Blast from the Past #344: Falling Robot

I have already posted two versions of this "falling robot" drawing, back in September of 2008 (my first blogging year), but when I ran across this version today, I thought it might be worthy of posting. It's not terribly different from the black and white version I posted a few years ago -- the main difference is that there is no grey tone on the robot.

 

The other difference is that it is upside down, and that's how I saw it this morning when looking through some digital files. I actually think this orientation works better than the originally intended one. -- PL

Feed the birds part 2

In the winter, one of my morning duties -- if Jeannine hasn't already taken care of it  (and I am doing it quite often this winter, being the first one in a long time when I am getting up at the same time as her) -- is to restock the bird feeder. We both enjoy seeing the birds flying in to chow down on the sunflower seeds and the suet, though Jeannine has the better view (I sit with my back to the window through which the feeder is visible, though I often see the birds reflected in the screen of my laptop computer).

A few days ago, when I went out to pour the seeds into the feeder, there were quite a few hungry birds already clustered around it, hopping about in the branches of the tree next to it. They seemed pretty bold -- none of them actually flew away when I got there, though they moved off a few feet. And it gave me an idea -- I wanted to see if one of these wild birds would eat out of my hand.

So I grabbed a small handful of seeds, and held my hand out, palm up, with seeds spread in it, trying to keep as still as I could. I heard the busy flutter of little wings near my head as some of the birds flew around me, perhaps trying to figure out what to do with this odd new feeder.

After only a couple of minutes of this, one of them -- a chickadee -- actually settled on my fingertips, paused, then snatched a seed in its beak and flew off. As you might imagine, at that moment I had a big grin on my face.

I went in to ask Jeannine if she had seen it, but unfortunately she had not been looking out at that moment. I tried it again the following day, but had no luck.

Today, I decided that I would give it another shot, and this time -- just in case it happened again -- I set up a camera at the window, and set it to take a movie as I went outside to try to coax a bird into eating from my hand.

And -- after a few minutes -- a chickadee flew down and perched on my fingertips. It paused, pecked once at my hand as if to make sure this new bird feeder was stable, then grabbed a sunflower seed, paused again, and flew off. And, as before, I had a big grin on my face (which you can't see see in these photographs -- actually frame grabs from the movie -- because I was trying to keep myself immobile while the bird was landing and eating, and that included my face -- the grin came right after the bird flew off).

And this time, I had photographic evidence of the encounter to show Jeannine. -- PL

Blast from the Past #343: Fantasy illustration

This is another one of those drawings from the early 1980's for which I cannot recall too many salient facts.

I am not even sure if it was drawn to be published, though the specificity of some of the details -- like the look of the monster -- leads me to believe it was a commission for a fanzine. -- PL

"Hexapod" step three: Color

Here's the color version of my "Hexapod" drawing.

I may try another version, but I kind of like the combination of the watercolor and the photo background. -- PL

"Hexapod" step two

When I began to ink the "Hexapod: drawing (with a #6 Sakura Pigma Sensei pen), it started to gel, to come together. Curiously, I think it was figuring out what I was going to do with its mouth that made it work for me. I was stuck on that -- should it have sharp, pointy teeth? Flat herbivore teeth? No teeth at all?

What I finally decided on was an odd sort of "baleen" type thing, similar to what some whales have -- more of a rough, bristly strainer than teeth per se. And when I drew that in, the creature suddenly became real for me (well, as REAL as something like this can get!). And the inking progressed from there.

Here's the inked version as it stands now. I was going to say "the final inked version", but I may play around with it a little more.

Next up -- the color version. -- PL

"Hexapod" step one

This is one of those drawings that came out of left field. I don't really know what inspired it -- just that as I sat staring at the next blank page in my sketchbook, I had this vision of some kind of multi-legged creature climbing through tangled branches… and looking up, as if seeing some sight unusual to its eyes.

I still don't know what the scale is -- the creature could be the size of a large beetle, or the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I don't think it's necessary to know how large or small it is (or is supposed to be).

As I was penciling this, I kind of got stuck about halfway through. I'd drawn the basic shape of the creature, and roughed in the branches that it was climbing on… but then it just started to seem really silly and awkward, and I put my pencil down, disheartened.

It was probably a week or so later that I returned to it, determined not to let it be stalled at that point. There was something about it that made me want to finish it, even if it came out looking as goofy as I feared it might. So I kept at it, and got it to a point where I was pretty happy with it. And it was near the end of the pencilling that I added a small detail which turned out to be one of the things that made the whole piece work for me -- the thorns in the branches. Suddenly, the creature took on a life it hadn't possessed before, as I imagined that it would take some special climbing skills and toughness to be able to walk around on a plant or tree or whatever it is which was liberally studded with nasty, sharp spikes.

(Here's the penciled drawing as it looked just before I started to ink it.)

In "Hexapod: step two", I'll post the inked version. -- PL

Blast from the Past #342: "Hampshire Life" garden chart cover, printed color version

Some years ago -- I can't remember if it was while we lived in Sharon, CT or when we moved back to the Northampton, MA area -- I decided that it would be a good idea to get more organized with the clippings of my published work. This was mostly the stuff I did for "Hampshire Life", with some other work mixed in.

So I made a folder. It measured about 15 inches by 20 inches, and I used cardboard cushioned with some kind of material the nature of which I cannot at this time recall, and covered it with fabric. I glued a somewhat fancy foil-type paper on the inside.

Then I took large sheets of some fairly heavy paper -- I think they came from a cheap sketchbook -- and proceeded to cut out, trim, and glue down all of the printed samples of my work that I had saved, ending up with about 80 pages like this. Then I stuck it in a cabinet and rarely looked at it. I think the last time I took it out was when Emily was somewhat younger and I was trying to show her what her Dad did before the Turtles took over his life. (As I recall, she wasn't that interested.)

Recently, though, I had call to pull it out again, when I was trying to find the image of Dr. Martin Luther King and Archie Bunker's stuffed chair for this blog post. I knew I had done that drawing, and I knew I had seen it recently. I thought that was when I was going through some of the photographs I'd take in my old studio last year when I started (but still have not finished) my "digital art archive" project… but I was wrong. I went through all those files and could not find the image. But I thought it was very likely that I had a printed version in my pasted-up clipping files, and so I did, and that's what I used for the blog post on MLK, Jr. day.

(Curiously, two days later I found the original for the drawing sitting on top of a pile of stuff in my very messy room… I guess that's where I'd seen it recently and then forgotten about it.)

Anyway, when I went into that old folder to look for the Dr. King drawing, I was pleasant surprised to see that at least for some of the pages, I had actually taken the time to write down next to each piece where and when it had been printed. And as I went through the folder, I saw quite a few things I'd forgotten I'd drawn.

A few days ago, I spent a couple of hours taking photos of each of these pages. It is not the greatest quality for a digital archive, but it's something. And the way these clippings are yellowing (they were almost all printed on newsprint), I think it is better to have even a low-quality set of images of this stuff than let it go to the point where they will have changed so much that it would require huge efforts in Photoshop to bring them back to a reasonable facsimile of how they originally looked.

So now that I have this new group of images, I may be pulling stuff out for this blog, and if they look a little funky, that will most likely be because of the aforementioned process of slow decay of the medium on which they were printed. But it's kind of fun to look back and see how some of these things were actually printed -- I'd forgotten some stuff, especially with covers I did for "Hampshire Life", where someone in their in-house art department would add mechanically-separated colors to the art. I never had a hand in this, and I think for the most part whoever did the colors did it well.

One of my favorite "Hampshire Life" covers was the "garden chart", which I have already posted in its black and white form here. And now, the art as it appeared when printed.

-- PL