Teacup Pig as Angel with a Kamehameha Shotgun

Not just an imaginary interdimensional porcine mini angel carrying a firearm....

There's potentially a lot to explain here, but rest assured, this picture was a very specific request cooked up by my sons last night. The short version of the story is that this image represents the confluence of multiple things that my sons are thinking about:

They are still very much interested in listening to The Cab's song "Angel with a Shotgun," which is appealing because it is the soundtrack to a fan made "Attack on Titan" video (over 500,00 views with commentary written in Thai) and also evokes Doctor Who's Weeping Angels for them. And of course, there is the repeated reference to a weapon in a catchy song, so that's appealing right there.... (There was a previous "Angel With a Squirt Gun" napkin from 2014 that hashed over these topics if you really think you might want to read more.)

Teacup pigs are a sore topic this week, because, as mentioned in our previous post, we will not be adopting a soon-to-be-immense micromini-pig any time soon...despite our younger son's overwhelming need for one.

This minipig is not only armed with just any shotgun. It is shooting a "Kamehameha Wave."  And what is that? you may wonder.  I had been wondering myself for a while about the yelling of "CAH-ME YAH-ME YAH!!!!" that was going on in our apartment. I have to admit that I might have been remaining intentionally ignorant of the finer points of the Japanese anime TV show "Dragonball Z."  I suppose that I have been fortunate that my sons have never consistently watched it, as I find the histrionic tone very hard to appreciate...or even tune out.

But now we have a Dragonball Z video game and I can remain ignorant no longer.  Apparently heroes of the series are able to gather and shoot energy from their bodies... akin to the "Force Push" or "Force Lightning" in the Star Wars universe, or the "Fus Roh Dah!" of Skyrim. This particular sort of energy blast is named for the Hawaiian Kamehameah line of kings. I am not sure why, and unfortunately, do not have any further time to sort this out.

I will add that I had not made the connection previously between the shouting that my kids were doing and the Hawaiian royalty, because, as I now discover thanks to the magic of the internet, I had been pronouncing "Kamehameha" wrong for decades.

Yet another educational napkin...for me, anyway.

Land Shark Vs. Space Pig

How to make a big mess over a long weekend:

One of the many joys of having two kids in two schools is that their time off does not always line up.  The younger one was at home today, both are off on Monday, and the older one is home on Tuesday.
Foolishly, I thought this would be a good time to start a project we've been talking about- making some cardboard and plaster sculptures of the characters for that web comic which we still haven't written yet. I thought maybe I could work with each child alone, as joint time in my studio tends to devolve into a play-fighting brawl. Each kid picked his favorite- Space Pig for the younger and the Land Shark for the older.

I tried to put the two characters together in a nondescript space on this napkin without much success.  My younger son told me that I had made the pig look scary and weird. The older son pointed out that I neglected to include the flaming chainsaws that the shark requires.

We did manage a little work on the sculpture today... It quickly became clear that my son was mostly interested in weapon design...and maybe this weapon he's building will be so cool that he cannot bear to see it plastered onto a pig sculpture and will have to keep it for himself... 

In the bottom picture, you can see that I made very little progress on Space Pig.  We spent a lot of time debating which way his joints should bend- whether they should be porcine-accurate or humanoid.