I love Illustration Friday's current theme of clique, in my mind one of their most creative keywords in weeks. Originally I was going to try and draw a caricature of my Grade 10 class photo – all gawky mullet and seven-hair moustache, a look that successfully shunned any and all area high school cliques – but an evening on the couch with Kerry, watching Flight of the Conchords, changed all that. My feet were on her lap, she was tugging on my big toe, and I realized how much of an oddball that fellow is (and by extension, how clique-y the remaining toes are). This image above (but with toes) popped into my head. But toes aren't quite as expressive as fingers (and in my case, hardly photogenic), so I opted for a hand instead. And from there – as you can see – it was an amazingly simple concept to produce. The only special skill involved was matching up my facial pen doodles to the original hand photo.
You can click here, for a slightly larger view.
Kerry and myself, a 25-second exposure and the absolute last shred of daylight on the pier in Whytewold, escaping the bugs on the Labour Day weekend.
The rain – and the mosquitoes – were (and still are) torrential. Success in our thicket of (mostly) solid green tomatoes are now at the mercy of unpredictable September temperatures. Corn season was truncated. The city was void of its standard one- or two-week-long heat waves. I laughed after I said it, but with a week left to spare in the season, I officially conceded to Kerry that this summer was a bust. So, Summer of 2008, hear this: you've made my sh*t list.
That being said, I enjoy autumn more than most – and nothing would give me more pleasure than a sweet, smooth, harvest-scented extension into winter. Here's hoping, anyway.
I've noticed a key element of funny stories – notably, when they happen to you – is that you never know when to expect them. I had one occur this evening, on a corner store run for a slicing cucumber, two sweet red bell peppers, a can of white kidney beans and a box of Shreddies.
With Harry's Foods in sight (I know it's not Harry's anymore, but try and stop me from calling it that), a man roughly 100 feet ahead of me on the sidewalk locks eyes with me, stops, points at me and performs what I can only describe as a tai chi move – a slow horizontal wave of both arms.
Whatever. I'm going to the store. So we continue towards one another.
And in the split second that we pass on the sidewalk, the man stops again, raises one leg in the Karate Kid crane pose and performs a quick, through-the-air karate chop and halts his hand within a foot of my head. He says nothing. I move my head back about three inches.
The f*ck?, I tell him. That's all I've got.
But he's moved on. And I do, too, glancing back more than a few times. I head to the store, procure my groceries, go home and make my Friday potluck pasta salad. I tell Kerry, but find the man difficult to describe – until I realize he looked just like one of the dudes in the Just For Men ads. Like this:
I've been into birdwatching from the get-go almost, but my early zenith came during the ages of nine to 12 when I feverishly scoured the bushes and skies with binoculars and Audobon's Field Guide to North American Birds (Eastern Region). Naturally this passion took a backseat to high school – you know, girls and such – but it rose again in my 20s once the risk of appearing uncool stopped mattering. And today I am a fully fledged bird nerd.But my memories of those early days persist. Every summer Saturday was spent with the family at Patricia Beach – hotspot for birders but nowadays also for naturists, an awkward mix of skin and binoculars – and some of my most prized bird firsts were here (ruddy turnstone, western grebe, American bittern). My mom took me to Oak Hammock Marsh for my tenth birthday to birdwatch; I now work there. Out during lunch hours I've spotted a white-faced ibis, a red knot and a cinnamon teal. Once – right from my desk, swear to Jebus – I watched a golden eagle snack on a dead rabbit.This illustration is concocted from memories of my early birdwatching days, wanting so badly to see certain species that, to this day, have not made themselves available to my checklist. Chief among them, the blackburnian warbler is a model of elegance in pattern and colour (my favourite birds all share one trait: a well-thought sense of design). So this is more a tribute than anything – Illustration Friday's current theme of memories will do that to a guy.
Done in pen and watercolour-inspired Photoshop brushes. You can click here for a slightly larger view of the piece.
Just goofing around, experimenting with this 2005 shot of Kerry's niece taken at Batoche National Historic Site north of Saskatoon. The interpretive centre there had a tickle trunk of sorts full of vintage clothes, and Anna – camera-shy on that particular day – was proud to show off.
The edge effect I pilfered from Renee Robinson's (aka the immensely talented Playingwithbrushes) Flickr page. Her photostream is stuffed to the dusty rafters with elegant, delicate portraits and other imagery – the perfect treatment for Photo Friday's current theme of old-fashioned. A closer look at the original photo can be had here.
It's been awhile, but I'll admit that part of my self-imposed hiatus was a ruse. I needed a healthy chunk of time to create this poster, which I pieced together over the last couple of weeks in July in order to provide enough time for float-mounting in advance of our ten-year (non-marital) anniversary. This poster was constructed as a companion piece to a similar one I made in the summer of 2003 for our fifth anniversary (and that poster was modeled after Charles S. Anderson's amazing Seinfeld tribute jobbie for Entertainment Weekly). The initial poster was built around a New York Times Sunday crossword, filling in squares with bits of photos, scans and memorabilia saved over the years. It was always my intent to make a second one, similarly built with a Scrabble board as base. The board itself is a stitched composite of four flatbed scans, then a layer-happy Photoshop file was made to accommodate the 100-or-so images that fill in the blanks. I made five folders for the years covered and stuffed them with the choicest cuts, so to speak; photos, concert stubs, scans of cards, even maps. From there it was an exercise in patchwork; deciding which images go where, arranging an approximate chronological order of things, tidying up the grid. With my own personal digital camera era in full effect, the selection and scanning process was greatly reduced in comparison to the first poster.
The two posters now share headliner billing at the end of our dining room table. And in the end, we shared a nice little anniversary day.
You can click here and here, respectively, for much closer looks at the old and new poster.
Today in the cafeteria at work I procured and ate the first taco of my entire life. I am 32 years old. And it was good – but not great – so I'm left uncertain if I will ever have one again.
This summer is going swimmingly.
Top row (left to right): precious golden gummi, a suggestive (at least to Dave) lady-slipper macro, the quintessential prairie cowboy-with-sunset capture. Middle row (left to right): new evergreen growth macro, a leg-banded yellow warbler, abandoned farmstead interior. Bottom row (left to right): abandoned farmstead exterior (four-photo stitched panorama), Kerry's feet in smoke-obscured evening light.a.k.a. Jeope's Annual Summertime Shutdown – again, I find it difficult to muster posts for this site when the weather is the way it is – despite the cooler-than-usual summer, the added rain and added-added mosquitoes. So, I offer you this grid of recent unblogged photos, a gentle push to my Flickr page where most of these have already been posted and written about – and a reminder to remember me and my humble site when I return.
You've been a great audience! Try the veal!
Behold, a six-pack of Canadians.Top row (left to right): Rebekah Higgs, John K. Samson of The Weakerthans, Basia Bulat. Bottom row (left to right): Joey Burns of Calexico (said he was born Canadian, who am I to disagree), Kathleen Edwards, Andrew Whiteman of Apostle of Hustle.
The 2008 Winnipeg Folk Festival expanded on a reputation for bringing the world to our door, outpost that we are, all tucked away up here in the dead-center of the continent. While the virtues of the festival itself continue to be debated as it grows ever larger, more popular and businesslike, it still cannot be ignored as the province's premier annual event for area music-lovers. This year more than most, I was able to get a sense of the festival's something-for-everyone credo – on the same weekend, followers of afro-beat, jug-blowing bluegrass, Word-spreading gospel and – here's where I get excited – a satiating mix of Canuck (and elsewhere) indie rock, could all locate their niche and contently co-exist.On the evening main stage, genres meet and, on occasion, awkwardly connect (example: Thursday's opening set included, in order, Côte d'Ivoire singer Dobet Gnahoré, The Weakerthans and multi-culti feelgood hero Michael Franti). On the daytime stages however, themes can be hammered out and attendees can get their niche-y fixes. Among personal highlights were glimpses (or more) of...- Geoff Berner’s Thursday evening accordion-led ballad The Dead Children Were Worth It, hilariously skewing the bloated Vancouver Olympics. His subsequent knock on fest sponsor Volkswagen was even better.
- Kathleen Edwards, whose lyrics can lift your spirit one moment, then crush your head in a kung-fu grip the next. Her mainstage rendition of Back To Me and a playful version of The Cheapest Key were dazzling.
- Friday’s “I Hate Tucson” afternoon show, with Hayden, Calexico and The Weakerthans merging talents, often backing on each other’s songs. Calexico’s brass brought extra oomph to the Weakerthans’ Pamphleteer, and their own simmering build-up on Corona was pretty awesome in its own right.
- Basia Bulat and The Apostle of Hustle – seeing both up close for the first time, finally putting faces to the names.
- Ray Davies, despite seeming a touch cantankerous and primadonna, provided as good a weekend capper as any by obliging fans to a sing-along of Lola.
(Unfortunately, Saturday was a complete washout, a rarely-witnessed summer trifecta of cold, wind and rain that kept me housebound – yeah I'm a wus, but you shoulda seen it).The more I get a handle on my camera, the more I can appreciate the access that can be had at the festival. My best shots above, plus a few more, can be viewed here on my Flickr home base.
... is what this mosquito was dared to do – and in honour of Illustration Friday's current theme of sour, I present to you the toe-curling results.My original concept was of a trio of raucous mossies egging a compadre on to suck the lemon – a type of hazing ritual – but I found the three of them together quickly becoming an indistinct tangle of probosci and bug legs. So for the sake of simplicity, I put my efforts into boiling the sketch down to a single dim-witted, unfortunate critter. And then even moreso by removing the lemon altogether and opting for a piece a touch more 't-shirty' overall.
This illustration was crafted near-completely digitally, with the exception of the original mosquito doodle in pen. The typeface used is Rockwell Extra Bold, and the background texture was gleaned from Crumble Crackle Burn: 120 Stunning Textures for Design & Illustration (pick up a copy – I'm in it!). Click here for a larger, detailed view.
