Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 31

Week 31: Realism.

"Portrait of Ian and Jack" (from a personal photo) in HB graphite and yellow, red and blue pencils on a black Sharpie easel. I hope this fits with the theme. I was inspired by some art examples in online articles on realism. My original intention was to draw an artist and two sitters, perhaps as less-than-real cartoons, with only the "painted" canvas featuring the realism. But I came to prefer the white space.

Update:

Week 31: Realism II.

"Elephants at Perth Zoo." Freehand watercolour on textured paper, based on my own photograph.

Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 22

Week 22: Science.

Ida Lupino as the evil alchemist, Dr Cassandra Spellcraft, in the "Batman" TV series of the 1960s. Oil pastels on A3 paper, with watercolour wash.

Update:

Week 22: Science II.

"Periodic Table of the Elephants." White pigment Signo ink and collaged black finepoint sketch on black card.

Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 21

Week 21: Ink.

Black finepoint marker, graphite pencil and coloured pencils.

Update:

Week 21: Ink II.

Black finepoint marker, graphite pencil and coloured pencils.

Week 21: Ink III.

Inkblot male seahorse and his brood, enhanced with blue ballpoint ink and a hint of coloured pencil, white Signo pigment ink and watercolour.

Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 2

Week 2: Outdoors

Collage and silhouette using Ingres papers, flocked cardboard, oil pastels and nylon cord on grey Ingres background.

Update:

Week 2: Outdoors II

"N-n-n-n-next!" Cartoon in finepoint black Sharpie, oil pastels and watercolour wash, collaged onto Ingres paper.

Week 2: Outdoors III

"Corellas' annual visit." Watercolour miniature. Masking fluid and black and white Sharpie highlights on watercolour paper. Based on my own photograph. This piece utilised an old offcut; it's only 85mm x 95mm.

Week 2: Outdoors IV

"Vasquez Rocks, Los Angeles." Watercolours with black and white Sharpie highlights on remnants of watercolour paper, mounted onto Ingres paper. Based on a photograph from my 2013 vacation album.

52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 21

Week 21: Boxes

Coinciding with the 2014 National Simultaneous Storytime, this box of elephants from the picture book, "Too many elephants in this house" (by Ursula Dubosarsky and Andrew Joyner) was created with masking tape, red acrylic paint with sponged shading, blue corrugated cardboard, black ink permanent marker and pink and silver waterbomb balloons. Trunks were cut from matching pink and silver plastic partyware bowls. This prop will be part of my school's celebrations of this annual ALIA event.

Back of Elephant house

This back panel was left unpainted deliberately. Note the yellow plastic ladder emerging from the chimney hole.

One more elephant squeezes in!

Udates:
Inspiration struck tonight whist walking home in the dark from the train station. Here's the Minotaur in his labyrinth on Crete, created in just ten minutes with a cardboard box and a kitchen knife to make some slots.

Week 21: Boxes II.

Black Unipin fine line pigment ink cartoon on cartridge paper. Seemed like a good week for a soapbox.

Week 21: Boxes III.

An idea flashed into my head during breakfast and I simply had to do it immediately. Before this Challenge, ideas like this probably would be fleeting - and never made permanent. Corrugated craft board, with colour highlight from an ancient Faber-Castell Metallic Silky Pastel.

Week 21: Boxes IV.

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!

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.

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.

Feeling uninspired...

... so here's a red elephant. You don't have to go far in the Australian countryside before you drive past something bizarre or completely incongruous. (I took it with my mobile phone on the way to Toowoomba, in Queensland, last year.)

This blog isn't a white elephant yet, but sometimes it feels a bit that way.

Over recent weeks I've discovered a number of blogs by friends of mine. Mostly, they are abandoned blogs, where the blogger leapt in with gusto, posted several times every day for a few weeks/months, got little or no feedback from loved ones... and their blog just gets locked into limbo.

Oh well...