Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 38

Week 38: Cat.

"Catwoman consults her script." Sketch of Eartha Kitt from "Batman", based on a publicity photo. Black finepoint Sharpie and white Signo opaque pigment marker on gold Quill Metallique card, mounted on black card.

Update:

Week 38: Cat II.

"Belling the cat." Sketch of the famous fable in black finepoint Sharpie on pink card, coloured with watercolour pencils and white opaque Signo.

Week 38: Cat III.

"Meggsie hides." Watercolour, finepoint black Sharpie and watercolour pencils on watercolour paper. Based on a 1976 photo of Meggsie from my album.

Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 25

Week 25: Invention.

"Professor Pat Pending builds the better mousetrap." Black finepoint Sharpie with watercolour, based on several cels of the character from TV's "Wacky Races".

Update:

Week 25: Invention II.

"Invention in the arts." Freecut symmetrical silhouette in black card, plus ribbon scraps, collaged onto a mounted print-out from Wikipedia.

Year 3 of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 11

Week 11: Mother

Freecut collage using paper scraps and negative spaces. Based on a photo of my Mum.

Update:

Week 11: Mother II

Freecut mice collage with watercolour and cartridge papers, plus miniature tissue paper streamers, mounted on black card. Shading in watercolour and black ballpoint, white Signo whiskers.

Return of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 24

Week 24: Calendar

This is "Calendar Man", one of the lesser-known Batman villains. Sketched (without pencil or eraser) in black and red Sharpie and white opaque Uni Paint marker on red car, mounted on black card. Based on several panels from DC Comics.

I had a Batman board game in the 60s, a tie-in to the 60s TV series, but which drew heavily from the comics of an earlier decade. The villains were the usual Joker, Penguin, Riddler and Catwoman, but also Mr Zero (who had became Mr Freeze before the TV series), Blockbuster and the Calendar Man, whom I'd never heard of! Poor Calendar Man is ridiculed by the other villains for his fascination with calendars.

Update:

Week 24: Calendar II

Freehand-cut symmetrical heart in red card, with watercolour highlights on a sketch in black Sharpie.

Return of the 52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 10

Week 10: Night

Watercolours on white watercolour paper. Permanent black Sharpie inked outline, with silver Sharpie highlights.

Update:

"Mr Minotaur prepares for bed after a hard day's night in the Labyrinth." Freehand sketch in black permanent Sharpie, with watercolours on watercolour paper. Live from my hotel room!

Week 10: Night II

52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 50

Inspired by an egg carton sleigh (with eight reindeer) I saw at a craft ideas website (The Well Nourished Nest) a few weeks ago, here's my own reinterpretation: Santa's sleigh being pulled by the Six White Boomers! Uses an egg carton, card, handmade and watercolour paper, some star stickers and wiggly eyes. Each kangaroo has different facial features, but it was hard featuring all their tails. Maybe that's why reindeer have small tails?

Week 50: Christmas

And as a table decoration:

Update:

Quick and silly cartoon, in Sharpie inks and watercolour pencils. "He was pining, so I suggested he decorate for Christmas."

Week 50: Christmas II

I drew the broken bauble's outline in black Sharpie, with no idea what creature would inhabit it. I'm still not sure exactly what it is. Watercolour on cartridge paper. Pine tree needles in green and red Sharpie ink, with white Signo highlights.

Week 50: Christmas III

My friend Santa holding my naughty Christmas elves, based on my Santa photo I had taken last year. (Long story). Green, red, black, gold and silver Sharpies, white Signo pigment ink and watercolour pencil on green Origami paper.

Week 50: Christmas IV

52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 46

Emerging from the clown car. Black and red Sharpie ink, watercolour and collage (with various wrapping papers and tiny pompons) on A3 watercolour paper. I made a vague thumbnail sketch at work yesterday afternoon, and it was just going to be a painted sketch. Then I walked home, and passed a bargain store with $1 sheets of wrapping paper - and yet another collage was born. Each outfit was cut out freehand - no pencil lines!

Week 46: Circus

Update:

Stagefright at the circus. Black Sharpie, watercolours and metallic coloured pencil on A4 amber La Carta Weave textured paper.

Week 46: Circus II

"Reaching new heights in the spotlight." Collage, watercolour, coloured pencil and black ink. Labels rendered in Word. I love the irony that the box with the messiest contents is the one that got upturned.

Week 46: Circus III

52-Week Illustration Challenge, Week 39

3D papier mache squirrel, decoupaged with orange paper printed with the words "squirrel", "paw", "ear", "tail" and "acorn", plus eyes made with "i"s - and an "n" for a nose.

Week 39: Words

Update:

Black Stained by Sharpie ink (a brushlike tip, supposedly for drawing on fabric, but nice to use on paper, too) on La Carta Weave textured paper.

Week 39: Words II

Week 39: Words III

Words and Pictures: Watercolour over cardboard templates, painted onto the page of movie reviews from Mx newspaper. (Ha! I was cleaning up the work area the next morning. The "audience" template, which I cut like a set of paper dollies from some card and used to mask off sections, looks too pretty to throw away. Into the Odds 'n' Ends box it goes. We may see it again some day.)

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.

Geronimo!

A famous literary mouse adventurer, Scholastic's Geronimo Stilton, dropped by our book fair today, to see how his royalties were faring.

Building the better mousetrap

Pinky: "Do you think we can really rid ourselves of Mousey with this Better Mouseytrap?"

Brain: "Just aim the laser ray gun at those three blind mice. But, you wretched rodent, you should have removed the cellophane from the cheese first. Now fire!"

Brain behind glass

"Pinky & the Brain", the famous TV cartoon mice, visited my school this week - as teaching aids. Coincidentally, they were posed next to computer mouse.

The lion and the mouse

More playground hijinks as the students and I do a
photoshoot for the fable of "The lion and the mouse".

Year of the Small, Nocturnal, Domestic Rodent

This weekend marked the commencement of the Chinese New Year. The Pig (2007) officially handed over to... the Rat (2008). Or, indeed, the Mouse - if you believe my local coin shop which is distributing special "Year of the Mouse" collectible coins for the Australian Mint. Maybe mice are more socially acceptable to coin collectors? (You dirty rats!)

I was in the city for a Star Trek Meetup in the Royal Botanical Gardens but, on the way through the CBD, I passed all the marchers and floats preparing to start their huge Chinese New Year Parade. Perfect timing, and I couldn't resist firing off a few digital snaps for my Flickr account. Or as a slideshow!

Photographing colourful, waiting, assembled marchers proved to be quite effective - with all the outfits pressed against each other instead of stretched apart during the parade proper - although the dragon and lion dancers came alive with a magic that only moving footage would have been able to preserve.

The most amazing group was wearing grey, faceless costumes of the Terracotta Warriors. Very impressive.

Enjoy!










Sunday's magic number: 92.1. Tempted by food - all around me! But resisting anew. I hope.

On the sixth day of Christmas

While cleaning up some file boxes in the garage this week, I found a batch of my "Star Trek" movie scripts, which I haven't seen since I moved house in 2000. I'd forgotten that I owned three versions of the ST III script, in addition to Harve Bennett's slim bootlegged premise, ST III: "Return to Genesis".

But in the so-called FIRST DRAFT script of "ST III: The Search for Spock", dated March 23, 1983 -- well after the Romulan crew of "Return to Genesis" has officially morphed into a Klingon crew -- Mr Bennett has this to say about the controversial makeup change from TOS:

"Present are the 1ST LORD of the Klingons, and his command staff. The variety of Klingons will be fully explored. Elders have been seen in STAR TREK I. Forehead bumps are marks of age and wisdom, not common. What is common is that they are a dark race of large and frightening appearance."

The "elderly" Klingon idea has obviously been nixed by the REV. FINAL DRAFT script of September 13, 1983, because Valkris wears a half-veil to hide her own bumps, and Captain Kruge is described as a "handsome but frightening presence, and relative youth".

(Since those early days, of course, we've seen Alexander, Worf's son in "The Next Generation" series, as a toddler with a matching bumpy forehead to his Dad's. Then we had Worf's enigmatic comment in DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations", and a two-part explanatory episode about the origins of smooth-foreheaded Klingons in "Star Trek: Enterprise".)

The early script also specifies a flotilla of Klingon heavy cruisers, and Kruge's cloakable Romulan Bird of Prey that "Trek buffs will recognize" from its "distinctive bird & wing motif". After they watch the Bird of Prey turn visible, the script goes on:

1ST LORD: What is this? None of you knew?

3RD LORD (hastily): It is his toy, sir. A Romulan prize. He has perfected their Cloaking Device.

1ST LORD: Commander Kruge, I want you here... Now!

INT. BIRD OF PREY BRIDGE - ON KRUGE

KRUGE: Always your servant, my Lord.

(He turns and CAMERA reveals his CREW, the most awesome collection of large, cruel and piratical men since the Pittsburgh Steelers of the Seventies. We will see more of them later.)

KRUGE: Well, my jolly lads, a few more triumphs like this and we'll all be back in prison.

(then turning)

Try to behave yourselves while I'm gone.

My take on it all? I reckon this Kruge probably should have had a Klingon parrot on his shoulder (but perhaps the lizard/dog from the REV. FINAL script ate it?)

A major character difference is the addition of vulcanoid (Romulan?) defector, Galt, who essentially fills the role taken by Maltz the Klingon in the final film. Galt is actually welcomed back to Vulcan by Sarek at the end of the movie.

Towards the end, instead of the REV. FINAL DRAFT and FINAL SHOOTING script version of Kirk saying to Kruge, "I... have had... enough... of you!" the FIRST DRAFT script has Kruge saying, "The last face you see, Kirk. The last face you ever see."

He then grabs Kirk in a choke hold, they struggle, and Kirk seems doomed - but when the zombie-like Spock grabs Kruge from behind, Kirk is able to break free, retrieve the Klingon dagger and throw it into Kruge's back. Then he asks Galt to beam them up, abandoning several remaining Klingons to their fate on the doomed Genesis.

Bennett's script notes also say: "The writer suggests to the producer and director that no acting credit be given for the role of SPOCK until the END CREDITS. (And that's what they actually did. There's a blank space in the opening credits of ST III, where Nimoy's acting screen credit should normally be.)

Cool, eh? Anyway, here are today's Christmas ornaments:

Above left: For 1996, the Coca-Cola polar bear mascot, sitting in the stocking to chug down his Coke straight from the bottle, was bought just after that Christmas, from a countertop display in a roadhouse (on the way to wherever I was holidaying in January 1997). Marvin the Martian, from "Looney Tunes", was a Hallmark boxed ornament. He has a Santa sack of (Acme?) dynamite over his shoulder and is, no doubt, trying to clear his view of Venus for Christmas. As Marvin would say, "Isn't that lovely?" Purchased from Grace Bros. in Roselands.

Above right: For 1995, the cute mouse on a swing has a hard head and a soft, stuffed body. He's actually standing up on a swing, and the swing's rope is what attaches to the tree. Another purchase from the Lakemba pharmacy/newsagency. The haloed angel cow is made of some form of clay and looks like it's been homemade, but was from Grace Bros. in Roselands.

On the fifth day of Christmas

Yesterday, my friend Leonie and I went to see the new Ben Stiller movie, "Night at the Museum". Based on Milan Trenc's children's picture book "The Night at the Museum", this movie is a lot of fun, with some great special effects that are seamlessly incorporated into the story. (Why should toys be the only things to come to life at night?) this film should make anyone eager to take a stroll through the New York Museum of Natural History. By day or by night...

Today's ornaments:



Above left: For 1998, one of my favourite ornaments: Pinky and the Brain, two determined mice attempting world domination, and have seemingly achieved it by wrapping up the Earth in Christmas lights and carrying it away. From the "Animaniacs" cartoon series, and bought from the Warner Bros. store in Parramatta. The little troll with Christmas hair, tie and pixie boots, is actually a girl's hair accessory for a ponytail. I bought him from the Lakemba pharmacy/newsagency, back when I lived in that suburb.

Above right: For 1997, the Christmas elf with the Jack-in-the-box just had lots of appeal. It's spring-loaded and came in a display box from Grace Bros. in Roselands. The cat is unusual and wasn't intended to be a Christmas tree ornament. The head is ceramic and the body is a tiny bean bag, made of patterned material. He doesn't actually hang from the tree, but rather reclines on the top of several branches. I bought him from the Lakemba pharmacy/newsagency.