The Origins of Animelds
how it all came about...

One day a word just popped into my head: Angelope. If you just take one letter in Antelope, and change it, it has Angel in it. And a great little image popped into existence in my big black book, along with an insatiable urge to find more of these... things. I immediately started soliciting those around me for ideas, and, in several sessions, quite a collection emerged.

Technically I was looking for instances where you could just change one letter in an animal name and have the name of an object contained within it (these are marked with an *). While trying to brainstorm, however, we found that other great combinations came up that didn't follow the "rule," but were just too good not to doodle up. In some cases a two-letter change or addition had to be made (marked with a #). In some cases there was just out-and-out merging of the words to form something great.

Now all I needed was to figure out what to call them. After more group brainstorming, I settled on Animelds

I continue to welcome suggestions to this collection, so send them along! I would prefer that they be animals melded with objects (not adjectives or concepts) and that they be an animal I haven't already done yet, combined with an object I haven't already done yet. But hey, if it's neat, send it along anyway, and if it sparks my visual inspiration, you may very well find it added to this page (with attribution, of course).

Animeld gallery 1, gallery 2, gallery 3, current