Blast from the Past #332: Drawing for Artisan Outlet Market Square Day 10K Road Race

Sometimes these days, when I am going through some old stuff looking for something interesting to post, I come across something that I sort of remember drawing… but that's about it. I don't remember exactly WHY, or WHEN, or WHERE, or for WHOM… but the drawing was clearly done by me, and clearly done for SOME reason.

So it is with this piece, with the integral "Artisan Outlet Market Square Day 10K Road Race" logo. I drew it in 1984, and I am pretty certain that it was while we were living in Dover, NH. To add to that certainty, I did a Google search for "Market Square Day" and Portsmouth (because I also had a vague memory of a Portsmouth, NH connection) and, sure enough, I got 37,800 hits. I only looked at a few of the results on the first page, but apparently there is a long-running (no pun intended) tradition of a road race in Portsmouth, held each June.

So it is very likely that I drew this thing in or around May or June of 1984, just a few months before Jeannine and I packed up our bags and boxes and moved down to Sharon, CT. But…

… WHY did I draw it? It has the look of a piece of art designed to be used on a t-shirt, but I don't recall ever owning a t-shirt with this drawing on it (and if t-shirts had been made with my artwork on them, I would have been sure to get at least one of them). I don't recall being commissioned to draw it, and I can't think of WHO I would have been hired by to do it.

Was it something I did totally on spec, and sent it in to the organizers of the event, hoping it would be used? Possibly. At this point, unless I can find mention of it in my copies of letters and such from that period, it's all conjecture.

But the main reason I am posting this is that the Fugitoid appears in it, and I find that kind of amusing. I can't imagine that anyone outside of me and Kevin and some close friends and family members even knew who or what the Fugitoid was back then. Certainly none of the road race organizers would have. Why did I include him in this design? I have no idea… just like I have no idea why I also included the small and slightly demented-looking Tyrannosaurus.

In any event, whatever the original purpose of this piece, I like it. -- PL

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

Blast from the Past #207: Dinosaur Disco

Here's another dinosaur-themed drawing from the distant past -- 1978. I'm pretty sure this was not done to make money, but rather just for fun.



This piece contains one of the few examples of my hand-drawn lettering with which I was actually satisfied. -- PL

Blast from the Past #206: Dinosaur birthday card art

Back when I was trying to make it as a self-employed illustrator, in the pre-TMNT years, one of the ideas I had for making money was to create, print and try to sell a variety of cards for different occasions. For several years, I employed my used book store as the primary venue for this attempt... which didn't really work -- I think I sold a few dozen cards. Not a terribly successful venture, but it was fun.





I am pretty sure these two designs were done for this purpose, though it is also possible that I drew them for friends' or family members' birthdays. Or I could have used the art for both things. In any event, they were enjoyable to draw. -- PL