First Macleans illo of 2012! Hope I can get the chance to do many more this year. The subject was a volunteer firefighter in British Columbia who died in the line of duty, two months after he got married. "You had me from before hello" is what he and his wife would say to each other as a sign of affection.
Part of the pleasure of doing these jobs is being able to pull elements of a person's life together to create one harmonious image. I recently attended the funeral of a friend and that brought me renewed appreciation for these commissions. I feel very privileged to do them.
I've gotten a bit behind in posting new work. Here's one I did for the holidays for the Weekly Alibi, featuring Duke Ellington facing off against Tchaikovsky in a battle of duelling Nutcracker renditions! Link to the article.
Christmastime is always a flurry of activity; visiting friends and family, making presents, etc. Add to that I had to pack and prep for being back in Calgary for the duration AND I managed to get a horribly persistent sinus/throat cold thing that lasted almost a month... But I'm all set now and ready to catch up with this darn blog thing!
Note the green and red colour palette! Appropriate for an xmas-themed illustration (just realized it now but I will pretend that was my intent all along :P)! I wanted to make the Nutcracker look a bit like Don King. I toyed with the idea of making them shirtless but I ultimately decided these dudes were way too dignified for that.
And here's the weeny sketch I made. More of a thumbnail, if your thumb nail is 1.5x1.5".
I had fun using shades of purple in this one. I knew right off the bat I wanted the manila envelope to be golden yellow, and what better way to make yellow stand out than to use purple, its complementary colour?
Here's the initial sketch, not far off from the final version.
My parents are into birdwatching in a pretty big way. They have nice binoculars, but sometimes ducks are shy. So they bought a sweet Vortex scope. It's got awesometastic optics, let me tell you. Of course I had to include their new pride and joy in my latest card!
One of their proudest sightings this year was of a King Eider (pictured in the above card on the right, the left-hand duck is a Green Teal), an absolutely gorgeous duck that is apparently pretty rare in these parts. I made them souvenir-looking t-shirts for xmas, working from one of their photos.
The meticulous little label on the photo is my mom's handiwork. They have eight giant D-ring photo albums full of bird photos that are just as carefully catalogued. My dad takes the photos and prints them off on their Epson PictureMate, my mom does all the record-keeping and the making of the lunches (taken on particularly long excursions). They haven't gotten to the point of keeping canned food in the trunk of their car yet. We shall see what 2012 holds.
I remember reading fairy tales as a kid that made mention of eiderdown. What a shame it would be to stuff such magnificent plumage into a pillowcase! After some research I've found that Common Eiders are the ones that fill the duvets of fairy princesses (eiderdown can be harvested without harming the birds, as they line their nests with those soft feathers). Were King Eiders safe, I wonder? That would be a major case of duck class warfare, or at least appearance-based discrimination!
I hope everyone's having a great ol' holiday season! Here's the card I painted for my family. Christmas has come and gone but we're just gearing up for New Year's, which means... Mochi! Every year around this time my family and I make dozens of mochi that we eat fresh or freeze to be enjoyed later.
Mochi is a glutinous (sticky!) rice cake made of glutinous rice that is soaked overnight, cooked, and then pounded into a blob that is then formed into smaller blobs. Wikipedia has a very informative entry.
In the olden days, wooden mallets were used to pound the cooked rice into submission. That is so olden days! We now have a magical machine with a magical name ("Mochitsukiki", aka Mochi-making gadget) that does the cooking and pounding for you!
Ta-dah!
Here's some very poor quality video I took with my iPhone to show the process. We strain the rice after soaking and dump it into this machine, where a single rotating widget in the middle mixes, mashes and pounds the rice until it is a uniform blob that spins and jumps around like its alive.
This clip shows the process a bit further along.
Dancing blog time! My sister and I found this to be the height of hilarity when we were kids. It's really kinda mesmerizing :P.
How do you get a spinning molten blob of sticky rice out of a mochitsukiki? With a specially designed plastic bit with a hole at the bottom, that's how!
From there it's dumped onto a wooden block that's been liberally sprinkled with sweet rice flour to keep it from sticking. Then we form it into balls.
There are lots of ways to enjoy mochi. Easiest is to create a paste using some of sugar and soy sauce and dip and eat. They're also great in miso soup (any soup really -- today we had turkey soup with mochi in it! The turkey soup was made from xmas turkey bones) and with sweet red bean paste.
Mochi has a simple taste, it's the texture that's the most fun. They are chewy and soft and stretchy. Zap one in the microwave and it'll inflate like a balloon, only to immediately flatten like the world's saddest souffle as soon as the power is cut. Mochi is fun!
My next post will probably be a showcase of the two t-shirts I designed as gifts this year. I coulda posted that first but I wanted to do something topical.
My latest piece for "A Circus Mind" is complete! This one was for a poem called "Jack White". The poem mentions Meg and Jack jamming in an attic, so I came up with this idea that they'd be surrounded by imagery from their songs and albums. I thought it'd be fun to depict Jack as a devil figure, tempting Meg with the drumsticks. I put flames licking at his boots and gave him a Southern feel, a gambling-man look with a blood red guitar. Author-poet Ryan requested Jack have a pensive look. Hope I pulled it off! Here are some of the other images I created for the book.
I enjoyed stuffing this illustration full of White Stripes references. There's a poster with red and white blood cells on it (for their White Blood Cells album), an orchid (from their song "Blue Orchid"), the attic light was made to look like the one from the album cover for "Elephant", the painting resembles the artwork of their "De Stijl" album, the elephant statue is another reference to the album "Elephant", the legos from the music video for "Fell in Love with a Girl", buttons for "Hardest Button to Button", and the attic window, mint candies, and the ball on the elephant's trunk all refer to the band's famous red-and-white swirl graphic. I put the snake in to go along with the theme of temptation.
The White Stripes broke up this year. One of the first indications of this was a dead goldfish image that was posted on their official site. I put a dead goldfish (and the skull) in the illustration to acknowledge this -- in every beginning there is an ending and nothing lasts forever.
I'm a pretty big fan of the White Stripes. I love their minimalist, authentic approach to music. And I LOVE LOVE LOVE that they have such a strong visual identity. Red, white and black. The candy-swirly thing. It's like what I was saying about the Wizard of Oz, how Oz has certain colours strongly associated with it -- ruby slippers, yellow brick road, and emerald city. Colours really resonate with me.
When you scroll down and see the process work, you'll see how I just kept adding and adding stuff and refining the drawing. The initial sketch is pretty darn crude and somewhat embarrassing :P.
Two more weeks left to go on Ryan W. Cox's "A Circus Mind" Kickstarter project! Here's another illustration I did for the book for a poem entitled "Dark Side of the Rainbow". Prints (and more!) of this image available for sale on my Society6 shop page!
For the Society6 t-shirt I've altered the image a little -- faded away the bottom a bit so it melds into the tshirt colour and added the bottom to the lowest falling brick for added effect.
This is my second Wizard of Oz-inspired illustration. I did the first one for UPPERCASE Studio's Work/Life 2 book. I have a lot of love for Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy, so I couldn't resist illustrating Ryan's "Dark Side of the Rainbow" poem. I really wanted to capture an ominous, dream-like feeling while keeping the image looking kinda storybook. I think the red linework gives it a bit of extra kick!
Here's my initial sketch. Sometimes I like to use grey tones to get a better idea of how an illustration is going to look when it's done. This sketch was done with my tablet.
And here's the sketch I did by hand. This is an extra step I'll do occasionally when the digital sketch requires a bit more finesse before I head to final.
One of the reasons I love the Wizard of Oz so much is that there is such a strong sense of colour throughout that story. The yellow brick road, the ruby slippers, the emerald city... Even the four countries that comprise Oz (Gilliken, Munchkin, Winkie, Quadling) have colours associated with them. Love it!
