Return of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 28

Week 28: Winter

Cartoon in black Sharpie on watercolour paper, with highlights in watercolour, white opaque Signo ink and white Puffy paint, collaged onto crushed white cartridge paper.

Update:

Week 28: Winter II

Salted watercolour collage with black ballpoint and Sharpie detailing.

Brrrrr!

DAY 2

First frost in Penrith today! It was still zero degrees at 7.30am. Brrrrr.

What I loved about my original "365 Photos project" was the anticipation of finding a daily pic. It kept the senses tuned all day, flitting in and out my head, seeing potential subjects everywhere. Some days I'd forget until almost midnight - I ended up with about ten shots of the dog looking startled, wondering if it was past our bedtime. The project unexpectedly made me blog more often.

It recorded some very significant events, including my last photo taken of my Dad before he passed away, but before he started to look too frail. It's a year of my life more fully documented than any other in my life. It also led to a fun afternoon chatting to TV personality, Andrew G, who was doing a "365 self portraits" challenge of his own and had a gallery exhibition.

You can't really imagine what 30 days of doing anything will lead to. It'll be great to see what happens sharing experiences with a group (on Maang). A great project for a class, too.

What season is it?

These azaleas seem to be going from strength to strength this winter. Just can't kill 'em!

Frostbite folly

Today was Sydney's coldest overnight temperature for 2007 and here, near the base of the Blue Mountains, it was almost 0 degrees C. I hadn't thought about how truly cold it might have been until I was halfway to work - walking briskly - when a slight tingling on my ears made me regret not digging out a beanie and woolly gloves.

I well recall one particular morning in Chicago, USA, in December 1983. I'd been temporarily unable to make contact with my second cousin, and take up his offer of accommodation, and had booked a night at a hotel adjacent to Chicago airport. It was several degrees below freezing, but considerably even more below due to the wind chill factor.

With time to kill the next morning, I headed off to breakfast at the McDonalds across from a snow-covered park. (I was on a promise to my Ann Arbor penpal not to see falling snow until I got to Michigan.) Partway across the park, I realised that the stinging sensation to my fingertips and ears was due to going outside without the appropriate garments. I had visions of collapsing in a heap, being covered by fresh snow, and not being found until the next thaw.

I did finally make it to the McDonalds and, after eating, I reluctantly prepared to head back to the hotel. In a brainwave, I ordered a brewed coffee - and I hate McDonalds' brewed coffee - and used it to get back across the park: the coffee warming up one hand, and then the other, and reaching to cup one ear, and then the other.

Not quite frostbite, sure, but still scary (and not to mention painful).

Puss in boots - and other fabulous felines

Now that I have my pro account with Flickr!, I really must do something about my tragic collection of photo albums. Most of them date back to the early 70s and were the then-innovative, original plastic sheets (and no-glue) technology. Sadly about ten years ago, most of the pages have oxidised badly - and many pages have either lost their self-adhesion, or refuse to give up the photos now seemingly bonded to the pages.

Here are three favourite cat photos!




Tiger-striped Dugil (left) was born in late 1978, and moved with me from the family home in Kingsgrove to my new Lakemba flat in late 1984. He lived a much longer life than his alley cat siblings, whom I'd tried to catch first, mainly because he was a dead ringer to my first cat, Meggsie. Named for the newspaper of the Guild Teachers College ("Dugil" is an anagram of "Guild"), Dugil loved playing "Puss in Boots", or sitting on any important sheets of paper!

Meggsie (right) was Dugil's older brother from an earlier litter. Meggsie ended up in my care in 1976 as a two-day old kitten, and was a traditional ginger tabby whom I raised on an eyedropper (during the crucial Higher School Certificate examinations). He survived our family's move from Rockdale to the new house in Kingsgrove, but lasted only three months before being skittled on Stoney Creek Road at age fourteen months. He's seven weeks old in that photo.

The black and white photo (below) illustrates a familiar Winter scenario, which we always called "frying your eyeballs". My younger brother would stretch out on the floor in front of the heater, preventing the rest of us on the couches from most of the benefits of the radiated heat. Mac, our German Shepherd/Boxer cross, would sneak between Brian and the heater to "fry his eyeballs". And then Meggsie would slide into place in front of Mac, to "fry his eyeballs".