Loki’s Journey – A Rabbit’s Map

This is the third mapping experiment I have done for my research. I decided it would be interesting to map a living creature and how it behaves. So, with the help of a good friend, I took my rabbit Loki out of his hutch, put on his harness, and allowed him to run around the garden.

As my friend ran around the garden with him, following where he wanted to go, I observed and mapped out where he went. The dots represent spots where he stopped, and I labelled some of the ones where he did something other than just standing. It was interesting to note that some areas he actually designated for particular activities, such as digging, sleeping and grooming. The activity took us about an hour. He had a particularly fun time playing in the garden at the top left corner of the map, so we stayed there for quite a while. Funny how rabbits spend more time playing than sleeping.

I’ve labelled particular landmarks in my garden to give you a rough idea of where everything is. This is a pretty simple map, as I needed to be quick to keep up with Loki’s antics. He’s rather energetic for a bunny!

My inspiration for this map was animal tracking. I have a thorough love and interest in animals, and tracking their patterns is one of the most intriguing things ever. Animal tracking, and the maps made from those tracks, is an important social/biological experiment in order to keep track of animal populations in the wild and where they move to. I wanted to try and recreate this in my map, thinking about whether wild rabbits share the same traits as my domesticated rabbit has.

Shade

I know this is unrelated to my course, but I wanted to give you an insight to my usual art style.

This is Shade – one of a collection of characters that I use for my own artistic purposes. Shade is a ghost fox. She has a rather deep background, which I won;t bother going into because a) it has nothing to do with this course and b) you’re probably not interested anyway.

Regardless of that, Shade is a character that I closely associate myself with, and she makes appearances on my paper quite frequently, I like to imagine that she’s my little spirit guide, following me around and giving me direction. Funnily enough, she usually only makes her appearance when I am feeling down…but when she does appear, she seems to take all my anxiety away with the lead of my pencil. As such, any piece that I draw of her tends to be quite emotional.

This piece is the second artwork in my journal. A simple drawing, but I think it’s quite pretty nonetheless.