San Diego trip, part 2

While going through some of my recent digital photos, I realized I had neglected to mention a few other fun things we did on our recent trip to California, specifically going to some of the museums in San Diego's wonderful Balboa Park.

The only one I'd ever been to before, back when I was coming to the San Diego ComiCon in the 1980's, was the Natural History Museum. I remember that one of the coolest things was an exhibit of full-scale animatronic dinosaurs -- something that was unusual at the time, but now is fairly common. Jeannine and I decided to go there first.

It seemed to me that the layout of the place was completely different from the last time I'd been, but as that had been at least nineteen years earlier, I suppose it just could have been faulty memory. But they still had some cool dinosaur stuff, including these life-size replicas of an allosaur...

... and a type of duckbill dinosaur -- Anatosaurus maybe?

One of the things that drew Jeannine's interest in this section of the museum was this beautiful painting and display of fossilized ammonites...

... in part because ammonites loomed large in the life of Mary Anning, the young English woman who found so many fossilized sea creatures on the shores of Lyme Regis, and Jeannine had written a picture book about her a few years ago. In addition, the things were just fascinating to look at. Jeannine particularly liked this one with a delicate pattern of fern-like vegetation somehow impressed on its surface...

... and this one appealed to me for its slightly "mutated" look.

We moved on to the arboretum, the one housed in what appears to be a quonset hut type building made of slats of slightly rusted metal, but which is actually wood. Here's a shot from the inside...

... and one of a nifty spiky pink flower which caught my eye.

From there we walked over to the Museum of Man, where we saw these huge castings of Mayan sculptures. Very impressive.

We didn't have time (or the energy, to be honest) to see all that we wanted to see that day, so the following day we came back and checked out the Air and Space museum, a veritable treasure trove for anyone into the history of air and space travel. Here's one view from the first section of the museum, with a number of WWI-vintage biplanes.

Nearby, we saw this display of Amelia Earhart and one of her airplanes which Jeannine agreed to pose with.

The museum had a relatively new exhibit about life beyond Earth, which was pretty neat but felt more oriented towards kids, so we didn't spend too much time there. But in one of those odd coincidences, I was brought up short by something in this display, which I think was supposed to represent the concept of "talking animals" as one aspect of how people have thought of the possibility of alien life (or something -- I didn't read the signs too carefully).

As I scanned the display, my eye was drawn to a group of small but familiar figures near the center...

I just can't get away from these dudes, it seems. -- PL

Flight, part2b

As I ease myself back into the habit of flying in airplanes, I am starting to remember many of the details of this activity that I had forgotten over the twenty-one years during which I had eschewed flights. One of most prominent of these is that -- once you get beyond any fears of crashing or exploding or whatever, and let your mind drift away from the mind-boggling fact that you are traveling through the air, thousands of feet above terra firma, in a conveyance which weighs more than approximately ten large elephants, is that flying is pretty boring, for the most part.

That's why you see people listening to music on their iPods, watching movies on iPads, reading, etc. And I remember from those flights of long ago that I would, like my other Mirage buddies, spend a lot of my time in the air drawing in my sketchbook. (I recall that on one flight with Kevin back from visiting Playmates in California in the early days of TMNT licensing, I came up with the concept for "Commandosaurs" and did a bunch of drawings for it before landing in Connecticut.)

On our recent trip to San Diego and beyond, I remembered this activity, but I was really more inspired by observing Jeannine. She has a great work ethic, and makes excellent use of these kinds of blocks of time by working on her writing -- pulling out her sheaf of printed pages to proof or edit with a pen, or hauling out her laptop, once the aircrew tells everyone it's okay to use their computers. (Actually, given that she uses a MacBook Air, it's not so much "hauling" as "slipping gracefully" from her laptop case.)

So I got out my sketchbook and did some drawing. I worked on finishing some inking on some pieces that I'd started back home, but also did some new drawings in pencil and inked them to various stages of completion.

This one I started on the second leg of our journey out to California, on the flight from Atlanta to San Diego. (That's not Ben Grimm's sculptor girlfriend Alicia Masters from the "Fantastic Four" comics, in case you're interested.) This drawing was inspired by the book that Jeannine is currently working on, which is a non-fiction piece about a real female sculptor. For some reason, I imagined her chipping away at a monumental statue of my favorite FF character, the Thing. (Given when this woman actually lived, it's a bit of a wacky anachronism, but what the heck.) I almost finished inking this one on the flight back home.

This other one is something I started while waiting for our flight back home in Los Angeles International Airport. We make it a point to try to leave for the airport a couple of hours ahead of our flight time, so as to be prepared for any unexpected delays -- which is great in one sense, because it prevents (so far, at least) missing our flights, but not so great in another sense because then we have hours to kill waiting in the airport departure loges. In this case, I think we had about three hours.

I'm not sure where the idea came from for this one, though it's possible the huge castings of various Mayan stone artifacts we saw at the Museum of Man in Balboa Park in San Diego could have had something to do with it. But I kind of like the slightly Kirbyesque feel of the giant, vegetation-covered figure -- is it just a sculpture? Or an abandoned war robot? Or a giant humanoid in armor, mysteriously frozen in mid-stride ages ago?

I don't know.

I penciled this at LAX, started inking it there, and did a little more inking on the plane. Hopefully I will get around to finishing it soon. -- PL

Flight, part 2

I'm back home after my SECOND cross-country airplane trip of the year (this could get to be a habit!). Jeannine and I were planning to attend a memorial service for one of her relatives in California, and decided that it might make sense, given that we were traveling all that way, to extend our stay a few days and see some sights.

So we flew off to San Diego, a place I'd not been to for nineteen years, I think. It certainly has changed -- I barely recognized the downtown area, though Seaport VIllage still looks about the same. And the San Diego Zoo is still a cool place to visit -- literally, the day we were there, it was in the low 60's, I think, and the animals were pretty active. Like most of the tourists there, I took a bunch of photos -- here's one of a peccary…

... a koala...

… and a monkey (sorry, don't know the type) on a rope…

… and two beautiful ladies posing with a chrome polar bear.

Emily was going to attend the memorial service as well, so she met us in San Diego, and we had some extra time with her, which is rare these days. (We actually didn't stay in San Diego -- we had a nice room at the Hotel Del Coronado, a place I'd wanted to get a closer look at since my last trip out there.) Here's a shot I took of Jeannine (wearing her "Organically Grown" cap) posing with some dramatic cloud lighting on one of our walks on the beach.

A few days later, following the memorial service, we continued on to Los Angeles, where we spent some more time with Em (including going out to dinner with her employers, whom we'd not met until then -- very nice folks). Em also took us to Griffith Park, a place I'd wanted to see on our visit in July. I was amazed at the number of people there -- I'd thought we would drive to the top and see maybe a handful of sightseers, but we were lucky to find a parking space about a half mile down from the observatory. But what a view! We got there just as the sun was setting, so we had some dramatic views of LA all lit up as the sky darkened.

I spent a good part of the time on the flights out and back peering out the window (Jeannine let me take the window seat)…

…and snapping shots of landscapes with my pocket camera.

They're not as cool as the photos from Stan Sakai's trip to Croatia, but I like them. A lot of the images from our flight over the desert and the mountains out west reminded me of the landscape-building stuff I used to do with the 3D program "Bryce"… maybe I should dig that program out and play around with it some more.

I did try to do some drawing during the trip… and this last photo, taken as the sun was setting on our last leg of the return trip back to Connecticut, shows my sketchbook reflected in the window of the airplane. -- PL