This week's Illustration Friday theme of smitten instantly reminded me of a photo I took not so long ago when Kerry and I were on vacation. Not one to be too squishily sentimental often, I thought I'd attempt to create a photo-based digital illustration much in the same manner that I did in my submission for I-F's early-summer theme of "portrait" (click here to jog memory, or to see again for first time) – which I had a lot of fun doing and wanted to try again. Using the photo as a base layer in Photoshop, I first applied a slight median filter to eliminate some of the pixel details and night-shot noise. Then I took a whole whack of time with the smudge tool, pushing along the clothing folds, fire licks, etc., to mimic an oil-based, painterly style. I then subdued the picture's overall redness with hue and saturation shifts and upped the yellow content with Photoshop's yellow and sepia-toned photo filter presets. Following this, I inserted another photo – of wood-grain pattern – and tossed it in the mix, fading it back to add a bit of canvas texture. Overlying details were added last; the paint blotches and stains around the edges and the word itself, done with the freebie download font Klink-O-Mite (get it here). There's quite a few finer points and adjustments in the overall process too, that I'm either neglecting to mention or just plain forgetting. You can click here to get a closer look at some of the detail, and here, to see the original photo and just how much – or little, depending on your point of view – alteration was actually done.
A photo from the vault to keep things flowing. I haven't been to Photo Friday for awhile to see what's up on that front. And their latest theme of destruction brought to mind the image above, which I took with my sister's borrowed camera on a 2002 visit to Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland. It had been a lousy day of traveling mostly; plenty of that grim maritime rain they get 50 per cent of their time (it seems), and we stopped at a stony beach marked by scraps of the S.S. Ethie, a steamer that wrecked there in 1919 during a fierce storm. It was at this time, late in the day, that the sun decided to show, casting this cool purplish light over the ship's rusted metal remains.
Don't pick up that coin, kid.Lately I seem to have been in an outright sketchy mode when it comes to putting stuff here. Which is good. I have to remind myself to loosen up when I'm drawing, when more often than not I'm attempting to get lines and curves to mimic a technique bordering on vector-based.Case in point, this little piece of storytelling here. For Illustration Friday's theme of trouble, I felt like drawing a monster – and then working from there. And for monsters there are no rules, and as such, nothing suited my monster more than making one as loose and as sketchy as I could. The kid and the coin were added afterwards as I molded my idea to suit the theme.You'd think the bumps and jiggles of an eight-hour road trip would cater to this style I'm striving for, but I guess I'm not that loose. I tried, coming back from a Thanksgiving weekend in Saskatchewan, but I couldn't seem to get to that point where I could draw in the car. So instead, I spent a good chunk of Tuesday evening at home with this drawing, and finishing it over lunch on Wednesday. I spent a couple of hours Wednesday night fixing up any schmegs and adding colour. You can click here for a better look at some of the detail. Also, below is a look at what I had to work with before delving into Photoshop, as an example of how much cleanup I sometimes do digitally.
A quick note – and some homegrown red peppers – just to say the complete Flickr photoset of our vacation photos from last week are now available for scopin' out. You can check the holiday set right here – these are the best shots the week had to offer. There's a handful of stitched panoramas I'm still working on; they'll show up in my panoramas set when they're finished.
And the peppers? An experiment, done a couple of weeks ago. I took our five most successful peppers from the garden and lined them up on our kitchen stove, snapped this pic and in Photoshop, "whitened the whites" and removed the stovetop elements. The only problem: it was at night, and even though I had the tripod the ceiling light made it fuzzier then I'd have liked.
I'll be the first to admit that for the first time, I ran out of time with an edition of the HOWieZine. The current version, themed pirates, gave me a stellar opportunity to create an idea for a relevant illustration I've had in my head since high school (you heard right). And on the off-chance that I still realize it someday, I won't divulge on that little nugget any further. I know, nasty, right?
In the meantime, I made two quick pages – only one of which is on display here – that were still fun in the making. The first (not shown) used a scanned page out of one of Kerry's high school yearbooks, with each photo tagged overtop in pen with various hand-drawn pirate features (eye-patches all around, mustaches for the dudes, a few speak-bubbles and a parrot tossed in for good measure). Although I agreed not to use a page with anyone she knew closely, I'm withholding it here anyways out of respect for the embarassed – well, that and the fact I accidentally deleted the file off my hard-drive.
The second page (above) is a montage of words that any booty-loving pirate would love to say. Pretty simple, yeah, and Kerry and I had fun putting this list of words together. So let your inner buccaneer out and sample a few when nobody's watching.
Last week's vacation has been offically declared a hoot, and a culmination of several factors made it so. Start with my absolute favourite time of year, throw in one of my all-time favourite places to be since childhood, add fires, grey jays and smokie-dog cookouts and mix together with the sensation of being the only people for miles. It's bliss – and amazing that we didn't consider this sort of thing sooner.Kerry and I are no strangers to visiting the Whiteshell, but have never made our excursions into anything more than day-trips (with the exception of a sole overnight stay two years ago for my birthday). So the prospect of staying there for nearly a week was exciting, since many more options open up when the (upwards of) four hours of travel time are cut from the equation. We made day-trips out of the two ends of the Mantario Trail, a gruelling multi-day hike through the heart of the park. The day from the south trailhead offered varied terrain, train-squashed pennies (a Whiteshell tradition of mine, I was bold enough to try a quarter this time) and fire-toasted turkey-tomato-avocado sammiches at Caribou Lake. The following day we took the hefty drive to the north trailhead for a hike along the shores of Big Whiteshell Lake where we encountered gusty winds, an abandoned 40s-era car reclaimed by the forest and a pair of shotgun-wielding grouse hunters ("so yer the ones scarin' all the chickens away.").
Top: me and Kerry by firelight. Above (left to right): boulder on Big Whiteshell Lake; the beavers are clearly in charge on the Mantario trail; driftwood face.
Tuesday we drove deep into the park to visit a popular trail leading to Pine Point Rapids on the Whiteshell River. I can't recall offhand just how many times I'd done this hike since I was little, but this trip offered something I had never seen before in all my visits: no rapids – and no running water whatsoever. Neat in its own right, but a touch creepy, to be able to walk across silent and bare rock usually lost underneath fast-flowing water, fish and thrill-seeking innertubers. Any further creepiness was dissuaded by a local gray jay that could snatch peanuts straight from our hands. These birds, along with a fox, four eagles, about a hundred deer and a million idiot grouse, kept us company during the week when we were out pretty much alone in the woods.
Above (left to right): the falls are gone at Pine Point Rapids; staredown with a trophy buck; the gray jay does my bidding (photo by Kerry).
Even though the weather slowly turned sour as the week went along, we were never turned back by it. The following day we paid a visit to the Hunt Lake trail just down the road from where we were staying, and Thursday we split our time between the bland Cabin Lake trail and the short but scrappy MacGillivray Falls trail (again, no water though). On a thick-as-molasses foggy Thursday morning, I also crossed the road from our rental cabin into the empty neighbouring campground to view what I could of West Hawk Lake from atop a high granite outcrop. In the fog I nearly bumped into a giant (to me) and fearless white-tailed deer buck that I talked to gently in order to pass. For the record, I won't divulge what we talked about.
Above: a foggy Thursday morning on West Hawk Lake.
Our cabin was a quaint and down-homey affair, and on a five-day, non-weekend, out-of-season rate, a fair deal considering the full kitchen, barbecue and satellite-TV/DVD setup that allowed us to keep up-to-date with The Office, rent movies and sneak peeks of old glories like 21 Jump Street, 90210 and The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.
Above (left to right): Kerry at Kinosao Lake in Riding Mountain National Park; fall leaves along the Ochre River trail (photo by Kerry); the road home.
This past weekend the scene shifted westward for a weekend stay in Riding Mountain National Park. Not quite the challenge for the hiking set, but gorgeous weather and some interesting sights (a bounding otter, trail-blocking moose and more bear scat than we'd prefer) made the short holiday addition fine in its own right. Sunday was quite possibly the day, that one fall day, that makes the season my favourite, despite its quickness and damning end.Note: I'll be posting a link to the complete vacation Flickr photo set when it's up and ready, prolly a couple of days.
Kerry and I are on holidays now, so this place will be left to sit and fester for the better part of a week and a half. In the meantime, I can't think of a better opportunity to have you leave this part of the blogosphere and go to visit my upstart corner over in the Flickrverse. It was not too long ago I started a full-fledged Flickr account to store the growing stash of photos that inevitably comes with digital camera ownership. And while I'll continue to post the best and brightest things that come out of my head here, my Flickr page is a great spot that allows me to display larger collections of images from days out, photographic experiments and other general goings-on.I've been delving into the recent past to stock the site up to the state it's in right now. Currently on display is a gallery of stitched scenic panoramas, an extensive set of magazine spreads from work, local snapshots of shoes hanging on power lines and a stash of photos of random objects appearing in large numbers. There's also full sets of pictures from past events mentioned here, like my niece's August visit, the MS Bike Tour, our day at the Criddle-Vane homestead and my PhotoFortnight shoot for their winter theme of "night". And if that's not enough, there's also party pics from the awesome St. Jean-Baptiste Day party and the HOW Design Conference in Las Vegas. And if that's not enough, dig even deeper and find photos from past vacations in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.Or, click here and view them all as part of a Flickr slide show (it's pretty cool). I'll make sure to post about any new developments at my Flickr site here in the future, likely starting with photos from the vacation I'm leaving for tomorrow morning.And if that's still not enough, then I don't know what is. And I'm on holidays, so tough.
What with these topsy-turvy economic times, even the mobsters are struggling. Or not. I don't know. But this mafioso certainly is. Originally a fast doodle drawn while performing volunteer duty manning a hole-in-one hole at the company golf tournament, I spent time this past weekend dressing this don up to the version you see here. I was attempting to honour the weblike and sketch-heavy style of the Winnipeg Free Press's inhouse editorial cartoonist Dale Cummings who, rumour has it, creates many of his works primarily with ink and toothpicks. I didn't stretch so far as to duplicate that feat, sticking with the pens I know best and some help from the brush pen for the fatter lines.
Drawn for Illustration Friday's theme of change. You can click here for a more detailed look.
Top row (left to right): A guy at the ballpark who likes like Dick Cheney; shoes on a wire; popcorn in my glasses (photo by Kerry). Middle row (left to right): lobsters from my sister's summer visit; kitchen-related hubbub at my brother's house. Bottom row (left to right): how embarassing - Jason and I wear the same shirt at the Folk Festival; the Gladstone Happy Rock (get it?) on Highway 16.
I'm closing in on the 2,000th photo taken with my birthday Rebel. And granted, even though a vast amount of these were outright experiments and castoffs, I'm still as thrilled about it now as I was last October when I got it. In honour of this momentous occasion, here's pics and a post about as random as you will ever see me get here - largely since I promised that this site would ever get to "bloggy" (beak about politics, slag off about work, post pics of kitty).
Top row (left to right): a sample of our bounty; our champion red peppers. Bottom row (left to right): colossal tomatoes the size of your frickin' hand! (photo by Kerry); morning glories.
1) We have been backyard slackers. Our backyard is in terrible shape: bumpy, weedy, infested with worms the size of snakes (side note: I'm OK with worms, but worms should be worm-sized, not snake-sized or bigger - which I have seen, with my own two eyes, in our back yard – but I digress). But probably our biggest success story from one year of homeownership has been our tomatoes. Kerry grew the hell out of some tomato plants we bought in the spring, mainly romas and grape, but also a few mutant giant ones and some yellow ones. Our summer was also a boon to tomatoes province-wide, but still. We also managed to squeeze out a few modest red pepper plants and a single banana pepper so far. Time is running out on all these veggies, but we hope to see at least another week of production out of 'em.
I get all gangsta about my beard: chin foliage (left) circa January (photo by Allan); photo #1,997 – my current attempt (right).
2) I've been letting my facial hair out. For argument's sake I am not calling it a beard because I reaffirm to Kerry on a near-daily basis now that I am not growing one. I have been living clean of such hair for quite some time – up to the turn of the century it was a constant part of my "frumpy college" look, when I gave scant thought to how much hair grew across my head. Rarely since have I attempted anything close; once was last Christmas, and now this experiment. The last time I did this it refused to fill all the way in and I was called out by my (then) boss: Boss: Jeope, what the hell is that on your face?
Me: I'm trying to grow a beard. Boss: Well then, sh*t or get off the pot. 
Five-photo stitched panorama of Epinette Creek, Spruce Woods Provincial Park.
3) I neglected to mention that on the September long weekend, apart from visiting the Criddle-Vane Homestead, Kerry and I also followed through on an idea to completely plan a day for each other and see it through. Hers involved the aforementioned trip to the homestead, an afternoon hike on Spruce Woods Provincial Park's Epinette Creek trail system and dinner at the Headingley greasy-spoon stalwart, Nick's Inn. My day included our first visit to Riding Mountain National Park to test our mettle on the Gorge Creek Trail and a visit to see Ken, Kerry's favourite waiter in the city at Star Grill.
