Texas Blind Salamander

T

By Alex Lahr

The first thing I ever drew as a kid was probably a reptile or amphibian. My first artistic inspiration came from pictures in animal books and I subsequently spent my entire childhood filling sketchbooks with images of creatures both real and imaginary. The Texas Blind Salamander is real, but it's not too difficult to imagine it wiggling around on some alien landscape or swimming through the pages of a fantastical picture book. It's a perfect distillation of what led me to draw in the first place— the ability to combine the expected and unexpected in an unlikely place.