Nice ice

Today, while Jeannine was entertaining and educating a lot of first through fourth graders at the Paton School in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, with her slideshow, and box of inspirational props, and tales of the vicissitudes of the writing life, I took a drive in my truck up into the hills around Brattleboro, Vermont. It started out as your basic aimless meander, but once I left Brattleboro proper and started up Route 9 towards Bennington, it got interesting. I was glad that I brought my good camera with me. (By "good", I mean the one with the nice zoom lens on it.)

I had not realized that Vermont had recently gotten hit with an ice storm of this nature -- similar, it seemed, to the one that devastated western Massachusetts a couple of years ago (although there did not appear to be as many broken trees in Vermont, or at least along this stretch of road). It seemed as if every tree had a thick, glistening, glittering coat of ice, and that, coupled with the bright sunlight, made for quite a sight as I drove the curving road up and over Hogback Mountain. I stopped in several locations to take a few photographs, but I could easily have spent all day there and blown through the entire sixteen gigabyte memory card in my camera -- there were that many beautiful images to be captured.

 

 

After leaving Hogback Mountain, I headed towards WIlmington, VT, and took Route 100 south towards Massachusetts. As I was driving up the first long incline, I saw a dirt road heading off into the woods, with the sun beating down on the ice-crusted trees lining both sides of the road. It was an arresting sight, a great photo opportunity, but I was by it in seconds.

It stuck in my mind, though, and a mile or so down the road, I pulled over, turned around, and drove back. I ended up taking almost as many photos in that spot as I had in several on the way up to (and including) Hogback Mountain.

This dirt road did not seem to be heavily-traveled. I stood under some of the trees and listened for a while to the soft, intermittent clatter as bits of the coating on the branches -- the ice loosened by the heat of the sun and the movement of the branches in the wind -- fell onto the still-hard crust of snow covering the ground.

I am looking forward to spring, and I want to see all of this frozen water gone, and soon… but I have to admit that on a day like today, seeing a large part of the ordinary world briefly transformed into this shining, scintillating marvel is quite magical. -- PL

Nature's architecture

Today, the temperature is up enough to continue the melting that started yesterday. and a light rain is helping matters along. I hope this is the long-awaited beginning of the end for this winter, though I am not foolish enough (well, in all honesty, I am ALMOST foolish enough) to bet on it.

It's encouraging enough to make me post this image I shot several days ago, when it was really cold, and we'd just had another freezing rain. Jeannine and I were out walking the dog and I saw this group of golden yellow weeds of some sort bent over by the weight of the glistening armor of ice they had accumulated in the storm.

The slender arcing and interwoven forms made me think of some kind of architectural concept I'd seen somewhere -- could it be something associated with Paolo Soleri's "Arcology"? Maybe.

This image is actually created from three separate photographs stitched together with Panorama Maker 5.

I put this image together a few days ago, but even though I found the shapes and colors of the ice-clad plants quite beautiful, didn't post it because I was so sick of winter and looking at ice and snow.

But today, with all the melting going on, somehow, it feels okay. So here it is. -- PL

Blast from the Past #356: Sketches for "Nuclear Freeze" posters

These are some quick sketches I made for some ideas I had related to possible posters for the "Nuclear Freeze" group I worked with in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I believe they were meant to help raise money for the cause.

I'm pretty sure I never did any finished art based on these sketches, and thus no such posters were ever made, but I kind of wish I'd done more with that "nuclear vulture" one -- I like the layout and the way I made the vulture look sort of like Ronald Reagan. -- PL

Blast from the Past #355: MSC logo designs

I've always enjoyed trying to come up with interesting logo designs, though I am not terribly good at it. I think my best one may have been for the "Scat" comics magazine I helped to found with some artist friends years ago. I have always been impressed with people who can come up with clever variations on a theme (the theme being, typically, letters and/or numbers in the name of a business or organization). One of my favorite logos of all time is the one that you see on the hoods of Toyotas -- I never knew until a few years ago that that simple symbol, if broken down properly, reveals all the shapes of all the letters in the word "Toyota". And right behind that one is the logo for Acura, Honda's luxury car brand, which is essentially the famous "H" used on all Honda cars, but with the top corners of the "H" pivoted slightly inward to form an "A" for Acura.

(Actually, I am not sure if these symbols are, technically, logos… but that's how I have always thought of them. If anyone knows a better term, please feel free to enlighten me.)

I found the following  page in an old sketchbook, where I was apparently trying to work out a design for some outfit called -- or with the acronym of -- "MSC". Do I know now what "MSC" is/was? No. That memory has vanished. I don't even remember WHEN I did this, though from the looks of it, I'd say some time in the early 1980's.

Looking at this, I am reminded of how much I have admired the work of illustrator and graphic designer David Suter. Don't get me wrong -- I am not at all equating my work with his brilliant stuff. But I see some of his influence here in my attempt to play with three dimensions and the classic "three-quarters view" while working out this design.

I can't recall if I ever even came up with a finished logo design for "MSC", or -- if I did do a final design -- if it was used. But I can see that I was having some fun with it. -- PL

Blast from the Past #353: Illustrations for "Dan Gabriel Real Estate" ads

(I apologize in advance for the "sketchy" quality of these images -- when I photographed this art last year, I didn't light some of it properly. I tried to tweak it in Photoshop to get it to look good, but realized pretty quickly that it would take hours to do that, so I just decided to use them as is. -- PL)

Back when we were living in Dover, and the TMNT comic had yet to bring in enough money to allow me to focus on that and not worry about getting other illustration jobs to help pay the bills, I got a number of gigs doing stuff for local businesses. The Dan Gabriel Real Estate company had offices on one of the main streets in Dover, and as I recall, they were going through some kind of big change in their business -- I think they were becoming associated with Coldwell Banker, or moving to a new location, or both, or something like that. Anyway, they wanted to do a series of ads which would announce this change in an eye-catching way, and for some reason, they hired me. (I cannot at this point remember HOW I got the job -- did I approach them? Did they approach me? If it was the former, how did I know they needed some illustrations? Who knows? I wish I did.)

Anyway, this turned out to me a lot of fun to do. And I am pretty sure it was my idea to do the ads this way. The basic concept was this fanciful notion of elves carving the new offices of Dan Gabriel Real Estate out of one huge solid block of wood, and I drew four stages of this activity, starting with the block just slightly carved, and ending up with a fairly accurate rendition of what the Dan Gabriel office's facade looked like. (Unfortunately, I have not been able to find that last drawing.)
Here's the first one…

… the second…

… and the third.

I also drew some small images which were to be used as "teasers" to get people to wonder what was going on with these wacky little elves showing up in various spots in local newspapers.

And I did keep one tearsheet from a local paper -- the Rochester Free Press, I believe it was called -- in which the ads were run.

In my experience, it was rare to get a chance to draw something for a client like a real estate agency which had any kind of whimsical elements, and this one was just about ALL whimsical. -- PL

[10-18-14: UPDATE -- I've been reading some old letters that I wrote to my parents during the period when Jeannine and I lived in Dover, NH, and I discovered the reason why I got the gig doing the artwork above. Apparently, I had made a contact with Terry Dunn, the editor of the "Rochester Courier", the local newspaper in Rochester, NH, two towns away from Dover. I had forgotten that he had helped me connect with various local business who needed artwork for ads and such, providing me with much-needed opportunities to make some money. Thanks, Terry! -- PL]

Emily's twenty-second birthday card

Our daughter Emily had her twenty-second birthday this week, and unlike last year, when she turned twenty-one and we had the pleasure of her company here at home, this year she was celebrating with her friends and co-workers in California. I'm pretty sure she had a good time.

I have tried to make a birthday card for her every year, and I thought that this year I would continue the octopus theme which ran through our 2010 Christmas card and the Valentine's card I made for my wife this month. So I got out the sketchbook, and drew this:

It took a couple of days to finish -- I was at first not too certain that this was the way in which I wanted to go, so I left it lightly penciled and came back to it the following day, and decided that I liked it more. So I penciled some more on it, and decided that it was ready to ink.

Using my trusty number 06 Sakura Pgima Sensei marker pen, I got to work, and by the next day, had gotten it to this state:

I knew I wanted to watercolor it, so the next step was to make some copies to work on, which I did down at Mirage. The coloring went pretty quickly, and this was how it looked:

I wanted to put a background in -- something to do with the ocean -- and decided to use a similar technique as my last two cards, only this time I decided to use an actual photograph, albeit one lightly filtered in Photoshop. I went through some of my recent photos and picked out one from my trip with Jeannine to Cape Cod last year. I liked the light on the water and the clouds, and after running it through one of Photoshop's filters (I'm pretty sure it was "Rough Pastels"), this was the result:

I selected the background of the watercolored image, pasted the ocean scene into it, and voila! I had Em's card. -- PL

Blast from the Past #352: John Morrison in a biplane

I can't remember exactly WHY I drew this, but I do seem to recall that it depicts -- in a somewhat unrealistic, cartoony way, of course -- an event in the life of local theater owner John Morrison. The details are, at this late date, pretty vague in my mind, but I think it had something to with his having to get on a small plane to bring a print of a certain movie to show in his independent movie house, the Pleasant Street Theater.

John actually gave me several of my best gigs as an illustrator back in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I got to do several posters for his theater, including my favorites, "They Came from the 50's!" and "Thrilling Hepburn Tales" (I'll have to dig that one out and post it sometime). The Pleasant Street Theater still exists in downtown Northampton, showing movies you usually can't get to see at the bigger cinemas. I am not sure if John is still associated with it.

One fun thing about this drawing that I realized as I was getting it ready to post here is that there are some Northampton-specific details in the background which are fairly close to reality. That's the Coolidge Bridge over the Connecticut River, and I even got Route 91 and the exit from it onto Route 9 in there, along with some of the buildings just over the bridge. (I somehow missed the railroad bridge -- which is now a key part of the bicycle path to Amherst -- that lies just north, almost within a stone's throw, of the Coolidge Bridge. D'oh!) -- PL