Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 47

Week 47: Buildings.

"1960s Street". Sketch in finepoint Sharpie, with watercolours, white opaque Signo, yellow pencil and collaged road markings on watercolour paper. Based on a photo found in a Facebook image search.

Update:

Week 47: Buildings II.

"King Kong hug." Quick sketch in black and brown Sharpies with highlights in white opaque Signo and watercolours.

There's something in the woodheap...

Today is a very good day to go to the movies, I think. Anything to avoid a day of letting Jack in and out of the back door.

My Jack Russell terrier, Jack, has spent the last few days patrolling the backyard, and under both side gates, with his nose glued to ground level, relentlessly following the unseen path of some invisible creature, which has obviously been passing through with some regularity.

In the past, we've suspected a possum, cats and/or small garden skinks, and it often has been the latter. I have also spotted blue tongue lizards (Jack's cornered two of these in the past, flipping one over on its back), and there was the famous ferret sighting - not to mention large water skinks at Zena's and my red-bellied black snake encounter down at Penrith railway station. Nor will I mention the near-tragedy of the baby blue tongue lizard at my aunt's last year.

Who knows what monster is lurking under the woodheap (the remains of the old balcony decking boards)? But Jack did finally see it under there twice this morning. "Bark, bark, bark" etc.


"Where is it? Where is it?"


On the topic of monsters, I've recently had a curiosity about the fate of Peter Jackson's "Son of Kong" movie, which he'd promoted in the bonus DVD features of his "King Kong" remake (2005). I haven't heard a thing about the sequel, which was going to star an albino progeny of "Kong", in ages; in fact, not since seeing the bonus features of the DVD, now that i think of it. Today it was time for that Google and IMDB (Internet Movie Database) search, and thus I discovered this comment in a review of the Jackson "King Kong" DVD:

For those that fell victim to the joke (I did) about "Son of Kong", there won't be a "Son of Kong". That was an April Fools joke.

Really? Now I feel silly.

I must admit, watching the DVD bonus features, I thought it was a weird move for Jackson to do such a sequel when "King Kong" itself had had a less-then-impressive performance at the box office, but I was equally surprised when the recent media seemed to be totally ignoring the progress of the (seemingly elaborate) sequel. The bit about Kong's son growing up to fight Nazis should have been the give away. Gosh, I'm slow.

You know, Peter, it was a great joke, but I'm still not looking under my woodheap.

The road to Adelaide, 1985

Continuing my series of 2D representations of my 3D photograph collection, taken with a Nimslo 3D camera, here's the first photo taken on my December 1985 holiday to Adelaide. First stop, for breakfast, was Goulburn, home of the Big Merino, and also this wonderful King Kong display on a (now long gone) video rental store in the main shopping strip. It was a case of, "Wow! That'll be a great 3D shot! Stop the car!" That's (now-housemate) Steve in the pic; the less hairy one on the far left. ;)



What intrigued me was the possibilty of how 3D would be the reflection of traffic behind me, as viewed in the shop window section of the "TV screen". Although Kong himself was very two-dimensional - even in the 3D image, as I expected - the road and cars turned out to be extremely three-dimensional in the actual Nimslo print when it was processed.

Any time we've passed through Goulburn since, we've tried to identify which shop used to be the Kong shop.



Moving on to Gundagai, here's the famous "dog on the tuckerbox" statue. In the 3D image, the writing on the roof of the souvenir shop is actual quite legible, but the dog looks great in either version. Today, he has a bigger monument built around him.

I'm really liking these pics, and the way they scan.