Kerry and I are officially on vacation, so in our absence I present this heavy metal worshiping beaver. Part placeholder, part Illustration Friday entry – this beastie also handily represents the week's theme of heavy. However, in the din surrounding our preparations to leave, I whole-heartedly admit that I drew this some fourteen years ago, during a time when I was discovering the work of Terry Aislin and other great Canadian political cartoonists (I wish I could remember the specific artist that inspired this, but I'm spacing). More recently, I called up this beaver for heavy metal duty as the cover-rodent on an all-Canuck compilation CD I made for a friend.
See you in April!
For Illustration Friday's theme of leap, I was inspired by the squirrel: nature's finest mammalian acrobat. My street is lined by stately, century-old American elms – a literal playground for these amazing critters – and my favourite manoeuvre is the tree-to-tree leap during the frantic, noisy and much-entertaining squirrel chase. I've heard stories, ranging from the ridiculous to the comical – to the squirm-inducing – of rare moments of squirrel leap failure, but I have yet to see it with my own eyes. But if I can imagine it happening something like in this illustration, I may chuckle.
I built this piece fairly quickly, first by creating the tree and squirrel as separate silhouettes in my sketchpad. Merged in Photoshop and complemented with a simple wintertime colour scheme, I borrowed a texture photo I took of some wood grain to lend to the tree trunk. The path of the falling animal was done in Illustrator and added to the main file, and lastly the edges and snow were included using some custom PS brushes in eraser mode, cutting away at the blue background.
Photo Friday's current and far-reaching theme of art has me digging, not too far back, into the vault. Rather than displaying an sublimely abstract or bokeh-heavy piece of photography, the theme reminds me more of this literal take on the subject – a tidy vignette of a moment I caught last spring while Kerry and I were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Resting my tired feet on a bench in a hall of gigantic Jackson Pollock works, I watched this kid – huge Pollock fan, it appeared – incessantly urge his parent to take this rigid pose beside this piece. Flash off, I snuck this snapshot off without the camera-toting guardian noticing.
Left: the victorious captain's log details the moment of enemy capitulation. Top right: let the records show it was a close battle. Above right: I diplomatically signal the end of combat.Local and international news services may not have picked up this minor story, but not since 1812 had Canada and America waged such a ferocious military battle as they did for one fine hour last week. And much like the former skirmish – but with myself at the helm – I pushed back an enemy Yankee advance in a victorious engagement of GoogleChat Battleship. Led from a secret command center in the swamps of New Jersey, the once-heralded power of the U.S. Navy could not successfully penetrate the Canadian defenses. Mission accomplished, the five-colour-with-varnish banner would declare, triumphantly across the deck of my remaining destroyer – if I could afford a banner of such quality and lustre.
So, what to do in the ensuing peacetime? How about four hours of cartoons and an all-you-can-eat cereal buffet – that's what the Cinematheque was serving up this weekend. Starting off with see-it-to-believe-it episodes of Super Friends, The Amazing Chan & The Chan Clan (featuring voice-work by Jodie Foster!) and The Jackson 5ive – and heaping bowls of Honeycombs and Froot Loops (a growing-up fave, now decidedly disgusting) – the marathon continued with even hokier episodes of cartoons featuring The Partridge Family (in 2200 A.D., no less) and Rick Springfield. While there were definite duds in the mix nearer to the end as the audience's sugar high subsided, it was worth it to endure for some Scooby-Doo and the ultimate guilty pleasure: a glimpse of some He-Man.
Clockwise from top left: wearing my cartoon marathon finest; sweet sustenance!; He-Man inspires Javier Bardem's Oscar-winning haircut; Kerry at the buffet.
Top row (left to right): synchronized swatches!*; glass car on blue sky. Middle row (left to right): living-room lamp abstract; our new dinnerware is making you sleepy; the bedroom bamboo. Bottom row: me, flashing myself at night.I didn't do it cuz' it's cheap / I didn't do it for the freedom / You know what? / I did it 'cuz sugar and milk is good eatin'. – Mcenroe, "Cereal For Dinner"It's Manitoba's inaugural Louis Riel Day long weekend, Kerry and her sister are girling it up in New York and Philadelphia – and I'm reacquainting myself with the camera, having only taken a few shots with it since New Years. And all the while I've managed to squeeze in a few bachelor weekend essentials: leftover pizza for breakfast, leftover pizza for dinner, Hockey Night In Canada with a brownie and ice cream, White Stripes turned up to 11 and watching a tape of The Big Lebowski while my inner dude abides. Yessir, the February long weekend has been the greatest addition to Canadian society since universal public medicare.
(* if you get this reference, then a gold star for you.)
Pronounced like it's written, I'm assuming – that's where a recent Jeopopolis visitor hails from, in Poland.
As both a statistics and geography junkie, it never ceases to amuse me to check the hit counter doohickey I installed on this site and learn the weird things that lure visitors. Inexplicably – or until I learned of Google's purchase of Blogger – the average monthly number of visits more than doubled, beginning in December. And I mention Google because the doubling is made up near exclusively of Google image searches (a touch frightening on its own, considering all I read about image theft in illustration and design circles). More amusing to me though, is the list I keep on file of countries where visitors originate; last week, the oppressive, Internet-starved regime of Burma/Myanmar became the 115th nation to be represented by a visitor to Jeopopolis. What was the Myanmarian doing here? Image-searching on Google for pictures of "mo" (crazy Myanmarians, always wanting mo') – hitting up my illustration of a blood-sucking mosquito.
But if you told me three years ago that I'd have visitors from Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Côte d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, French Polynesia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nepal, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen and Zambia (not to mention hits counted from the Faeroe Islands, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Hong Kong and the Palistinean occupied territory) – I would have said you were pulling my chain. Not so much anymore.
Choose the blue krill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. Choose the red krill, and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
Har har. Drawn entirely in the forever-abandoned vector program Freehand – yeah, I'm still a stubborn arse when it comes to vectors – for Illustration Friday's theme of choose. Textures added in Photoshop. I'm no sci-fi geek, but I couldn't resist this reference. Click here for a bigger view, if'n that's your thing.
One thing that the stubble I let accumulate on my face any given weekend has going for itself is that it can make me look awfully decrepit. Pieced together with bedhead and my frumpy faded green hoodie – the most comfortable item of clothing, ever – and I may not be much of a specimen. That was part of the inspiration behind this impromptu diptych. The remainder comes from Kerry's avid – and growing – fascination with the boxing-related workout she attends more and more each week (so much so that she invested in this pair of extremely cool Green Hill gloves). So this past weekend, when the winter afternoon light was screaming just so through our living-room window, we posed for each other in order for me to craft this slightly-Photoshopped scenario.
Both photos underwent some post-production, primarily with the burn tool to eliminate background information (not hard, considering the focused power of the sunlight). My own portrait features added treatment, in the form of missing teeth and a slight shiner ("gross", Kerry winced, when she saw the end product on screen). Though no physical harm was inflicted in the making of this diptych, I cannot stress enough how similar the end result would be after an actual tilt in the ring.
Better looks at the portraits can be had here, and here.
I'm foregoing the task of just meeting Illustration Friday's weekly challenge and tripling the effort to include merits that meet the Sugar Frosted Goodness current theme of hats, IF's own theme of tales and legends ... and a hilarious Flickr drawing group dedicated to – of all things – bears in ill-fitting hats. This troika developed into what you see here, and while the sketch's suitability for Flickr and SFG is clear, for Illustration Friday it's perhaps less so. But there is a certain leniancy to IF's theme this week that allows for some interpretation, so read on.So how does a grizzly bear come across a papal hat? The answer to that might not be black-and-white, but this concept is loosely based on a legend widely used in the realm of sarcasm – that of the Pope s**tting in the woods. The Urban Dictionary defines "does the Pope s**t in the woods?" as follows: a sarcastic answer to a question with an obvious answer of "yes", or "duh", taken as a combination of the similarly-intended "does a bear s**t in the woods?" and "is the Pope Catholic?" – also phrased in the form of "is a bear Catholic?"
As such, my grizzly bear is clearly Catholic.This bear was based from a photograph searched for on Flickr, a great source of reference material (the hat itself I found in Google image search). Most of this piece was sketched with my thinnest pen, a Pigma Micron 005, using thicker nibs to hash out any edges. Selective colouring was intentional here; I was aiming for a piece much more sketchy than normal, and didn’t want the use of colour to overpower the time I spent with my sketchbook and pens (click here for a larger view of the sketch-work).
Disclaimer! Before you read any further, I must stress that you click here for a larger view of the full image.
Illustration Friday's theme of plain can be taken a number of ways. I selected the word as a noun, as in, where I live, I am surrounded by the boring, flat, boring and flat plain. You will not find a flatter patch of land in the country than what you see in southeastern Manitoba. For the love of prunecake, even Saskatchewan – for all the ribbing it takes – is hillier, more roly-poly than my home turf.
It is worse in the winter – all this flatness means there's no place to hide when the elements take over. And that's where my illustration comes in, pulling double duty (which I will explain in a moment). For Illustration Friday, this poor chap on the prairies represents the standard Manitoban in winter: despondent, bundled to the nines, shielding his eyes from the glare like a polar explorer, watching o'er the expanse of plain.
And for the Sugar Frosted Goodness! Blank Book Project, a traveling sketchbook a third of the way through its global adventure, this sketch represents my entry. Themed Where I Live, the SFG!BBP showed up in Winnipeg by means of Montréal and the eastern seaboard to myself and fellow SFG! contributor Allan Lorde (who graciously allowed me some page space after I wasn't able to land a spot in the book's 50-member initial sign-up).
Left: Kerry strikes the pose that would help me flesh out the drawing (actually photographed indoors). Right: I pose with the amazing SFG! Blank Book, nestled in its wooden carrying case.
