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Submitted: May 14, 2005
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Eland and the Vegetable Lambby `ursulav

Anthro / Traditional Media / Painting & Airbrushing

Nothing terribly exciting here--I just wanted to draw Eland the antelope again, and since I was thinking of him as a wandering ancient scholar like Pliny or Herodotus, the Vegetable Lamb was a natural.

Allow me to explain.

Once upon a time, people believed in the vegetable lamb.* Growing out of the ground on a stalk through the belly, the vegetable lamb was half-plant, half-animal, a sheep tethered by the stalk to its root system underground. Depending on the version of the story, once the animal had grazed everything it could reach, it either starved to death and went to seed, or it broke the stalk and went bounding across the landscape, kicking up its leafy little heels.

The vegetable lamb was believed to live in someplace far enough off that nobody could check the story easily, but not completely mythical--i.e. usually the less civilized bits of China. The Tartars got used to the sight of the more adventurous European scholars wandering around asking which way to the vegetable lambs, and they eventually realized that killing tourists was fun, but selling them crappy souvenirs was where the REAL money was, so a cottage industry sprang up in carving fake vegetable lambs. Some of these were pretty impressive in their own right, and a few can still be found in museums.

Obviously--normally I wouldn't bother to say it, but it's the internet, and You Never Know--the vegetable lamb does not really exist, and we don't really know who cooked up the story in the first place, but it's a neat idea. So I had Eland interview one.

Edit: Whoops! Forgot to mention that it's thought that the vegetable lamb first originated from people encountering raw cotton, a wooly but obviously vegetable substance and trying to explain it...

Original is for sale! It's 14 x 10 or so, mixed media on illo board, send a note for price info. Prints are available for $10 plus shipping, again, send a note to set that up.

*No, really, they did. I'm not making this up. As recently as the 1700s, people were still writing about the vegetable lamb.

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~YuiHime Oct 10, 2012

The funny thing is wandering through your gallery and finding this art about two years after the Pokemon franchise created a Vegetable Lamb of Tartary Pokemon (Whimsicott), and everyone treated it like it was some creative thing they just invented even though you did the research on this five years before it happened.