equinox of course, that being astronomically the start of Spring (It’s the Vernal Equinox). In Australia, it’s the start of Autumn, because of course they’re all walking around upside-down. There’s a whole thing about a little bird freezing & starving in the winter cold because she (or he) (or they) had been abandoned & forgotten by Ostara, who’d gone out to do a little shopping or something, but she remembered & came back just in time to revive the little bird & make it warm again & make flowers grow & trees blossom & things to be generally nicer, except in Australia. The little bird was so happy & grateful, it went flying around singing songs about how wonderful & beautiful Ostara was, so Ostara turned the bird into a hare (which is not a rabbit; a cottontail is a rabbit, a jackrabbit is a hare), well, it was a power Ostara had, it seemed like a good idea at the time. This hare, having been a bird, could still lay eggs (so it was a girl), so it did that, & hid them around the place & told all the children to go find them because… Ostara. (In some Pagan ceremonies celebrants hold up fresh eggs at some point & break them in their hands; a virgin sacrifice ((got that from Larry Todd)) ) So that is (allegedly) where the “Easter Bunny” came from. This was all being done for hundreds maybe thousands of years before the Christians came in & stuck their holiday of the dying Jew onto this one & tried to make it about resurrection & the Patriarchy & shit.

Anyway, this is Larry trying to figure out how to drive gouache paints, opaque watercolor used by many illustrators. Larry’s painting medium is One Shot sign painting enamels, from many years of painting carnival ride fronts. Mixed results; it’s practice, he’ll get better. But he still won’t make the deadline.