100 Palettes Challenge // Palette #17 // Keep Austin Weird by @3ofpents

Today's palette comes from a British army recruitment poster printed in 1916. We're pretty deep into World War I at this point, so there's been a lot of war-adjacent posters.

We continue my impromptu series of vaguely threatening travel posters with my partner's homestate, Texas. Specifically the city of Austin, a place very near and dear to their heart.

Now, there's not really a cryptid specific to Austin. But in my hunt for one, I stumbled across a couple of reported sightings of a "winged humanoid". It's exactly what it sounds like: A creature that appears to have the body of a human with giant wings. I think the key thing that differentiates them from your everyday angel is that the wings are reportedly bat- or dragon-like. I couldn't find more than a handful of sites mentioning a variation of the same two reports, but I couldn't resist it.

Why? Because it fit in perfect with what I really wanted to feature in this poster: Congress Bridge.

For those who don't know, Congress Bridge in Austin, TX is home to a huge colony of somewhere between 500,000 to 1.5 million bats. One of THE things to do when you're in Austin is to visit the bridge around sunset to watch the massive flocks of bats emerging from underneath the bridge. I sadly didn't get to see it the one time I was in Austin, but you can find hundreds of photos around the internet. It's so very cool and, as far as I'm aware, something really unique to Austin. I really hope that next time I'm there I get to see it.

I drew.

SO MANY BATS for this before I started finally copy/pasting.