"Not So Yellow"

This year, as a gift for friends and family, I made a batch of Limoncello (the link goes to a good wikipedia article). It turned out quite nicely, though not as vibrantly yellow as I would have liked because I used an organic and slightly less refined sugar. The flavor, though, is very good which means that limoncello making will probably become a yearly event. Last night the liqueur went through it's final filtering and bottling. Here's a picture of some of the bottles, corked and sealed in beeswax:



I also made a lable for the little bottles and here's a picture of that:



(The Christmas Duck, by the way, visits our house every year -tagging along behind Father Christmas and leaving bundles of sticks and leaves and maybe a cookie or two.)

Bugs

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas.

Today I worked on my short (6 page) comic for Flight 5. The story is about a catterpillar, a spider and a few other critters who live in a small woods. And I have to admit that it was at least partially inspired by Sir David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth. Here's one panel:



By the way, do click on the link to the Flight Blog and watch the animated short Arctic Holiday. You won't be disappointed!

From the Bottom of the Pile

When you move, you tend to find things that you had forgotten about. At least I do. After our recent move I found this old watercolor I had started a few years ago. I remembered flinging it aside in disgust, but when I saw it again I couldn't remember what had bothered me so.

So I finished coloring it. Here it is:



When I was done with the watercolors I was happy enough that I sent it off to be framed and hung in a little gallery down the street from us.

The other thing is that my "alive" friend, Bill, has finally posted some of his thoughts on The Discarded Image. Here's the link. Bill has even put together a handy table of planetary influences for Astrology-Minded Readers.

It's Organic!

There's been a lot of talk, lately, about those energy saving lightbulbs. I had this great idea for an herbal lightbulb! Here are a few concept/technical sketches:



If anyone knows how I could get funding to continue my research in this important area, please let me know! The first prototype is still a little over the horizon, but I am CONFIDENT! I haven't even grown the herbs yet.

Oh, and I just finished a magazine comic that features characters that kinda-sorta resemble me and my friend Denver. I mean, if you squint. The comic is called "Strange Days" and it's mostly about how wierd the world is.

Dungeons and Doodles

I spent a couple very enjoyable hours last night playing Dungeons and Dragons. The new wrinkle, for me, was that I played the game with my friends in Virginia thanks to a couple of webcams and a program called Skype. It felt good to be rolling the old 20-siders again.

And when I play I draw. Here are a few odd doodles from last night's game:




And here is my first picture of my new character, a shiftless rougue named "Quill Porcupino"



Yep. Drawn on an envelope.

The Ebay Plunge

Edited Post: Only hours into this and I've pulled two listings. I will let the Gilbert cover run it's course. The other two pieces ...they have a different destiny.

Sorry for flip flopping on the issues.

Disney Can't Shut Up.

This weekend we watched on of my all-time favorite movies, Kiki's Delivery Service. Kiki's is a beautifully animated Studio Ghibli film about a young witch striking off on her own for the first time. It captures that transition between childhood and adolescence -that special magic time that usually lasts one summer. The setting is also achingly beautiful: taking place in the late 80s, in a small unnamed European city, but (and this is the interesting part) in an imagined world where World War II never happened.

Unfortunately, while being one of my favorite films, it's also one I have a hard time watching. This is mostly because the Disney translation is so crummy -being too often used as a vehicle for the Late Phil Hartman to wisecrack. Many of the films quiet moments are, in the english translation, crowded with dialogue. The whole mentality is "never let the characters stop talking"

Take, for instance, the scene where Kiki flies into the city for the first time. In the original version the scene is almost dialogue free and, for animation, there is a surprising amount of sublety in the acting. You get a sense of the bustle of the city and you can see that Kiki is both excited and a little overwhelmed. But Disney in their infinite wisdome, realized that the film might be shown to hundreds upon hundreds of lobotomized apes and so they rewrote the script to have the characters (Kiki and her cat, Jiji) painfully describe everything they see. Here is the actual dialogue from a scene that was originally dialogue free:

"Where are we going now Kiki?"
"The Clocktower! I bet you can see the whole city from there!"
"there's SO many buildings!"
"There ARE a lot of buildings, yes."
"GASP! Jiji! Look at all the cars!"
"Yes. Lots and LOTS of cars"
"And the MARKET!"
"With much hustling and bustling, yes."
"Oh, Jiji, it's so amazing! And, and just look! Look how many people there are!"
"Too many if you ask me!"

My goodness. So painful. Keep in mind that Kiki is voiced here by Kirsten Dunst.

And to keep an art-blog honest: Here's a piece I finished over the weekend. A variation on the scribble from the last post, this is one of those rare drawings made for no reason in particular:



I thought briefly about putting this up on ebay but then I thought better of it.

An Ordered World

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

Just recently I finished reading "The Discarded Image" by C. S. Lewis. I ordered it on interlibrary loan after a friend had, hmm ...raved is probably not too strong a word. A friend raved about it.

Library loan took awhile, but the book was worth the wait. In his beautifully approachable prose, Lewis describes the medieval worldview. He considers their conception of the cosmos as a work of art unto itself, referring to it as "The Model," and what a model it is. The book was continually, delightfully enlightening because over and again it shed new light on bits of history and art and science and philosophy of all kinds.

To quote one of the Amazon reviews (linked above): "Read this book. You will never see the Middle Ages quite the same way again."

Annnnnd... here's a scribble to keep an art-blog honest:

Got Chesterton?

The illustrious, Ted Schluenderfritz is auctioning this fine illustration featuring G. K. Chesterton's popular clerical detective Father Brown. The illustration, pictured above, shows a scene from The Blue Cross -the first meeting between Fr. Brown and the colorful master-thief, Flambeau. Christmas is coming, Chesterton fans...

And by the way: My friend Bill has a blog that is very interesting to read. That is, when he's not writing about Linux.

(Next up: the Discarded Image, by C.S. Lewis)