I come bearing balloons

Something I drew for a 30th birthday card for a friend whom I have known for 25 of those years (wow that sounds like forever . . . I'm one of the youngest of my offline friends so I have a while to go but everyone around me is turning 30, eep!).

If you think it's self-absorbed for me to draw my own character on someone else's birthday card . . . perhaps you are right!  But I did have a reason other than that.  A while back, this friend was at my house and for some reason that escapes my memory, she ended up looking through my deviantART gallery, and kept saying how much she loved Lighbow (or as she called him, "your dingo cockatoo guy") and told me that she wanted a picture of him.  So it seemed only logical to make her a birthday card featuring him.

This friend also happens to work for the National Library and when I gave her the card she said it should go in the National Archives because "it's so Australian". O_o

Less flattering was when she showed it to her family with the comment "Look at this pokémon Simon made!".

Um.  No.

I guess all those years of being known as "the Nintendo nerd" have led people to assume that any fictional creature I draw must be a pokémon . . . oh well.


Anyway, as usual, the original looked a lot better than this.  I took about 10 different photos trying to capture it properly and none of them looked quite right, but I've now given the original to my friend, so I'm afraid this will have to do!



Lighbow belongs to ScurvySimon


(Really old reference sheet, please try to ignore the badness of the anatomy and such.)