Hunting the wild engine block?

It had a perfectly fair chance. She has only a single shot rifle, and it was a four-banger.

real cute and attractive with its simplicity, of course

I think I've been there... That engine block in the grass looks familiar. ^-^ Oh wait, that was my back yard.

You live in Arkansa?

Seriously, even in Toronto there were wild patches in our numerous river ravines where people dumped the damdest things -- old car chasses, garden furniture, mattresses. Finding an abandoned oil barrel that had been used to burn junk was too commonplace to mention, and even collapsed sheds were barely worth a word. For a kid under 12, it was paradise!

Hehe. No, 1890s cabin on a 1850s farm in Santa Cruz. It was still some working farm elements even in the sixties when part of it got turned into a little commune. And even in this century several of the neighbors keep horses, chickens and goats.

Nothing in Toronto is as old as 1850, or if it is then it has a historical plaque on it. None of the rubbish found in ravines and fields in the 1960s was likely to have been older than 1930 or 1940. It may have only been as little as ten years old.

Strangely enough, I recall at least two farms within Toronto city limits back around 1970. One was a strange field in a steep valley. I never did figure out whether some creek flowed in and where it flowed out, as it must have. It was no meteor crater. Whoever owned the property kept goats on it. A couple of years later, when I was living in another corner of the city, I came across a recently abandoned farm. It hadn't been overgrown with bushes and saplings, just ankle-high weeds, so the land couldn't have been empty for very long. It had probably been bought by developers, and today it's choked with a different kind of overgrowth -- condos and office towers. It was just odd to find so much empty space with miles of urban growth all around it. Mind you, neither property was even close to the center of the city -- both were near the margins.

It was the oldest house I'd ever lived in, and oldest city - Santa Cruz was settled by the Spanish monks three hundred some years ago. Heck, the bay's salmon run was fished out - destroyed utterly - in the 1860s. Evidence for the impact of humans on nature is very much alive in California. And yet, much like up there, lots of empty space.

But all of it has been stepped upon at some point.

LA was originally a small Spanish mission, but the city as we know it isn't very old. The first settlers arrive in the 1750s, I believe... about the same time white settlers began to trickle into the Toronto area from farther east. By 1800 there was a small town in both places, that began to grow rapidly in the second half of the 19th. century, and became large cities only after World War I. Our histories begin to depart, at that point. Toronto was surrounded by tiny hamlets and few small towns. The towns grew slowly, and were too far from Toronto to merge. LA seemed to be one of a number of towns that were almost the same size, and all were growing, so that by the 1940s they began to merge into one big mess... Toronto grew more slowly at that point, didn't go through the same scale of post-WWII growth that LA did, and only began to merge with surrounding municipalities late. But Toronto is better organized because of it. The Greater LA Area is still a patchwork of medium sized cities masquerading as one huge metropolis.

By contrast, the southern part of California was more heavily populated by Hispanic-Americans and a number of towns of respectable size grew quite early.

Yeah, LA didn't grow big until water from the big projects started rolling in. Us up by San Francisco have annual rainfall; half the year no rain, the other half the year rain.

The Bay Area was heavily populated after the rush in the 1850s and had already a huge collection of missions from the prior century. Much of the area is very young, but up against the water it's mostly older settlements. The San Diego area was similar: A large easily cultivated land next to a naturally protected bay.

It almost makes you wonder why LA is the monster metropolis that it is, while San Diego and San Francisco are secondary, since both those cities are better natural sites by far. I guess it was the very conditions that make LA almost the last place you'd want to put a huge city that created the monster. All that dry heat and sun was great if you were shooting movies are testing aircraft. And since the land wasn't worth much, you could parcel it into suburban tracts and sell homes for next to nothing at one time. All it took for LA to take off was the one thing it didn't really have -- water. Once water was stolen from other parts of the state, using money taxed from people in other parts of the state, LA blossomed. LA is one of the poster boys of Free Enterprise and the Free Market, as practiced in the US -- State interference has always been the real force at work, behind the scenes.

It's cheaper to build on flat, and LA has ... had tons of it.

Also true... though flatness is relatively uncommon only on the West Coast. Plenty of it in Nebraska and Eastern Texas.

Sis on the prowl. Excellent sketch, Taral.

Looking into the sky using a muzzle loading rifle. She must be one damn good shot

Maybe the rest of that 1919 Flivver is falling on her?

Is that inked picture? It looks to me very close to pencil drawing, what kind of inking you using? Sorry for asking I always curious about techniques artist use cause myselft I'm purely self-educated, and continue trying to improve myself. I read books (very highly unavailable here) and love those viedeos which show how drawing was made in attempts to pick uf useful bits of nowledge

It is only pencil. What I've learned to do is use Photoshop to increase the brightness by a couple of points -- to eliminate as many smudges and erasures as I can. Then I raise the contrast by a whole lot, up to 80 or 90% in some cases. That creates a pretty black line. But I have to use the white paint brush or erasure tool to remove all the hundreds of spots and grey blur that's inevitably left. Takes as long to fix a scan as it does to draw the art!

Another trick you might find useful, since you seem to like drawing skunks, is to use the select tool for the parts of the body that are supposed to be black. If you have cross-hatched the black areas, as I usually do in a sketch, its a good idea to spray them over until the lines are just grey. You could paint them out entirely, or just paint the area flat black. But I like to keep some of the sketchy quality. Once I've made the cross-hatching grey, I spray it black, but only until its dark grey. Some of the sketchy lines should still show. If you look at some of the other skunks I've done, you'll see what I'm talking about.

Oh, thanks for explaining ^.^

Might be more worried about rain coming and putting out the fire under her still. The old engine parts are likely from a long ago episode with a posse of rev'noors.