Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 23

Week 23: Zoo.

Freecut silhouettes in black card, and sketches in black finepoint marker on white paper with watercolour shading, collaged to either side of a translucent blue plastic stationery folder. Based on elements from several photos taken by me at Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo.

My blue cardboard had a bend in it, and I had to improvise. I had only found the folder on a forgotten pile last weekend. For me the exciting thing is how it photographed! Way more interesting and realistic than blue card, and the sea lions can be repositioned inside the plastic sleeve!

Update:

Week 23: Zoo II.

Freecut silhouettes in black card, and a sketch in black finepoint marker on white paper with coloured pencil and watercolour shading, collaged to either side of a mounted mesh baking sheet. Based on elements from a recent photo taken by me, plus a 1960s stock photo of Taronga Park Zoo's late feature attraction, King Kong.

It's as difficult to see the gorilla as it was at the Zoo in the 1960s. Infamously, Taronga's King Kong (and his partner, Mary Kong, in a separate enclosure) delighted in tossing sawdust and excrement onto the screaming human observers. Eventually, an additional perspex barrier had to be added. I thought people might like to see what it looks like inside the depressing 1960s enclosure, so here he is (below).

Week 23: Zoo IIa.

Week 23: Zoo III.

Freecut silhouettes in black card, and sketches in black finepoint marker on white paper with watercolour shading, collaged to either side of a mounted translucent green plastic stationery folder. Based on a memory of the original otter enclosure at Sydney's Taronga Park Zoo and stock otter photos found via a Google Image search.

This was one of my favourite Taronga exhibits as a kid (and featured in a favourite episode of TV's Catch Kandy), but in the late 70s, it disappeared off the official Zoo maps and I had to use an older map (in the Jacaranda School World Atlas) to find it each time I visited. It was like my secret rendezvous with the otters. The new maps and Zoo signage showed only a newer exhibit, around the corner.

52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 51

The Minotaur in his labyrinth. Collage of black card over red "bricks", textured with sponged watercolour.

Week 51: Silhouette

Update:

"Lions of Taronga, 1960s". Based on a friend's photograph and my own childhood memories. Background in watercolour and double-ended black Sharpie; lion and lioness silhouettes cut freehand from textured, handmade paper. So many times in the 60s, 70s and 80s did I lean on the fence staring into the lion pit. The pit is still there at Taronga Zoo, but totally remodeled so that it is viewed from the side at the lions' level. The wall depicted at the back is now glass and the public can't access the rim of the pit. This particular enclosure, which used to have a large map of Australia painted on its concrete floor(?) in the 50s and early 60s, now houses a tiger family.

Week 51: Silhouette II

There is a version of this b/w background sketched in pencil onto a canvas frame for "Black + White" week but, at the last minute, I realised the canvas was treated to repel water! I then tried to replicate it onto white watercolour paper, but totally ran out of time to finish the detailing (not to mention the lions). Then I realised I should just save it for "Silhouette" week, so I completed it tonight... after many weeks mulling it over in my head.

Oliphaunts!

This wooden (and batik fabric) elephant hangs outside my back door, but it seemed an appropriate subject this week to celebrate the birth of Taronga Park Zoo's first elephant!

Thursday is Zooday

After four days of sweltering Sydney summer temperatures, today was a perfect overcast day to go to...

Taronga Park Zoo!



My Flickr account hosts a slideshow here.

The elephant shots, from 2007, have been added at the end. Enjoy!

A blog entry in the hand is worth two elephant books online, or some such proverb

It's been a busy week, but I haven't been too motivated to blog (here). I think it's probably because I'm blogged out, spending a chunk of every work day jointly-constructing numerous blog entries with Stage 1 (Years 1 and 2 at primary school) on a blog format with our current book rap: on the picture book, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox & Julie Vivas. And helping to moderate other entries. And designing wiki pages to go with them.

The quality of the students' answers has been very exciting! The blog format and the wiki pages, are working out very well, and the ability for the moderators to edit out errors in posts - never possible on a listserv - means that we can model better examples for the students.

Predicting what the next few years will bring for the so-called "Generation Web 2.0" is almost impossible. Tomorrow's school students will have such a different outlook on technology and its possibilities than their teachers, or even their older siblings. I'm guessing all homework will be completed (and marked) online, once every student is assumed to have home Internet access. Heaven help those who never get it...

This week, the Internet, Google, Wikipedia and online shopping all came in handy to help me track down an old classic Australian picture book, "Jessie the Elephant: Her Story" by WM Fleming (New Century Press, 1939), the true tale of one of Taronga Park Zoo's icons, who gave elephant rides from 1883 to 1938.

Actually, I managed to find two copies, in different online stores, on the same day. I had missed the first copy by a matter of days, I was informed, but there was a similarly priced one at another site. I shall explain later why I need it, but I'm rather excited about finding it, especially when I found a few on overseas sites for a lot more!



Sunday's magic number: 90.8 - Well, speaking of elephants, I've mastered the art of staying the same mass for a whole month. Obviously, I will be much happier to see a downward procession of numbers again, but I am going to have to change more things about my weekly routines to make that happen. If I go back to that fateful day when my mass was 104kg a few years ago, then I can grin and say, "Hey, I lost over 13 kg!" (In fact, I've now lost that amount twice in recent years, having let most of my loss creep back on in just a few months early last year.)

On the other hand, I can think back to the very first time I went on the "Fat Free Forever" diet in the mid 90s - when I started at 90.2 and got down to 75kg. Sigh. It was so much easier then.

Taronga bound!

When you leave the house at 6.00am (and not required to be at Taronga Park Zoo until 10.00am), it's very hard to guess what to wear. I took a chance that it was going to be hot, so I chose shorts (but good ones, because I was to be in the presence of the New South Wales Premier, Morris Iemma), a shirt with a collar and my leather bush hat, but made sure to take my umbrella. It was just as likely to have been torrential rain all day. I did feel a little silly heading off in a hat, shorts and comfortable shoes at 6.00am, but it did turn out to be a glorious hat day: a trip on a ferry, and then overlooking Sydney Harbour from the Free-Flight Bird Show open-air amphitheatre at the Zoo.

The occasion was the annual Premier's Reading Challenge presentation ceremony. I was invited as a member of the booklist review committee, but my Very Important Task today (pic, above right) was to chaperone children's author Duncan Ball (ie. a close friend of Selby, the talking dog). In fact, during the sit-down proceedings I got to be right near artist Kim Gamble (who drew an amazing picture from the forthcoming "Tashi and the Phoenix" in pastels which they raffled off to one of the invited school groups) and authors and/or illustrators such as Anna Fienberg, Emily Rodda (aka Jennifer Rowe), Tohby Riddle, Ursula Dubosarsky and Libby Gleeson, to name just a few. Several of the teachers exclaimed that Gordon Winch, also present, had been their lecturer at university but for me, it was Barbara Poston-Anderson, also present and who'd arrived with Gordon, who had been my lecturer of teacher-librarianship.

Every person who spoke at the formal part of the ceremony did it with such enthusiasm, it was easy to be swept away by the positiveness of this celebration of literary achievements. Because of the PRC, over eight million books have been read by NSW students (that otherwise may not have been).

Oh my aching ankles

Yes indeed. Every step tells me that I was at the Zoo on Saturday. Even though I do walk a lot every day, and am quite used to all-day walking excursions, every step I took today caused mild twinges of my ankles, and at the backs of my knees. Caused by Taronga Park Zoo's unique slope, I suppose, and thus I've been reminded of my Zoo visit quite often today.

Unforgettable was the platypus! Sometimes very shy, and sometimes playfully swimming loop-the-loops around his tank, this visit saw Taronga's platypus snatch a rather large crustacean from the sandy bottom and give it an aggressive shake. I assumed the live food a platypus ate was quite small. Wrong!

The prawny yabbie thing escaped and hid, cowering, under a rock shelf with its terrified comrade. They nervously watched the platypus doing loop-the-loops for the crowd of human onlookers, lulling the prawny yabby things into a false sense of security(?) that their pursuer was giving up on lunch, I guess. But soon the platypus was reenacting the movie "Jaws" - and, at his second attempt, little prawny yabby thing was no more. The web of life...

Inside, looking out; outside, looking in

Above: The view of the elephants. This is the view from the old 1917 elephant enclosure at Taronga Park Zoo, looking out at human passersby.



Above: The new view of the elephants. This is the view into the new elephant enclosure at Taronga, 2007. I swear you could make out these elephants grinning, from ear to ear, from the cabin of our chairlift as we swooped over the zoo yesterday. So much for the animal liberationists who claimed that the new elephants would be cramped, bored and poorly-treated.

As the US-release poster for "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" used to say, "There is no comparison."

Oliphaunt!

Today, the Sydney Star Trek Meetup Group is off to Taronga Park Zoo to check out the newly-arrived elephants in Taronga's 90th birthday year. (Coincidentally, our main building at work/school turns 90 this year, too, and on Friday we threw it a party.)

I'm taking the digital camera, so hopefully will have some great photos to share. Of animals, and/or Star Trek fans, I assume.

If it's Thursday...

What a rewarding time at work today. Two Kindergarten classes made their first official visit to the school library and, as teacher-librarian, I gave them a compressed version of all the activities I've been doing with the Stage 1 classes (Years 1 and 2). The topic for the term is "Nursery Rhymes", so we did "Little Miss Muffet" (starring my battery-operated, black, hairy Bungee Spider - he drops down from his web and crawls back up again!), and "Hey, Diddle Diddle" (featuring my handmade cardboard finger puppets).

We followed up with a reading of The Cat in the Hat, because Kindergarten will be otherwise engaged tomorrow afternoon during the time assigned for the national read-aloud.

This afternoon, as school finished and the playground filled with departing children and parents, several of my little first-time visitors returned, cloth library bag slung over a shoulder, hand inside Mum's or Dad's hand, to wave goodbye to me at the library door. Ten minutes later, when I was in the back office, I heard the pitter patter of little feet. Another first-time library patron had entered to announce, "I just needed to say 'Goodbye'. Goodbye!" And back out he went, the way he'd come. So cute! I wonder if I've made as big an impression on these young lives as my first teacher-librarian, the wonderful Janette McKenny, later Janette Mercer (when she married my Year 4 teacher, Milton Mercer!) did for me in 1967?

Tonight, the Sydney Star Trek Meetup Group had its second monthly midweek coffee shop meeting. Another rewarding experience. I'm looking forward to these Meetups very much. I'm in the city every Thursday night, anyway, and it's nice to have a regular group to commune with after a big shop-up at Galaxy Bookshop. Our next meeting, we return to Taronga Park Zoo.