226: Portrait Of A Metal Duck

A culmination of the past two Monday night Creative Nights – last week: drawing, this week: colouring/styling – this drawing enabled me to get the pens out and work on some hatch-based texturing. This is a roughly one-foot-high welded metal duck sculpture sent to Kerry and I as a gift some time ago, which I situated at my new drawing desk last week and treated as a still life sketching subject; the sketch itself ended up almost actual size, resulting in a pair of stitched-together scans to make the final image in preparation for finishing up tonight. No theme, no reason, just drawn for quacks and giggles. A larger version, with a look at some of the detail, can be viewed here.

225: My Funny Valentine

Kerry bought this vintage Sunshine tricycle at an antique shop near her work a number of years ago. Since then it's been a fixture in our apartment, and now the living room of our house. Every now and then I hop on and wheel around the main floor – which, to date, has yet to fail to test my knees, strain my butt and amuse her greatly. So, in this fancypants digital age, I am now able to wait for her to leave the house for a hot yoga class, set up the tripod and Canon PowerShot, giddy-up/do my thing, import into iMovie, add effects and a soundtrack of The Sadies' "Sixteen Mile Creek" and craftily pop this video onto her laptop. It amused her greatly; a happy Valentine.

224: 365

I'm one week into a new venture, of taking a photo a day for an entire calendar year. The concept is simple and entirely unoriginal – there's thousands of people on Flickr right now in the midst of their own 365-photo campaigns – but one that I hope will result in at least some photographic paydirt. I've thought about doing it for some time, but there was just something entirely random and pleasing about the eventual timing of my dive.


I didn't want to crush under the weight of cheese in starting on my birthday, or New Years, or what-have-you. And there's not enormous pressure behind the concept, but it may certainly force me to realize how many days slipped by in the past where I didn't give the camera even a second glance – especially in the thick of winter. In one week it has already kept me awake and thinking more about ideas, concepts and composition than I can recall.


I'll post the occasional shot from this little project here, but the glut will be housed in this Flickr photo set. Keep checking in. The images shown here are from February 6, 9 and 10.

223: Moom

My friend Kal Barteski – she of Love Life fame – invited me to join herself and a few others in a spontaneous creative bout this past week. Operating in the vein of Illustration Friday and other creative of-the-week themed concepts, the GO/venture is far more open to interpretation, offering participants the option of providing output ranging from sketches to photos to written word submissions. The theme of the edition I took part in was permanent. I was initially excited at coupling a piece with Illustration Friday's theme of clumsy – but clumsiness prevailed in the end; turns out that was last week's theme.

This piece was drawn quickly over the weekend, then dressed in Photoshop on Monday evening as part of Creative Night. You can click here, to view the illustration larger, and here, to see the Flickr-based GO/venture home base, stuffed with other folks' entries covering a whole wadge of past themes.