The Happy World of Hoodleoos

About Hoodleoos

What is a hoodleoo? It is some relation of the Columbidae family of pigeons and doves, with all of the practical questions about how their wings work like human fingers, what would the purpose of tail feathers be, etc. neatly side-stepped. They’re cute, distant relations of Columbidae with a hobbit-like disposition, that’s good enough. Though they are the adorable, rotund stars of this world, it is the world that they live in, sustain, and maintain, that has really fired my imagination. Emphasis on leisure, conversation, public transportation, community, sharing, recreational art-marking, accessibility, and unbridled joy have fueled my creations in these drawings, with a number of deeply personal drawings taken from family memories, as well as little jokes paying tribute some of my favorite works of art and locations. The use of bubbles: speech bubbles, thought bubbles, electronic transmission bubbles has been key in these drawings, presenting more than one enclosed picture in a single image. This has struck me as being true to how we live on a daily basis, split between perceptions of our immediate surroundings, and (often equally vivid) imaginings of other places, times, situations, concepts. We think about our future plans, we talk to people about our past plans and what we were thinking about saying in the future which we are currently experiencing. The use of pictures as objects within some of these drawings is an extension of this, as vivid as a thought, but viewable by all. While I do use text in many of these, as much as possible I hope that it is incidental to understanding the story or scenario that unfolds. If some of the illustrations have a puzzling element, I hope that the cuteness of this world’s inhabitants encourages engaging with the stories, to figure out what these busy but unhurried birds are up to!

About These Drawings

I began drawing these hoodleoos around the middle of December 2021, and have been steadily producing illustrations since. I will be updating this website with new images every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with an image from any point in my creative journey, and this will go on until I stop, I suppose. The order of illustrations is completely random from my (as of November 2022) collection of nearly 200 images. As I create more, they will be added to the end of the queue, also with some randomization.

About My Approach

My approach to these illustrations is bound up with my materials. These illustrations are all hand-drawn and colored using (with few exceptions) various weights of drawing, multi-media, and watercolor paper (Strathmore, Grumbacher, Canson) and Tombow Dual-Brush water-based brush pens. The color schemes of different illustrations play with the various parameters of these water-brush pens. For instance, in numerous illustrations I only employed brush pens that have a single common number as in their 3-character color code. For some illustrations I employed brush pens grouped into a single color family or combinations of color families designated by the manufacturer. For some illustrations, I have randomly selected between 9 and 10 brush pens. Different personal codes designate these different approaches. Here are some of them which you might see with various illustrations:

• TCLS([color]) - Tombow Color Limited Selection, an approach to color selection not based in the manufacturer-designated codes or color-categories using a limited selection of colors, either singly or in combination.
• TCS[###] - Tombow Color Series (Example: TCSXX6), the Xs and numbers refer to the number of the 3-character color code that is the point of commonality for the colors employed in the illustration.
• TCSComp[#]([color]/[color]) - Tombow Color Series Complimentary, the number refers to the series of complementaries the parentheses refer to the color families involved, such as Blue and Violet.
• TCRS(X#) - Tombow Color Random Selection, made using 9 or 10 randomly selected brush pens (that exclude previous selections). The letter refers to a single selection series, the number refers to the number within the selection series (Example. TCRSA2, the second random selection in the first selection series).
• TCSS([color]) - Tombow Color Superspectrum Series, employs colors from all 3 related parts of the manufacturer-designated color family (ex. Red: Violet-Red, Red, Yellow-Red)

Origins

This entire, ongoing project exists thanks to my wonderful husband Douglas Johnson. At the key moments of in the origin story of this Happy World of Hoodleoos, Doug has planted the grain of an idea (a millet grain probably) which has brought a flock of ideas swarming and pecking around it. It started in the early spring of 2020. Doug brought home a plastic bird feeder to hopefully bring a little life to the balcony that I was spending more time looking out over than ever previously. I was skeptical that it would have many customers, considering my balcony is on the 16th floor of my building. There are few times I have been happier to be proven wrong. Finches, grosbeaks, and (most importantly) mourning doves have, since that day, made a daily commute to my balcony to feast on sunflower chips, millet, suet, and plenty of other tasty morsels. Hours of entertainment for me! After a while I began to call the big mourning doves that came bustling and bonking around my balcony the nickname “hoodleoos” after the various sounds they make when flying or calling to each other. They are my (albeit messy) friends, and we’ve tried to make as hospitable and nutritious a place for these city-dwelling scrapper birds as possible. Doug’s next pivotal contribution was the literal shower thought that launched the proverbial thousand ships. During one of the few family visits in the post-vaccine era, I was idly wondering how our balcony birds were faring without us (would the feeders last through the trip?) when Doug drew a stout dove in profile with his finger in the steamed glass of our hotel shower. I was enraptured! HOODLEOODLEOO! It was perfect, hilarious, adorable. The shower glass was streaked in steam hoodleoo cartoons by the end of the trip. My imagination was fired with these adorable little Busytown-like creatures. As my work has been virtual but Doug’s remains hands-on, I had taken to writing out my daily schedule on a sheet of paper for Doug, to which I began to add little Hoodleoo-doodles; sometimes one in a particular costume (like Huck Finn or as a three-piece suit businessman), sometimes in a little scenario (like birdwatching or conducting a vocal group). As my drawings became more elaborate (and therefore, fundamentally, sillier), Doug once again stepped in to provide the materials for the drawings you will find on this site: the Tombow water-based markers and various drawing and mixed media papers were his own excellent curations. The 2021 end-of-year winter holidays, when the Omicron variant yet again drove us all into our own bubbles again was when these drawings really took off. These happy, loving, eager, enthusiastic hoodleoos are something of my own wish-fulfillment for a better, kinder world, made from my far-seeing vantage in the sky. Thank you, Doug, for being the wind beneath the wings of my wonderful, big, bonking hoodleoos.

Bonk??

“the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left”

-Umberto Eco (“Postscript to the Name of the Rose”)

Along with some of doves’ favorite foods -millet & sunflower chips- you’ll see the word “BONK” a lot here, whether freestanding or in a pun on another word. What’s the deal? It’s a word I’ve adapted to mean many things, possibly most anything! Here are some of the ways that I use it:

• To describe the motion of pigeons and doves walking, bobbing their head forward as their legs move backward: bonk bonk bonk!
• To describe the health and strength of particularly big, round birds (e.g. “that bird is big and bonking!”)
• To onomatopoetically describe the visual impact of suddenly seeing a particularly big, round bird (“bonk!”)

In the world of the hoodleoos, Bonk is a positive thing. It’s displayed on signage, shirts, incorporated into names of people, places, and things. It is an aspiration of birds to get big and bonkin’, and to happily bonk around with their world! Bonk is the bird pursuit of happiness (and millet).

Exhibitions

• "Hello, BIRDS" - Area 405, Baltimore Maryland, April 8-May 7, 2023 in conjunction with Stillpointe Theatre's production of "Nevermore"

• "The Happy World of Hoodleoos" - Mixers, Baltimore Maryland, April 2025