Always be yourself. Unless you can be a Muppet.

In the ongoing journey of coming home to myself, I recently decided to leave my almost-full-time payroll position in order to pursue writing more full time. There have been some positive steps in that direction, but a girl's still gotta pay the bills, so there's a lot of other stuff still happening.

But that's not what this post is about. This post is about my love language of art-making, my love of the Muppets, and my deploying both of those loves on my now former-colleagues.

At the staff meeting each week, this team does a little relationship-before-task question activity. Several months ago, it became clear that many of us (including me!) are quite taken with the Muppets. When I made the decision to leave the staff (I'm still supporting the team freelance -- at least until my successor is hied), knowing I wanted to make a little something for each of my colleagues, it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that I was going to be drawing each of them as a Muppet.

I told the team of my plan so that they could provide me with photos they liked. Some, had specific requests -- this one always wanted to be Red Fraggle. That one really wanted to be Janice. I took their photos and headshots and ran them through my Muppefication machine, and at my goodbye lunch I was able to hand each of them a little sharpie portrait of themself as a felt creation.

Since it is time for an illustration here on Hot Flash of Genius, I thought maybe these little characters would be a nice way to share with you a bit of what's going on with me while sharing some of my work.