I rarely go to see movies I know very little about. I can't help it. I peruse the Internet Movie Database pretty much daily. Check out Apple's movie trailer site. I pick up Premiere at the bookstore and just generally hear about stuff.
But my buddy Dwight and I checked out Kung Fu Hustle yesterday afternoon. I only knew it was touted as being bizarre, funny and original. I heard comparisons to the Roadrunner and Coyote or The Three Stooges, mixed in with classic kung fu fare. And that it was very, very fun.
Which it was. I cannot remember the last movie that left my mouth open the entire time. This is a movie that Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) could've made. Stellar effects. Consistently outrageous. Silly and fun. The only thing I can compare it to (as I told Dwight) is The Story Of Ricky – a similar, yet unintentionally hilarious, kung fu flick with an Evil Dead budget (although hard to find). I highly recommend both movies for anyone looking to reconnect with their inner six-year-old. Righteous!
My last Illustration Friday submission took fifteen minutes to draw. This one took about five hours from start to finish.The week's theme – daring – gave me an idea almost right away. I wanted to draw a small, shy girl at a Spin The Bottle party, staring down the barrel of a two-litre Coke bottle with a tight gaggle of pointy-fingered, taunting kids hunched behind it. But I couldn't really make it work without reference, and even though Kerry volunteered to pose for me, I came up with a second concept instead – featuring this daring little man (above).I sketched this illustration out in pencil pretty much as it's shown above, only at first the fella was facing the goons, back to the viewer with two clenched fists. Once I was confident about it, I added the pen work. I scanned it and added colours and texturing in Photoshop, using overlays of close-up photos of rusted metal I took at a Newfoundland shipwreck site in 2002. Skin tones use the same overlays with inverting and hue shifts. You can click on the thumbnail image (right) for a closer view.And most importantly: it was a ton of fun to do.
I didn't think I would have the time to post an Illustration Friday submission this week. But I just finished prepping my HOWieZine pages. So lookit me now! This is what I imagined Illustration Friday was built on in the first place. Doodles. I peruse the submissions and I'm always wowed by the craft, the time commitment – and sometimes even the complexity – of folks' work. That's why I always dig my man Allan Lorde's stuff. It's simple. It conveys the message. It's fun. And now go do something else. That's what I did this week, in drawing this doodle right in my grid-paper work notes. It's my interpretation of the word reinvent, this week's theme. And it took all of fifteen minutes. I've heard there are finches on the Galapagos Islands that have actually learned to use 'tools' to find food. Some use twigs to extract hard-to-get seeds or to tip eggs out of other birds' nests. So here's this guy, basically taking that concept one step further. It's reinventing the finch, baby.
After two arduous, seven-day white-knuckle weeks, Kerry and I found a house. Yes, it had been an exhausting and sometimes brutal ordeal but we finally – finally – have our place. A house. H-O-U-S-E. In Snoop: A hizz-ouse in tha hizz-ouse.
Two weeks. Never in a lentillion years would we have ever imagined it over that quickly. I expected weeks and weeks – months, maybe – of ups and downs and downs and downs. We always considered the odds were equal that it could happen in April just as easily as it could in September. Or next year. But neither of us were prepared for it to actually happen.
Item! Our house – in the middle of the street – is at 157 Lenore Street (above, not the greatest quality image, but it's all I've got for now). It was built in 1911. It has two stories with a tiny, single-room third floor and a front screened-in verandah. It has a parlor with a gas fireplace. A bathroom with two sinks – for teeth-brushing races (I dunno?). A yard. Two yards. I haven't had a yard for eleven years. Do people still have yards? I know there was a trend towards artificial turf in the early 90s. I think ours is natural.
My friend Stacey, a recent house-purchaser herself, asked me the other day if I had the "Oh Shit" feeling. And it's true. All week Kerry and I have slept poorly, ate crappily and have spent a great deal of time staring at each other.
But today is beautiful and sunny. I wrapped up the deadline-heavy spring issue of my magazine. And I'm about to become a homeowner. I've officially turned the "Oh Shit" feeling into a "Holy Shit" one.
We get to go inside – to live – in July.
So that calls for some props. Let the congratulations rain down!
I'm off to dedicate the next few chunks of my time to a project I signed on to with about 50 other members of HOW magazine's online forums: The HOWieZine. The HOWieZine operates much like Illustration Friday, only it's more like Illustration OnceInAWhile. Contributors pick a theme (this issue is black and white), build two pages dealing with their interpretation of the theme, print as many copies as there are contributors, mail them to one super-dedicated soul who volunteers to craft them into books and then mails out said books – made up of everyone's submissions – back to all who took part. So while I go about crafting my HOWieZine contribution, I dug deep into the JeopeVault and pulled this drawing to represent this week's Illustration Friday theme – the word travel. This sketch is from a book Kerry and I made for her niece and nephew one Christmas. Kerry wrote the story, I drew the pictures. It was an awesome collaboration. It's still one of the favourite things I've ever made. So...Merry Christmas!
Does anyone remember on Jeopardy! when they'd have that random column labeled 'potpourri'? That's what this is.
1) Someday I'd like a digital camera. To wit: about one week into my blog career, I took this photograph (right) from my kitchen window. It's a female mid-sized falcon called a merlin (Falco columbarius), with a dead sparrow in its talons. And I remembered at the time thinking, this will be cool on my blog. And then it took three months to finish the roll of film.
2) I don't want to jinx it, but I think the seasons are changing. I won't even mention the word in full, but perhaps – perhaps – spr*ng is here. It's seven degrees here. I'm not sure what that is in fahrenheit, maybe twenty knots. The geese are back at the marsh, and this morning Squeaky – the headache-inducing ground squirrel that hangs around outside my office window – popped up.
3) I stopped writing movie reviews for awhile because they make me think too hard. But for the record, we recently saw Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education. I thought it was a nice change from his recent string of estrogen-heavy films, and it satisfied Kerry's hunk fix with a healthy dosage of Gael García Bernal. We also watched a total Venus-and-Mars double bill featuring Steve Martin's The Jerk ("He hates these cans! Stay away from the cans!"), matched nicely with a Sylvia Plath biopic bringdown, appropriately called Sylvia. This Saturday we're checking out the 2004 Cannes Advertising Film Festival, a 90-minute extravaganza of last year's best commercials from around the world. It's an annual spr*ng ritual for me. My mom took me with her to see them in 1984 and I've been going ever since.
4) My lemons are up. See them again for the first time – here.
5) And the biggie: We are now officially house-hunters. Kerry and I met with our real estate agent Wednesday night and will check out our first potential pads on Sunday. There's nothing like bandying about the prospect of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars – and decades of my life – to make me feel my age. The market here is nuts, but our agent comes highly recommended, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Wish us luck.
Based on this week's Illustration Friday theme – crowded – I made this photo illustration of Kerry busy in the kitchen on Easter Sunday. I feel a bit guilty about even posting it to Illustration Friday, on account of doing no actual drawing. But I conjured up the concept in my head, performed the photo shoot atop our barstool chair (three more Kerrys didn't make the final cut) and set to work piecing it all together in Photoshop. I'm pretty proud of the way it turned out. And Kerry really likes the shirt she wore, so everybody wins.
I finally finished something in time to submit for Illustration Friday (it helps that they extended their deadlines to include weekends). This week's Illustration Friday theme was the word bloom, in honour of spring I suppose – which has arrived practically everyplace but Winnipeg. So to honour my hometown and its hardy denizens, I've created this number. It's the 'blooming' of a Winnipeg man – inspired by an old illustration of human evolution from National Geographic. This picture features a combination of pen sketches (for the clothes), mangled photocopies of the magazine illustrations and Photoshop work.
One of my childhood fascinations was maps. I loved atlases. Road maps. Park maps (like this one). Topographical maps. Maps from National Geographic. Those 3D relief maps at museums and interpretive centres. Even now, give me a map and I'll read it like a book. And like any other printed medium, there are well-designed and poorly-designed maps, the good (like the classic London Underground map) and the ugly (like a lot of state highway maps).
As a kid, I would draw my own maps. Usually they were highway maps of imaginary states or provinces. I would scan the atlas, newspapers, sports pages and my own collection of maps for names of towns, rivers and parks for my creations. And they would be inspired by actual geography; some of the larger ones – drawn over weeks on 3X5 sheets of paper with pencil, pens and various Crayola™ markers – look awfully similar to places like Manitoba, Hawaii and Chesapeake Bay. Once in college I tried again to see if I could still pull it off, and drew a map of a made-up province based on the park outside my apartment. The playground became a city. Snowbanks at the north end became a mountain range. And the skating rink was transformed into a large inland lake. I used it as part of my entrance portfolio to get into Red River College's graphic design program.
These islands are based on clothes scattered on the bedroom floor. The island at far left is a short-sleeved shirt. The main one is a pair of pants (still recognizable if you look close), underwear and a hoodie. There's a pair of socks off the southern coast. Place names were taken from Manitoba's highway map. I sketched the outline of the clothes and rendered the tabloid-sized map in FreeHand. Topography was then added in Photoshop from a scan of crumpled paper.
