JSVB

537 - Elsa Enchanted

2012-02-15T18:12:00.000-08:00

Elsa is another character from MinMax Studio's award-winning videogame "Space Pirates And Zombies". She is a ship's operational officer, second in command to Captain Don. Elsa is, like Don, also a Space Pirate. She is different from Don in that she frequently acts as the moral foundation for her ship. She questions some of Don's seemingly rash decisions, however, she remains fiercely loyal to her crewmates.

According to knowledgeable sources, the original Elsa "failed to hit the HOT button", so my version is an attempt to remedy that.

Once again, my deepest thanks go to MinMax for their gracious permission to tinker with their character set. Please click here and here to see my version of Space Pirate Captain Don.

536 - Two Of Hearts

2012-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

A St. Valentine's Day card for my sweetie, made out of waffles. Happy Valentine's Day!

535 - Cien Pesos, Por Favor

2012-02-13T12:35:00.000-08:00

The other night, I returned from a wonderful two-week vacation to Puerto Vallarta. With an eye towards today, the monthly Ungood Art Day here on JSVB, as a tourist I took the time to sit on the beach and paint rocks for the Mexicans. Above is an example.

The history of this particular rock is rather sad. A couple of years ago, a hurricane devastated the Puerto Vallarta shorefront, damaging local buildings and washing away the esplanade, the famous Malecón. Over time, much of the debris that had been sucked out to sea has been returned in the surf. This rock was likely part of a painted wall.

I chose this rock because it already had blue paint. I borrowed a bottle of typo correction fluid to colour in the white bits and used a marker to draw in the black. It's a mess of artistic stereotypes, with the sleeping Mexican in his sombrero, the waving palm trees, the distant cloud-draped mountains, and the ubiquitous "M"-shaped birds. Unlike many of my Ungood Art pieces, this one was intentionally engineered to be bad. Unfortunately, it's not much different from the painted rocks that the tourists buy.

Cien Pesos, Por Favor. A hundred pesos, please. Ten bucks, and this rock is yours.

534 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part XIII

2012-01-23T23:41:00.001-08:00

Gilding is the process of adding gold to artwork. Today's efforts involved setting paper-thin gold leaf onto my icon. In brief, the steps involved begin with marking out the areas for the gold with yellow ochre, and then painting over those lines with a diluted glue known as "size". The fragile gold leaf is applied to the size much the same way you would apply a decal. It's a demanding technique that requires sharp attention, however, as is the case in much the rest of the art world, there are more difficult, expensive, and convoluted traditional methods of achieving the same effect.

The gold creates a dynamic contrast to the rich colour of the paint. Since I have yet to seal the gold onto the icon, it is too fragile to place on the scanner. I took a photograph instead. The ambient light in the room makes the gilding appear to glow.

533 - Don Of The Dead

2012-01-22T21:49:00.000-08:00

Spoiler Alert! Don the pirate space captain from yesterday's JSVB post (please click here to see that) gets turned into a pirate space captain zombie. It's actually a pretty cool plot twist, although there is more to the story than I am telling here.

I wanted to make zombie Don more disgusting to look at, but this picture gets reduced to the size of a postage stamp. You get the basics with some scabs and the mood lighting.

Thanks to MinMax Studio for their kind permission for me to use the characters from their award-winning space shoot-em-up video game "Space Pirates And Zombies".

532 - A New Don

2012-01-21T19:49:00.000-08:00

This is a replacement image for a space pirate captain named Don. This image is considerably enlarged, as the original is just a postage stamp in size.

Don is one of the characters from the award-winning indie videogame sensation "Space Pirates And Zombies". I must thank MinMax studios for their kind permission for me to give their characters a new treatment.

531 - Year Of The Re-Use

2012-01-20T18:33:00.000-08:00

Gong hei fat choi! It's nearly the lunar new year, or the 4710th Chinese New Year. This will also be a Year Of The Dragon, which the Chinese view as auspicious and risky.

Few risks taken for today's JSVB entry. Shameless, I re-used the little dragon from JSVB Post #140 (please click here to see it). Gong hei fat choi I traced from written text, and the Imperial dragon is courtesy of Lee Boltin.

530 - Tripendicular Wave

2012-01-17T23:40:00.000-08:00

The mighty ship rolls and crests the massive wave. Tripendicular! (a surfing word, meaning better than awesome)

All of my sources were public domain images, with some additional help from PhotoShop.

My wife wanted this image a few days before the Costa Concordia tragedy had occurred, so this is another one of those unfortunate art co-incidences. In no way should this JSVB post be considered to have any connection to the recent maritime disaster off the Italian coast.

529 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part XII

2012-01-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

Now, I am getting closer to finishing this icon. There aren't many details remaining to add. Today, was a lot of fiddly little details: hair, bits of cloth folds, and Christ's blue sash.

It's hard to see them, but I put in fine yellow lines along the edges of the garments. These lines provide underpainting for the gilding. Next week, I plan to slather 24 karat gold all over the icon, an expensive, nerve-wracking, but ultimately beautiful addition.

528 - You're Deer To Me

2012-01-15T23:55:00.000-08:00

I made a page of sketches, making up poses for deer.

Do you like this entry? Please send any Cervidian Medals Of Honour owed to me in care of JSVB.

527 - Baby B&A

2012-01-14T20:58:00.000-08:00

After

Before

I enjoy restoring old photos using PhotoShop. It's a nice combination of detective work, puzzle-solving, and art skill. Admittedly, the "after" picture looks airbrushed; I was working fast.

The big problem was that the picture has been sitting for a very long time in a frame with an oval window in view of the sun. The colour was bleached away over the years into this weird pink egg. I made a custom mask to select out the shape and used that to restore as much colour as I could. However, there's not much colour information remaining in that egg zone. Fortunately, the colours just outside of the egg, the skin tone, the hair colour, the stocking colour, and the dress, were all available for sampling.

After I got the colour back, I erased some folds and stains, and also blotted out some debris on the image. I think it's an improvement!

526 - Two Shots

2012-01-13T22:11:00.000-08:00

Two shots and a miss. Welcome to the first installment of Ungood Art Day for 2012. The thirteenth of every month, I present something that I created that totally went south.

These two sketches were preliminary work for a political cartoon featuring the now-she's-nobody-just-like-the-rest-of-us Carole James, former leader of our provincial New Democrat Party. Please click here to see the finished cartoon.

Preliminary sketches can be pretty ugly, and even by political cartoon standards, these are woofers.

525 - The Legend Of Black Bot

2012-01-12T23:55:00.000-08:00

Yes, even more black robot rants. Please click here to see previous items in this train of thought.

While musing on the topic of why robots tend to depict white people, I tried to come of with a list of famous black robots. So far: Robby The Robot and Simon The Cylon.

The Empire from the "Star Wars" series, strangely enough, is not a big employer of robots. They seem to prefer the human touch, or at least human clones. The few black Imperial robots tend not to look at all like people, unlike, say, C-3P0. I would argue one of the most famous is the little box on wheels that Chewbacca yells at in the Death Star. A very simple special effect, it's obviously a remote control car with some model parts glued on top.

Leave it to Star Wars geeks to come up with a backstory for every blessed frame of every movie. A quick Internet search shows that this creature has a name: MSE-6, or Mouse 'Droid.

I think it's pretty funny that the Empire would take the time and effort to paint every floor, ceiling, and wall of the Death Star black, give all the soldiers crazy masked helmets that are very difficult to see out of, and then pepper every level with an assortment of these little black bots for everybody to trip over. No wonder Chewie gets chuffed.

The MSE-6 is the intellectual property of Lucasfilm, as is Star Wars. The Imperial logo, although you can barely see it (thank you Blogger lossy image compression algorythm), was drawn by Jim Wisniewski, although it is just a copy from some other Lucasfilm material.

524 - Black Robot Blues

2012-01-10T14:09:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've found out more about black robots. Please click here to see JSVB Post #519, where I introduce my idea that there are very few robots designed to look like people who aren't white.

I would consider the most famous robot of colour to be Robby The Robot, whom I have painted above, adding a traditional French Maid's uniform for comedy effect.

I should also point out the newer iRobot® Roomba® models can come in black. I figure a black Roomba® is pretty much the equivalent to Robby The Robot with a feather duster. Maybe the Roomba® is more eager to sweep out dust bunnies from under beds and couches, though.

My friend Tony pointed out that Simon/Number Four from the re-imagined "Battlestar Galactica" television series was a black Cylon. I never watched the program past the first couple of episodes. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, I found that sort of show too hard to watch. Much like Japanese cinema after Hirosohima and Nagasaki, American movies and shows seemed intent to replay that disaster over and over again as either catharsis or entertainment. Either way, it felt exploitative to me.

Today, looking over pages of Internet BG lore, I see that it's also very complicated. Gone are the goofy, clumsy Cylons that can get killed when the child's pet robot dog bites one on the ankle. Modern audiences demand a cybernetic villain with complex motives and behaviours. Somehow, messing with our empathetic responses becomes acceptable television, enough to sell whatever needs to be sold during the commercial breaks. Not that I am complaining, just that I find that I am not understanding the new Battlestar Galactica at all. I get it enough, though, that I can see where a black Cylon would be a good fit for the show.

523 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part XI

2012-01-09T23:43:00.000-08:00

Back to work on the icon. I finally painted over the last of the white areas. The orange parts look garish now, but they will all be covered in gold. The orange underpainting makes the thin gold leaf looke more golden and shiny.

522 - Sins On Date Night

2012-01-07T23:56:00.000-08:00

A date night, this time a fun night out at the old hockey game. The Giants of course, it's not like we could afford the Canucks. We've become used to people all around us paying homage to their smartphones rather than paying attention to the game they paid to see. Please click here to see another JSVB entry on a similar topic.

I think I may have stumbled upon a worse sin than pawing away at a smartphone while enjoying at date. That would be photographing somebody using their smartphone while on a date. But dang it, I was curious. I knew I could snap a picture pretending to take an action shot of the game, have the phone of the lady sitting right in front of us in the corner of the picture, and then blow it up at home in Photoshop. See it all here:

Enhance the image 450% and run it through Photoshop Curves and the ever-useful Unsharp mask. I blanked out the people's names.

XXX'S MESSAGES

XXX: The couple behind us are pretty rad commentators eh?

lol: enjoying it

Another sin on date night: people who talk too much. That would be my wife and I. We talk through movies, we talk through stage plays, and apparently we talk through hockey games. At least the people in front of us seemed okay with that, they called us "rad"! Probably they would be not so okay with the covert photography. And with another sin: blogging about it all. Well, JSVB needs posts.

521 - Bouncing Off The Walls

2012-01-06T23:47:00.000-08:00

A quick illustration of a couple of kids having fun bouncing off the walls of a passenger ship as it wallows in heavy seas. Most kids don't seem to get seasick the way most adults do.

520 - Davidian Sketch

2012-01-04T23:57:00.001-08:00

My sketch study of the famous David figure. Instead of using the Michaelangelo statue as a visual source, I used a da Vinci sketch. The origins of David began as part of a series of commissioned religious pieces by Donatello. Donatello died before he could render anything but the absolute beginning of formative sculpture. The hulk sat for over twenty years before young Michaelangelo, himself not much older than Donatello's first cut into the marble slab, earned the commission to finish the statue.

Leonardo da Vinci sometimes acted as advisor to Michaelangelo, and produced his own sketches of how he thought David should look. Although similar in pose, da Vinci's David differs from Michaelangelo's in several respects, and seems to be a cruder version of the ultimate masterpiece. My sketchwork... cruder still.

519 - No Black Replicants?

2012-01-02T19:41:00.000-08:00

I predict that in the upcoming Ridley Scott science-fiction horror epic "Promethues (2012), the black guy is going to be the android.

Today's JSVB post is designed to see if anybody is paying attention.

Here's what I've been thinking about: in sci-fi movies, shows, and books, you just don't see robots made to look like people of colour. They're white guys. A civilization reaches a high enough level of sophistication, they start to make automatons. Or an alien species wants to infiltrate Earth, so they create a being that looks exactly like a human. In both cases, that artificial person is likely going to be white. Maybe there are some examples I have not yet found. I have seen Asian-styled robots, both very real and in anime form, but is that enough?

Let's take a look at some of the great humanoid robots of the genre:

Maria/Maschinenmensch - Metropolis (1927), white lady (metallic as well)

Gort - The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), silver metallic

Robby The Robot - Forbidden Planet (1957), black (!) metallic... hmmm...

Ash - Alien (1979), white guy, also:

Bishop - Aliens (1986), white guy inside and out
Robocop - Robocop (1987), a white human cop becomes a cyborg

T-101 - Terminator (1984), big white guy, metallic interior

T-1000 - Terminator 2 (1991), white man, woman, silver liquid metal

T-X - Terminator 3 (2003), white woman, silver liquid metal

Was there ever a black Terminator? I do not recall.

C-3P0 - Star Wars (1977-2005) golden metallic, some variants white metal and silver metallic

Roy Baty, Pris, Zhora, Leon, Rachel, Deckard(?) - Blade runner (1982) - all white.

Production notes show that Tyrell (white) was also supposed to be a robot, but the special effects for him did not work.

I was thinking that there was a black robot in The Adventures Of Pluto Nash (2002) with Eddie Murphy, but the android was played by Randy Quaid, definitely a white guy. I think there was another Eddie Murphy vehicle called Meet Dave (2008), where Eddie Murphy literally was the vehicle. He played a one-inch-tall captain who piloted Dave (also Murphy), a human-sized robot meant to blend in with Earth civilization. Dave was black, but I never saw this show, so I can't comment beyond that.

My guess is that black robots frighten Hollywood. The idea of having an African-American actor play a robot could be problematic. Usually, androids are used in science fiction as slaves or at least as tireless unpaid boon companions. Star Trek's Mr. Data (white guy in yellow make-up) explores his place in a human-dominant universe throughout his lifespan; he ends up being treated mostly as an equal. Were Data definitively black, perhaps he would have been percieved differently by audiences, if not his crewmates.

Terrible associations with racial slavery may prevent the black android from making a memorable appearance in science fiction cinema. Could an audience take seriously any enterprise that would recreate a black person as a mechanical servant or slave? I figure that's got to be a tough sell. Still, for shock value (and I expect Prometheus to be shocking), perhaps there is room for a black android in the future.

I took a promotional photo of Harrison Ford as android bounty-hunter Rick Deckard and rotoscoped a promotional photo of Andre Braugher on top. I painted out the picture digitally to make the image look unified. So much for my New Years' resolution to be more careful with the rights to images I post on JSVB.

Braugher, who portrayed the genius-level Homicide detective Frank Pembleton on television, would in my opinion make a really good Deckard if he could have played the role. Was Deckard a replicant, a human android? I put an otherwordly glow in Braugher's eyes to suggest that this might be so.

518 - JSVB: Year Two In Review

2012-01-01T18:42:00.000-08:00

Today is the second anniversary for JSVB. What you see above is a matrix containing every self-created image I have posted to my visual blog. The left-hand tower is my production for 2010, the right-hand tower is what I came up with for 2011. I made 37 fewer posts in 2011 than 2010, but I feel that overall the quality has improved even if my post rate has not. It's the old equation of quantity versus quality.

Still, two years of plugging in posts (which amounts to giving away much of it) seems to be a lot of work for not much of a cause. I have decided, though, that I might as well keep going. At least JSVB fills my sketchbooks, so that's a plus.

2011 has seen some changes for Blogger, the software application that I use to publish JSVB. It's free, so I should not complain. However, Blogger has been making changes, some announced, some not so much. Lately, the new changes favour people who make fast blog posts using their smartphones, but I find them to be awkward for my use. Hopefully, when it comes time to shutter JSVB, it will be on my own terms, and not because Blogger has placed their application beyond my admittedly old-fashioned skill set.

I am happy with most of my posts, but one I regret intensely has to do with Japanese earthquakes. At the end of January, I created two earthquake-themed posts, #295 and #296, which you can see by clicking here and here. Six weeks later, by awful co-incidence, Japan suffered a massive 8.9 magnitude earthquake. Apart from the horror of the event, I did feel awful about my posts. They could be seen as being in very bad taste in retrospect. This was never my intention. I did create a post about my hopes for the rebuilding effort, which you can see by clicking here. Someday, I would like to create a more ornate poster for this theme. If I ever manage to sell any, the money would go to the Red Cross.

Now for some statistics. My Top Ten post list has changed since 2010. You can last year's list by clicking here. Each text highlight is a hyperlink that you can click to see the corresponsing post:

517 - Wii Love Hockey

2011-12-28T23:27:00.001-08:00

After a nice break for the holidays, it's back to the sketchbook. A recent offering of excellent videogames has put a cramp in my productivity, though.

One game was a bargain-bin find, Electronic Arts' all-but-abandoned "Slapshot Hockey" for the Wii, which had been released way back in 2010. Maybe you recall the television commercial with retired hockey legend Wayne Gretzky re-living his all-star career by standing in front of his television and waving the crazy little Wii controller like a hockey stick.

The gimmick to the game, other than that it plays a sweet, fun brand of no-fighting hockey, is that the set comes with a miniature foam hockey stick used for mounting the Wii controller. Once the stick is assembled, you hold and brandish the stick much like you would as if you were a player. You handle the puck, deke with the blade, and fire off your best wrist shot or haul away with a massive slapper. On defense, you can deftly use the crook of the stick to hook your opponent or smash with it like a club to jam the wood into the other player's dental work (no blood, and everyone gets back up when knocked down).

It takes just a minute or two of practise with the stick. In no time at all, you feel like you are a major-league player. You're slipping past the defense with a spin-o-rama and gunning for it up the slot with a wrist snap that zips the puck clean over the goalie's shoulder and into the net, blasting his water bottle. The all-powerful feeling of hockey goodness and mightiness lasts just until you discover that your wife bought a second foam stick controller and wants to play.

With me against her, we duelled on the ice. Hockey is not usually a co-ed sport, and now I know why. Although my wife's charming little Hailey Wickenheiser dance was awfully cute the first time she scored a goal against my team, the charm turned to alarm when she followed it up with five more much like the first. It was all I could do to answer with two measly points of my own.

Curse that I was more interested in Star Trek than the hockey's three stars when I was little! I have a lifetime of booksmarts and indoor leisure to overcome if I am going to ever gain the skill to defeat my wife at Wii hockey.

For a little drawing of Hailey Wickenhiser in a gold medal winning dance, please click here.

516 - Peace And Goodwill

2011-12-25T23:46:00.000-08:00

Peace, goodwill, and very happy holidays to all. Merry Christmas!

515 - Merry Christmas, Baby!

2011-12-23T23:05:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, Baby! This is the last of my Operation Draw Holiday Babies project for 2011. I can always re-use the baby from last New Year's Day for the upcoming New Year's. There are a small number of holidays I missed babies for in 2011, so I hope to draw them all out in 2012.

514 - Eyes Wide Xmas

2011-12-20T23:30:00.000-08:00

Why not make Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) into a cartoon? I've frequently been interested in the idea of sending filmed product into the realm of classical animation. Somewhere on JSVB, I've got fantasy characters of Scully and Mulder ready to go for a Saturday morning X-Files cartoon. While my drawings are too crude, I think the idea would be awesome. Maybe parents with kids would think otherwise, though. Please click here to see JSVB Post #93, which has X-Files character models.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) remains as the gold standard for Christmas cartoons. Filmed years before I was even born, drawn on a shoestring budget with woefully limited animation, it still stands as the most popular Christmas show ever. Residuals for Charlie Brown keep pouring in, making it an unbelievably profitable property given its lowball budget. Producers around the world continually try to match the Charlie Brown magic formula, which is why we get acres upon acres of cheap holiday film. Not much of it seems to be any good, yet Christmas sells almost as well as sex.

That's my thinking: a sexy Christmas film. At least there's no crass commercialism or cloying Santa Claus. Adult audiences would appreciate that. It's one reason why I consider Eyes Wide Shut to be such a spectacular Christmas film. Of course, the dead hookers in New York, the strange and aloof orgies in Republican mansions, and Tom Cruise in general might not come to mind as solid holiday fare as would bell-ringing angel wings, syrupy egg-nog, and Mr. Bean's outsized turkey.

Eyes Wide Shut, love the story or hate it, comes with some of the finest cinematography in the history of film, period. It's such a gorgeous motion picture. Even the minor actors receive a high quality of lighting and camera direction that some A-list stars would never get in their entire careers. To my mind, the perfectionist Kubrick would have made a stunning director of animated films. No stranger to animated special effects, Kubrick pioneered several techniques that earned him Academy Awards. Animators are much more used to working with perfectionist directors than live-action actors, or so I believe.

I started the drawing above in a cartoony style, but in truth, I didn't have a good handle on the character models, so I opted for a more graphic-arts look. If you've ever watched Richard Linklater's superlative animated film "A Scanner Darkly" (2006), I hope that you will see that I tried to emulate that vision. I used an embarrassing amount of Photoshop to post-process the drawing into something that might appear filmic.

513 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part X

2011-12-19T23:52:00.000-08:00

Week Ten on the icon. I am starting on Mary's robes. The last time around, I had little idea of what I was doing, and I had to fix many mistakes. This time, I approached Our Lady's garment with a lot more confidence, although not much more wisdom. The lines look to me a little shaky, but I think I can fix that. I blew out both my spotter and my rigger brushes tonight, which did not help. I will have to figure out a way to fix the damaged brushes or else replace them.

512 - Doll Kicker Motion Study

2011-12-18T19:15:00.000-08:00

I have to admit to being fascinated by the antics of this little boy I saw the other day at the shopping centre, who in boredom and frustration was kicking at his toy Sheriff Woody doll. As a child, I had a great deal of respect for my toys, but I did know other kids who busted theirs up just to watch them break. Were they little psychotics in waiting or just boys acting up?

Trying to avoid making a moral judgement, I applied what I saw of the little urchin in the mall towards a motion study in my sketchbook. I wrote a couple of notes as well. Ten years from now if I look back at this, I will wonder what the blue blazes I was thinking. It's a cruel-looking page in my book, and rather un-Christmaslike, at least in the sense of a happy holiday.

To see another rendering of the Christmas Doll Kicker, please click here.

511 - Red Room

2011-12-17T23:32:00.000-08:00

A mysterious photograph. Look through the thick glass porthole into the red room. What does it mean? You tell me. Maybe it's Christmas-y. Maybe I am too torqued out to draw today. It does not matter. This is what you get.

510 - Kicking Woody

2011-12-16T23:52:00.000-08:00

While I was Christmas shopping yesterday, instead of spending a lot of money, I spent time people-watching. Christmas at the mall is the best time of year to study people, how they move, how they act, and how they react. For a student of animation or human motion, or just as a fellow citizen, this kind of observation can be very educational. I have a lot of fodder for my sketchbook.

Top of the list goes to a little boy and his mother. Both looked affluent and perhaps too upper-class to be in my mall, but there they were. The mother was tall and handsome, and in equal parts she seemed annoyed with her shopping duties as well as by the persistence of her smart phone. She paid no attention to her boy, whose expensive-looking shirt was fully untucked. Clearly he was bored and upset with his experience at the shopping centre. The little urchin was amusing himself by kicking the tar out of his Sheriff Woody Doll.

Just like in Pixar's "Toy Story" movies, the Sheriff Woody doll had a string on his back. You're supposed to pull the string, and Woody will say one of his lines. The boy was using the string as a tether so that Woody wouldn't fly off to Mars every time he was kicked.

I've taken some artistic license. For instance, the hat never came off. I suspect Mom or the butler may have glued it on. I researched the doll on the Internet just now. A Sheriff Woody will set his buyer back fifty dollars, which I think is steep for just a doll. Unfortunately, the talking Woody does not actually say "Thar's a snake in mah boots", and the mall was too clamorous for me to hear if poor punted Woody was capable of speech anymore. Also according to the Internet, the entire head has a tendency to break off at the neck. That did not happen when I was watching, although if it did, it would have been pretty awesome.

Here's a child who either has never seen a Toy Story movie (doubtful), or who has completely missed the point of Toy Story altogether. That's not very surprising; I thought Toy Story 3 did so as well.

509 - InSantaty Claus

2011-12-14T18:13:00.000-08:00

A fact of life for most urban Canadians is that we get a disproportionate amount of news from our nation's media capitol, Toronto. Christmas news from city they call The Big Smoke is especially troubling this year.

A few weeks ago, one of the Toronto school districts banned the use of balls, deeming them unsafe for children. Yes, the ball, the most universal of all kids' toys, swept away from the playgrounds of clumsy Torontonian tykes for their own good. I hear that the decision was eventually amended so that children could indeed play with balls as long as they carried valid permission slips. Way to go, Toronto.

Now, I've heard that Toronto's Eaton Centre shopping mall banished Santa Claus because the jolly old elf has become unprofitable. Now there's something to ponder: only in Toronto would Christmas become so commercialized that they don't even have room for Santa. It turns out that the little "Santa's Village" display in the center of the mall took up too much space that could have been occupied by retail kiosks. The cost-to-benefit analysis concluded that the man in the red suit deserved the boot much the way that Ralphie got treated by Santa himself in that great Christmas movie (partially filmed in Toronto, as it happens). Santa's village has been replaced by a much smaller display where kids use freeware Skype to contact Saint Nick online, presumably in his workshop at the North Pole.

Just don't ask for a soccer ball, kid, because you'll kick your eye out.

508 - Artoo And A Jawa Too

2011-12-13T15:39:00.000-08:00

December brings us to the final, penultimate Ungood Art Day for 2011. Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of Ungood Art this month as I haven't been trying all that hard.

What I do have here is R2-D2 and a Jawa from "Star Wars". Really.

Well, if you look close, you may recognize Professor Sack, and the big 'droid device is a new HEPA air filter. New-ish, anyways, and just a loaner. We are taking part in a science experiment to test air quality, funded by our local University. A bunch of technicians showed up with enough machinery to fill a sandcrawler let alone our small house, and of course the Jawas began to appear not long after. By the time you read this, all of the junk should be gone, the experiment complete.

I can't abide those Jawas... disgusting creatures!

Although the resemblance in JSVB is Ungood at best, R2-D2 and the Jawa are both character properties belonging to the Lucasfilm Star Wars Universe. To see more about Professor Sack, please see JSVB Post #414 by clicking here.

507 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part IX

2011-12-12T23:53:00.000-08:00

I like to think of this episode as "Christ Gets A Bathrobe". I've spent today putting paint to Jesus' garment. The upper tunic can be white, but pure white is too lifeless. I've gone with ecru, an off-white, with white highlights and warm salmon shadows. So help me, the robe looks comfortable, which is more than can be said for many Byzantine clothes.

I also darkened Mary's clothing, which caused my original guidelines to get painted over. Tonight I was hot with the rigger, so I re-painted all of the folds, fiddly work.

This happy little fellow is a "rigger" brush. It's very useful for painting long thin lines, such as an illustration of a ship's rigging, hence the name. Some painters also call these brushes "liners". The long bristles hold a large amount of paint, meaning that the artist can draw a long, smooth line without having to reload. The downside to a rigger is that the tip can be hard to handle. I've been practising and like anything else, the more I've worked with it the more comfortable I am with the brush.

Riggers can be expensive. A quality rigger can cost up to a hundred dollars, but then its line quality is unequalled. That's something to consider the next time you look at the price tag on a piece of art and think its creator is asking for too much money.

506 - Tree For Me

2011-12-11T16:53:00.001-08:00

My wife and I picked out this year's Christmas tree and brought it home. As we were leaving the store, a fellow shopper arrived in one of those miniature Smart Cars. I wish we had dallied long enough to see exactly how he was going to pack a full-sized tree home on one of those. He just about capsized his Smart Car going over the parking lot speed bump, just another hazard of driving a vehicle the size of a steamer trunk.

505 - Pogo Cordon Bleu

2011-12-09T23:03:00.001-08:00

I looked at our fridge leftovers. Lurking towards the back was a pot of fondue cheese that wasn't getting any younger. Who makes fondue anymore? Well, we do, but we had made more than we could eat.

Pour hot, liquid fondue cheese on a cooked Pogo corndog, and the spread sweet European mustard over all. That's a Pogo Cordon Bleu. I found it to be surprisingly tasty, although I don't want to guess what it does to my cholesterol count.

504 - Rose Bokeh

2011-12-07T23:30:00.001-08:00

Boke is the Japanese word for "fog" or "haze". Bokeh is photographers' jargon for an intentionally blurred background with highlights. The two words are closely related.

I don't like to use Photoshop filters all that often, but sometimes it's fun to experiment. My old version of Photoshop won't generate bokeh automatically, but I would bet that there is more recent software that will.

I photographed a rose and then rotoscoped it in Painter. You can see that some of the larger paint strokes survived the ravages of Photoshop's filters, if you look close enough.

To achieve the bokeh effect, I created a duplicate layer of the entire image and set it to overlay. I applied Photoshop's Maximum Pass filter, which does a very good job of breaking down an image into light-coloured squares. Then I took the filtered layer, duplicated that again, and applied Maximum Pass again. This second layer I set to darken, lowered the opacity to around 50% and applied about 10% radial blur. I re-combined the two filtered layers and used the eraser to dig away at any part of the layers that I thought were taking away from the detail of the image. Primarily, I erased the center of the bloom and part of the stem.

There we go, a rose bokeh.

503 - Mother Of Tenderness, Pt. VIII

2011-12-05T23:34:00.001-08:00

Last week, I took a break from working on the icon. This week, there's more to do. Most of it is monkey-work: fairly mindless and easy layers of paint to cover large flat areas such as clothing and the background. Mary gets her traditional purple garment, and baby Jesus sets the trends for the upcoming year in stunning ecru. Watch out for that colour, it's going to be big soon.

I also added Mary's coiffe, which is a shiny blue cloth that completely covers her hair. You can see it quite easily because I zoomed in today's scan to show detail.

502 - Yeoh La Tengo

2011-12-04T23:24:00.001-08:00

In Spanish, the phrase yo la tengo means "I've got her".

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a glamour photo of actress Michelle Yeoh. I thought it was a great shot, and seeing as I like many of Ms. Yeoh's films, I figured that I should draw that shot for JSVB.

Whoever set up the shot really knows how to photograph women. I find this seated pose to be very appealing and dynamic without going too far.

I don't have a credit for the photograph, which means Bad Jeff. I think it originally came from a magazine. Whoever scanned it managed to crop the hands and feet, so I had to draw those back in myself.

501 - Thoughts On 501

2011-12-03T22:17:00.001-08:00

I've pondered on the existence of JSVB, now at five hundred and one posts. I've met my goals regarding this blog, and I wonder how far I should keep going. Not in the aw-jeez what am I gonna do now? way that I see in some blogs, but more of an examination of my ambitions with this thing.

Blogs are designed to function with Internet media, but their popularity has waned in comparison with the popularity of social sites like Facebook and Twitter. A blog tends to be more work for the both the blogger and the audience, and it's slower to publish and get feedback. I don't intend for JSVB to be social, but the social function is built in whether I want it or not. I get statistics on viewers and an idea of who composes my audience.

While I do have many nice people visit JSVB and even a few will e-mail me with comments, by far most of my visitors have come to borrow/lift/steal the artwork. And that's if they are human. Lately, I have also been getting a load of hits from spambots, automated search programs that look for unprotected blogs to infect. Five hundred pages of material does attract that sort of element.

After 500 posts, I have five regular viewers. One hundred posts per viewer, looks like. I've also have around 11,000 hits, which is over 5,000 hits a year. Profitable blogs that earn enough money to live on should have at least ten thousand hits a month. Statistics, therefore, can be depressing. I'm more than nine-tenths away from being profitable after two years' worth of work.

I find the number ten thousand to be very interesting. There's a saying in Japanese animation: "It takes ten thousand tries to get a drawing right". One drawing a day three hundred days out of the year would take me over thirty-three years to render. By the time I am retirement age , I'll finally get the hang of this. That seems to be par for the course for many visual artists.

So, five hundred and one JSVB Posts down, nine thousand four hundred and ninety-nine more to go.

500 - "CMO"

2011-12-02T17:53:00.001-08:00

Welcome to my five hundredth post to JSVB! My intention with the numbering was to provide an easy way to catalogue images. You need a picture of a horse, check out post #4. You need a hamster? Try #177, #413, or #480. Numbering the posts also leads to keeping track of how hard I am working on JSVB, and it provides some milestones. I try to come up with something cultural and interesting every hundred posts.

This is a picture of Port Coquitlam's CMO, or Coast Meridian Overpass. It's a unique bridge in several ways: it was almost entirely paid for out of civic funds (as opposed to provincial or federal money), it completely crosses the second-largest trainyard on Canada's west coast, and it's the longest central-support suspension bridge in North America. It's also the single largest public-works expenditure ever for Port Coquitlam.

I got some decent use out of this picture, as it was displayed in a flyer that was distributed to every household in the City. The mailer folded out into a long flyer, which is why this picture is unusually long and thin.

Please click here to see JSVB Post #471, which shows my original sketch work-up for this piece. I did not think back then I would be able to get the permissions I require to show the final image, but as it turns out I was in the clear all along. I am pleased to present the final image to you for Post #500.

Please click here and here to see a couple of photos I took of the CMO.

499 - All Jeffs Go To Heaven

2011-12-01T23:52:00.001-08:00

For JSVB Post #499, I post conclusive photographic proof of heaven: me surrounded by cheerleaders, yay!

Well, okay, I am stretching my credibility here. Heaven for me is as close as movie night snuggled on the couch under the blanket with my sweet wife.

Why do I have so many cheerleaders clustered around me? They were assembled for the annual CFL State Of The League address at the Grey Cup, for which my wife and I were lucky invitees. The girls were very gracious to pose for this photo.

Stay tuned for JSVB Post #500, which I will publish tomorrow!

498 - Cheeseball Movember

2011-11-30T22:14:00.001-08:00

Here you have it: the official JSVB Movember moustache portrait. You can make this your background screen if you like!

Actually, while it took the entire month of November to grow my moustache this far, it took almost as long for me to come up with a reliable descriptor for my new soup-strainer: "cheeseball". Mine is not a truly scary moustache, but on the other hand, it's not doing my face any favours, either. Cheeseball.

I can't seem to grow any lip hair in my philtrum, which is the anatomical name for the vertical groove that runs from the mouth to the base of the nose. If I trimmed my moustache any more, I'd end up with a Hitlerstache, which would be horrifying. Cheeseball is bad enough as it is. I'm nowhere near a Clooney or the holy grail of moustaches, the Selleck.

"Movember" is now a world-wide charity effort to raise money and awareness for the detection and treatment of prostate cancer. Men are encouraged to grow the best moustache they possibly can starting from November 1 and ending November 30th, which is today. CTV News reports that Canadian men this year have raised over 32 million dollars for Movember, making Canada the undisputed world leader in moustache-related charity work. Anything to make prostate cancer go away, I say.

497 - Woods Hole Kids

2011-11-29T20:47:00.001-08:00

My "Woods Hole" illustration is somewhat unique in that it is a completely digital artwork. I took a digital photograph, played around with the colour and composition, and then digitally drew and painted characters over top.

Digital artwork saves a lot of time in preparation and execution. I don't have to worry about fumes or solvents or waiting for paint to dry. I can also compose or break apart any image into its component elements.

Here, I have created a drawing layer for the characters. I used it as a reference for the painting, and then hid the layer. These are sketches of the children, a boy playing cowboy and a girl serving tea to her teddy bear. I drew them directly into the computer with a stylus, which accounts for the loose lines.

Click here to see the complete "Woods Hole" image.

496 - Roosterville

2011-11-28T23:26:00.001-08:00

Boy howdy, I've been busy! Yet not so much with art for JSVB. I have a small backlog of things to post, especially since I am nearly at Post #500.

What has been keeping me active was the 99th Grey Cup here in Vancouver. We won! That's the short version.

Along the way, I took a lot of photographs. A traditional shot is of our stuffed toy chickens wearing custom-made jerseys for the championship teams. My wife and I were never still for very long this last weekend, so the jerseys were a rush job: The B.C. Li-Hens and the Winnipeg Chicken Cordon-Bleu Bombers.

495 - Return to Woods Hole

2011-11-24T13:24:00.001-08:00

Yesterday's "Woods Hole" picture (click here to see it) looks like this without the kids. It's a photograph that I created some false colours for, and used some Photoshop Liquefy to create a vortex-like, mystical focal point at the end of the path. Then I scrubbed most of the picture with digital paint and painted in a number of extra foliage details using the palette presented within the image.

The name Woods Hole most commonly refers to a small traditional whaling town near Nantucket, Massachusetts. I just like the name. From what I can tell, this picture looks nothing like that region.

494 - "Woods Hole"

2011-11-23T15:27:00.001-08:00

One of my talented author friends wrote a strange little short story. It's about a man trying to escape a disaster that he was partly responsible for. He ends up finding a safe haven with a forgiving group from his childhood. I found the story difficult to undertsand because the central plot point, where the fellow in his childhood meets a mysterious little girl while playing in some deep woods, can be read many different ways. Is the girl real or an imaginary play-friend? While she seems friendly enough, she is also prophetic. Perhaps she is an angel, although the protagonist is not faithful to any religion save for that of his own market share.

I found the image of the encounter between the boy and the girl compelling enough to attempt an illustration, which you see here. I took a photograph I shot locally and rotoscoped it, then painted the characters on top. I think that the image shares some of the strangeness that the story holds. It seems just out of kilter to have a little boy playing cowboy deep in the woods and then encountering a little girl playing at tea party with her stuffed bear. My wife compares it to a reworking of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, since all those things are common themes in Bill Watterson's masterpiece. The main idea seems plausible, just to me unlikely. Yet the woods in the story are a magical location, so anything can happen. At the end of the story, the boy is a man, and he discovers that the girl has never abandoned him, despite his destructive, self-involved lifestyle.

I have many of the details wrong. The hole in the woods is in a much denser, coniferous forest. The boy's favourite play area is under the roots of a massive tree that has tipped over, forming the mouth of a shallow cave. He is surprised to find the girl there playing at tea. I did not know how many teacups to depict. I settled on two and a pot. If there were three teacups, it would be too obvious that the boy was expected to join the tea party, although reading the story in that vein would have had it that he was. Spooky!

493 - Mother Of Tenderness VII

2011-11-21T23:33:00.001-08:00

Progress on the icon today means laying on large swaths of colour. This is a nice change of pace from painting fiddly details for hours.

First, though, I had to erase a number of mistakes. I used Medieval Liquid Paper™, which is just layers of translucent white pigment. Using thick paint would result in a bump, so like most anything else in the icon, I have to use multiple thin layers until I achieve coverage. At the outset, thin layers look streaky, but as they accumulate, the colour will become rich and deep.

The next step is undercoats, paint primers to dull the glow of the white. The yellow primer will make for a yellow background. The ochre undercoat will help Mary's maroon-hued garment stand out. Jesus' garments will be pale blue and gold. The final step will be gold resist, which is a method of painting with gold.

492 - Lions' Colours

2011-11-20T23:44:00.001-08:00

This little critter is wearing the colours of my favourite team, the BC Lions Football Club. Hooray for the Lions, who today won the Western Championship over their rivals the Edmonton Eskimos! The Lions are red-hot right now. I don't believe there is a team in the league that can beat them. Next week, I expect the Lions to prove this out in the 99th annual Grey Cup Final.

For the curious, the photo is one I took the other day of a "wooly bear" caterpillar, which is the larval state of the Isabella Tiger Moth. These creatures are very common in our area, if not most of the world's temperate biosphere at this time. Any day now, many of these little crawlers will form their own coccoons and hibernate during freezing termperatures. In the spring when the air warms, they will hatch to form adult moths. Folktale has it that the wider the orange stripe or the furrier the caterpillar, the worse the upcoming winter will be. Basic studies have shown that these factors are merely genetic variations within the species.

491 - Bird Watching

2011-11-19T18:43:00.001-08:00

Although I have been working on art projects, there isn't enough to show on JSVB, at least not yet.

So, look at the picture of the pretty lady for now, and I will come up with some new art shortly.

490 - Crane Shot

2011-11-15T22:37:00.001-08:00

A female crane flew into the range of my camera viewfinder, and I was fortunate enough to snap this shot:

489 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part VI

2011-11-14T23:32:00.001-08:00

After six sessions of layering pigments, I believe I have finalized the look of the flesh, i.e., hands, feet, and faces. The last step, adding the lightest tones and the "enliveners", which are the little fine-lined edges and details, transforms the face from a mask into a finished piece.

The next step is easy, laying down the base colours for the background and the clothing. After that, comes the next gruelling process of adding the detail to the clothes, and then the final gold resist.

488 - "Laundry Elvis" (With Disclaimer*)

2011-11-13T20:34:00.001-08:00

A couple of days after Hallowe'en, I noticed that our growing laundry pile* looked a lot to me like Elvis Presley:

It's sort of a yellow, cartoony, very old, wrinkled, and fat Elvis, perhaps the way he would look if he appeared in public today.

I've already come down on the side of "not art" for items that I have come across that have aesthetic appeal yet were created accidentally rather than on purpose. Examples are accidental photographs, such as JSVB Post #81 and JSVB Post #85 (please click on the post numbers to see each example). Laundry Elvis creates a new boundary of aesthetics for me, accidental compositions that are also putrid enough to qualify for my monthly JSVB Ungood Art Day.

Laundry Elvis is not Art because it is accidental, or at least the result of lazy housekeeping. (NOTE: You MUST read the Disclaimer at the bottom of this text!!) I awoke that fateful morning and saw Elvis at my bedside. From any other view in the room, this looks like just a pile of dirty clothes. So even the composition was random. As humans, we find it an irresistible behaviour to see the patterns facial anatomy in things that don't have faces: from bits of toast, to rutabagas, to medical scans of testes, to rocks on Mars, we will find eyes, noses, and mouths in almost anything we see. It's just dumb luck that my laundry looks at Elvis from the view from my pillow. Luck, or creepy fate. I decided that if Laundry Elvis isn't Art, it's at least Ungood enough to get its own post on JSVB for today. Perhaps it's even Ungooder than one of my all-time favourite JSVB pic's, that of "Inflatable Elvis" (please click here to see that, and be amazed).

"Cartoon" Laundry Elvis

If you perhaps find it hard to see the face of Elvis in my laundry, I made a cartoon version that might make The King stand out a little more. Again, understand that this isn't a healthy, virile Elvis of the past, but a modern-day bloated and spent elder Elvis with the awesome polyester show suit and the everlasting pompadour hair. I also drew up a schematic showing what the individual pieces of laundry are, should anybody ever decide to make their own Laundry Elvis:

Schematic View of Laundry Elvis Components

*DISCLAIMER (Mandatory) You MUST Read This Disclaimer:

The sorry, overflowing state of the dirty laundry depicted in JSVB Post #488 was fully, completely, and in every sense of the term 100% the fault and ultimate responsibility of Mr. Jeff Shyluk. In no way possible under any circumstances should it be ever said, inferred, hinted, or even the merely whispered that Jeff's wife had anything to do with either the creation, maintenance, or composition of the laundry pile. Clearly, she had no control or initial awareness of the circumstance that it may have come to resemble anything like Elvis Presley, if, in fact, it ever did.

So sayeth and attesteth I, Mr. Jeffrey Shyluk, dated this November 13 (Ungood Art Day), 2011.

487 - How We Remember

2011-11-11T14:10:00.000-08:00

A war veteran collects poppies at the conclusion of the Remembrance Day ceremony. These will be placed at the foot of our local cenotaph.

Last year's JSVB entry at this time has a decent essay on the symbol of the poppy in our changing world. You can see it by clicking here.

486 - Autumn Tone Poem

2011-11-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

The default answer to the question "Should I bring along a camera?" is Yes. If I don't ask myself this question before I head out the door, then I don't take the camera. Today, the light was low and gloomy, not so great for camera work unless I bring a tripod and use a long exposure.

Instead, I ended up drawing what I remember seeing. The colours are fairly true, but the composition is not powerful or thrilling.

485 - Smiling Worms

2011-11-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

"The Smiling Worms" sounds to me like a failed 1990's glam-rock band, or maybe the name of an eclectic porno shop (or the name of a movie about an eclectic porno shop. If it starred Monica Bellucci, I'd watch that). Apparently, Prosorhochmus Keferstein is the scientific name for a rare species of smiling worm. I can't find a picture, and it would cost me $226 to purchase the relevant research article from The Journal Of Natural History.

Why smiling worms at all? If the topic of composting were to come up, surely the worms would smile.

484 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part V

2011-11-07T23:29:00.000-08:00

I slap more paint onto the icon. I am trying to keep the features from swimming laps around each face. The tiny, repeated brush strokes invite me to draw the eyes out of line, pulling the mouth upward and the cheeks and chin downward. I spent half of today correcting last session's mistakes, another half laying down refinements and the last half making new mistakes. That's progress!

483 - My Favourite Toothpaste

2011-11-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

Today's JSVB entry depicts simulated blood. If the sight of blood upsets you, don't scroll down. It's not that bad, though. I've seen more blood in a Steve Martin movie.

Nobody has a favourite toothpaste, just like nobody has a favourite location for the DMV. Toothpaste just is what it is, which is why I figure the companies who make the stuff go to great lengths to add gimmicks to their product.

So my favourite toothpaste was Crest Whitening Expressions Cinnamon Rush. It was discontinued in 2010, I believe. I bought it because it had a strong cinnamon taste, and cinnamon generally does not seem like toothpaste, so that was a mark in its favour.

What endeared me to this toothpaste was that it came in a gooey gel that was very nearly arterial red. A few moments of brushing with this stuff and my mouth would be filled with bright blood-like gunk. Wash it into the sink, and the spittle made me look like I had advanced tuberculosis. Finally, a product that made me look forward to brushing! Did I have gum cancer, or did I just use too much paste? Looking at the Hitchcockian red mess swirling down the drain, there would be no way to know. Imagine formulating a health care product that simulates a gross body discharge, and you have Crest Cinnamon Rush.

Unfortunately, Crest chose to re-tool their product. They pulled it off the shelves for a while, and then returned with a new cinnamon toothpaste that I found to be a bland disappointment. The spicy flavour had been toned down considerably, and the colour was changed to a much less sanguine-looking chalk white. It's just not fun anymore.

482 - "Rosie"

2011-11-04T21:55:00.000-07:00

Today, I sketched a girl named Rosie:

481 - Agitprop Prep

2011-11-02T23:54:00.001-07:00

Here is the pencil prep sketch I made for yesterday's hamster agitprop. Agitprop is an old Soviet word for "propaganda to rally the masses", although usually today the word has unsavoury meaning. You can see the final work by clicking here.

The inked style and pudgy, furry look of the hamsters I owe to the comic-book genius of Italian artist Pericle Giovanetti. He drew a fantastic series based on his cartoon hamster "Max" in the late 1950's. Although his few books have been recently reprinted, they are not easy to find, which is a shame as the fine artwork and gentle comedy are top quality. Max was a childhood inspiration for me, and I enjoy following in Giovenetti's style.

480 - Down With 3670.79! Up With LURVE!

2011-11-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

It's civic election season. Suddenly, all sorts of issues are popping up like pure white mushrooms in a pile of newly-shovelled democracy. I've dug up a political waybill from the League Uniting Rodent Voters Everywhere (L.U.R.V.E.). It seems the hamsters are up in arms about Bylaw 3670.79, which was endorsed unanimouse-ly a few months ago by City Council.

3670.79 prohibits any local home from having more than four rodents at any one time. In Vancouver, the limit is six. Regardless, the typical brood of any hamster pair will likely be from eight to twenty pups. This means that anybody mating their hammy pets can expect a knock on the door by the ~~jackbooted enforcers of state dogma~~ friendly neighbourhood bylaw control officer for ~~extraordinary rendition~~ an informed discussion about the merits of 3670.79.

Now that the smell of election is in the air (or at least the smell of rotting pumpkins), maybe the brave, downtrodden members of L.U.R.V.E. will finally see 3670.79 repealed! Power to the hamsters!! Power to L.U.R.V.E.!!!

EDIT: Recent consultations with a high-ranking City official who refuses to be here named have borne the fact that Bylaws like 3670.79 are only enforced if there are citizen complaints. So, what happens in the hamster ball stays in the hamster ball, at least until cleaning time.

479 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part IV

2011-10-31T23:45:00.000-07:00

I understand that a religious icon does not relate well to Hallowe'en. In point of fact, it's anti-Hallowe'en. Some years, October 31st is parties and hedonism, other years, it's just another work day. Today, I had deadlines to meet and an icon to write. I put on my Star Trek sweater, gave candies to a dozen kids and then got back to work. So, if iconism is the opposite of Hallowe'en, then so is pushing pixels and wrangling mice.

Today's progress includes numerous glazings (of the artwork, not the artist) to tone down the heat of the earth tones and to help the colours blend. The glazing process caused an eye to drift and the chin to sag, so that's going to have to be fixed. You can see some new basic guidelines that were drawn in as an effort to correct the anatomy. Those, too, will get glazed over and will blend into the artwork.

478 - Tink To High Heaven

2011-10-30T23:37:00.000-07:00

Sketch studies of the cartoon dish fairy. I'm very off-model for Marc Davis' high standard, but she's still kind of cute.

477 - Hallowe'en Baby

2011-10-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

Operation Draw Holiday Babies continues. I've set up a line-art baby for Hallowe'en, which is just a couple of sleeps away.

To see some previous holiday babies on JSVB, please click here and here.

476 - Fowl Balls

2011-10-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

The St. Louis Cardinals secured their 11th World Series victory tonight in a thrilling Game Seven showdown. I thought it was a tremendous ball game. The Texas Rangers put on a terriffic show, coming so close to winning.

I've been asked about this year's chicken jerseys. Every year, the stuffed toy chickens that watch TV with my wife and I get custom jerseys with poultry themes. The St. Louis jersey has chickens substituting for cardinals. Birds of a feather, and all that.

475 - Ultimate Rally Squirrel

2011-10-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

Only the intervention of the Ultimate Rally Squirrel could have saved the St. Louis Cardinals from an almost certain loss to the Texas Rangers. Now we are faced with the truly magnificent prospect of a World Series that goes to seven games.

So what is the Ultimate Rally Squirrel? It's the current St. Louis rally craze of holding onto a toy squirrel, but wearing last year's rally craze of Pablo Sandoval's panda hat. Amazing that it worked.

To see the panda hat in action during last year's World Series, please click here.

The background image is the copyright property of Major League Baseball, and has been rebroadcast and retransmitted without their express written consent. If they catch up with me, my next JSVB post might be from Statesville Prison, along with Thames the Butler, Martin, Dutch Gunderson, Lana, and Sally Decker...

474 - DFv2

2011-10-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

The Dish Fairy, Version 2 (Dfv2). I heard that the previous fairy (click here to see her) was not fairy-like enough. No wings, especially. So, I tried making her look more like the stuff you'd see out of Hollywood. An improvement, but Marc Davis I am not.

473 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part III

2011-10-24T23:41:00.000-07:00

Today, I worked on the new icon. After laying down the sanquir, a dark green base coat for the skin tone, I start adding the warm skin tones. The darker tones go on first, and then lighter tones layer on top of those, much like real skin.

The trick, I find this time around, is that the faces are much smaller than the previous icon, so the brush strokes are smaller. It's too easy to paint outside of the boundaries. Towards the end, I was fighting the paint and the brush.

At this point, the mask-like appearance isn't a bad thing, as I am laying bright colour on top of dark. A richer selection of colours will add more life to the skin tone, and glazing will smooth out the harsh gradients.

472 - "The Dish Fairy"

2011-10-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

I've been busy. However, JSVB needs entries, so I took some time to draw a quick favour. Here is a small print poster for the Dish Fairy, who is no longer washing dishes by magic. I'm thinking I could improve on the art and the layout, but I think it gets the idea across, which is all that is important right now.

The sweet irony is that I personally seldom do the dishes.

471 - Blue Bridge 72

2011-10-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

A quick, fairly conventional sketch layout using somewhat non-conventional technique. I doubt that I will be able to post the finished piece.

470 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part II

2011-10-17T23:46:00.000-07:00

The second painting session for the new icon. I skipped painting on Thanksgiving. I didn't want to get acrylic in the turkey stuffing.

Here we can clearly see the gilding, which got messy around the edges. That will be fixed later. I did put down a guide for the halo.

Also, I got a start on the underspending, which traditionally is a dark olive green, sort of.

469 - Mice, Again

2011-10-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, more sketches of cartoon mice characters. None of these guys have much use, at least not yet.

468 - S.E.5 Sketch

2011-10-15T23:54:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been immersing myself in the lore of the World War One fighter plane. The stories are by turns beautiful and tragic, exhilirating and horrifying.

I made a quick sketch of a British S.E.5, which strikes me as one of the more iconic-looking fightercraft, apart from those of the "Red Baron's Flying Circus", including the famous red Fokker triplane. Well, two wings are easier to draw than three, although I feel that I butchered their perspective in this case.

467 - Bottle Map Of Manhattan

2011-10-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (JSVB Ungood Art Entry #23) was my wife's birthday. We had a little party. At the end, we were left with what looked to me like a map of modern-day Manhattan made out of empty booze bottles. Is it art? No, but empties are a common enough by-product of the artistic process.

Here we see Limoncello, Amaretto, Grand Marnier, Saskatoon Berry Schnapps, Raspberry Tequila, Orange Bitters, some cheap sparkling wine and a local Merlot. Not shown are Canadian Club, Vermouth, Sour Apple Liqueur, Sambuca, and Kahlua, on account of they were not emptied.

DISCLAIMER: Kids, don't try this yourself! Alcohol is bad for young people whose brains are still growing. A rule of thumb: if you're name isn't on a mortgage somewhere, you probably shouldn't be drinking.

DISCLAIMER 2: Most of these bottles were fairly close to empty by the time we got to them for the party. If they had been full, I wouldn't have been able to post to JSVB.

TRIVIA: A Manhattan is a cocktail. Two parts whisky to one part vermouth with a splash of bitters and an optional cherry. I like it served chilled, shaken like a martini and strained, others prefer it on ice. Either way, a Manhattan is served cold.

TRIVIA 2: Despite having all of the ingredients at the party for a Manhattan, we didn't make a single one.

466 - Venus Has A Sister

2011-10-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

Here is the companion piece to last month's Ungood Art post. We see that Venus has a sister, and like myself, she's a little cracked.

Please click here to revisit what may arguably be the peak of the JSVB Ungood Art experience, "Grey Venus Rising".

465 - Minestrone Warrior

2011-10-11T22:38:00.000-07:00

On-demand minetsrone soup, that's what life is like in the big city in the new millenium. I had some stock on hand, and my wife harvested some fresh vegetables from our garden plot. Together, we made savoury minetsrone.

Minestrone isn't a complicated soup, it's one of those things that you throw together out of left-overs, so there isn't a specific recipe. You do need chicken stock, tomatoes, and some other vegetables.

JSVB Post #80 details how you can make stock. Although my recipe is for beef, all you need to do replace beef bones with left-over chicken carcasses to get chicken stock. Click here to learn more about my stock.

Heat your stock (at least 4-8 cups) to simmer in a large pot. While you do this, you can chop up your vegetables. I used carrots, onions, celery, cabbage, and green beans. Fry these under medium heat for about ten minutes in a pan with about a tablespoon of oil. Remove from the pan (dump them into the stock), then chop 6-8 Roma tomatoes and a clove of garlic. Fry these as well. Fry the tomatoes until the liquid starts to boil out and the flesh breaks up easily when stirred, probably around 20 minutes. Throw all of the vegetables into the stock. I added about 1/2 cup of pizza sauce as well. I had some home-made stuff left-over, but I figure you can use store bought sauce if you watch the salt content.

Season with salt, pepper, lemon juice, oregano, rosemary, and sugar. I'd estimate maybe a teaspoon of each, but add more or less according to taste. Finally, add some good quality basalmic vinegar, which is my secret ingredient. Again, maybe around a teaspoon, although it's easy to overdo basalmic vinegar, so be careful.

Simmer for an hour or so. If you want pasta in your soup right away, throw in some shells about half an hour before you are done simmering. If you wish to serve the soup later, boil up the shells in fresh water and put the cooked, strained, and cool-rinsed noodles in the soup when you want to serve it. Otherwise, the pasta will overcook.

Mangi, Mangi!

464 - Exit The Yankees

2011-10-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

Thus endeth the season for the New York Yankees, so sayeth the Detroit Tigers. Not that I am a big fan of the Tigers, just a very big non-fan of the Yankees. Besides, post-season baseball has been good so far, despite my lack of care or knowledge about most of the teams who are racing for the pennant.

463 - Thanksgiving Baby

2011-10-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

It's a little early for Thanksgiving here in Canada, but I needed a baby graphic ready before the long weekend. Informally, I call this "Project Baby Draw". It's my wife's idea: eventually I'll have enough festive illustrations of babies to cover the major holidays in a format suitable for colouring.

To see another baby, please see JSVB Post #278 by clicking here.

462 - "Lubarq"

2011-10-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

Here is a sketchbook effort I coloured a little. It's another science-fiction piece, sort of a strong, simple mutant type. I picked up the name "Lubarq" from an online random sci-fi name generator. There aren't many Lubarq's on the Internet these days.

461 - Mother Of Tenderness, Part I

2011-10-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

Today, I've started to write another Byzantine style icon. Again, this one will be of Mary, but this time I also get to have her holding Jesus. This will add considerable complexity to the piece. I will have a larger colour palette to work with, and I will have to learn to deal with hands and feet.

Of course, there will also be more gold, much more than before. Today, I started the gilding process, which is the first step in any icon. While being a far from proficient gilder, I found the effort easier this time around, despite the astronomical price of the gold (although there's maybe five dollars worth of gold in the image so far).

Steve, our highly experienced instructor took this picture of me getting started in class.

To see a finished icon I have written, please click here.

460 - Join White Squadron!

2011-10-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

"Join White Squadron! Yes! White Squadron! First into battle, and first to find replacements for those who went into battle first!"

My wife was searching through some old files and came across this sketch I made back in 1999. It's a picture of a valiant white corpuscle, a single-celled organism in our bloodstream that ferrets out and destroys disease. White Squadron refers to the whole elite corps of white corpuscles in our bodies, and not ever to some kind of nasty white supremecist propoganda.

The quote is in fact a total rip-off of the "Red Squadron" recruitment poster in Ace Azzameen's room in the LucasArts videogame Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (1999).

I've drawn warrior corpuscles before. Arguably, the worst of my JSVB Ungood Art was BraveHelperTCell, which I drew when I was really sick. This sketch isn't much better. I like the concept of drawing white corpuscles as great warriors, but I have yet to perfect the art.

To see BraveHelperTCell, please click here and be amazed.

459 - Brave New Stadium

2011-10-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

"Roof!" He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and blink his eyes. "Oh, roof!" he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. "Roof!"

-Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Last night, I attended the opening game of the BC Lions football team in the newly renovated BC Place. Here is a picture of my friend Steve cheering. Above, you can see the spectacular retractable roof which was open to the cool evening sky.

Although the entire stadium received extensive remodelling, the new roof is the focal point. Where before the BC Place dome was permanently closed, now it can be opened and shut something like the iris of a gigantic eye.

Despite a price tag of well over five hundred million dollars, the new BC Place should prove its worth to our region as a massive magnet for sport and culture. Still, that price tag is very steep considering the size and use of the stadium. Since BC Place opened for business in 1983, it has rained only sixteen times for twenty seven seasons of Lions home games.

Oh, yes, and the Lions won! Victory! The CFL 99th Grey Cup championship game will be held here at BC Place on November 27th, 2011. We'll see you there!

For another JSVB post about BC Place, please click here.

458 - Text Goes Here

2011-09-30T15:12:00.000-07:00

I created for myself a fun, funky letterhead for the purpose of begging for money.

The text is called "lorem ipsum". It's randomized latin words from a textbook by Cicero around 45 BC. Lorem ipsum is nonsense placeholder text so that you can figure out what the intended real text should look like. It's better than writing "Text Goes Here."

457 - "The Facility"

2011-09-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

On the top of Burke Mountain in the heart of the Simon Fraser University endowment lands, deep within the forest hunkers what I call The Facility.

The Facility is a cylindrical cement construct. It's been there for decades. As you can see, it's getting weatherworn. There are no visible doors or windows to this place. Despite its remote location, the grass around The Facility remains trimmed, no doubt by a lethal kick murder squad operating ultrasecret black lawnmowers. There is a safety railing on top, presumably to prevent people standing at the roof edge from falling. How anybody can access the roof without scaling the wall is a mystery.

And so is the untold purpose of this singular building.

456 - Minus One Million Style Points

2011-09-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

A somewhat disturbing, possibly tongue-in-cheek, probably unscientific Internet poll suggests that Vancouver is one of the least well-dressed cities. Leave aside issues of poverty and that judging people by their clothes is highly superficial; it's true. Vancouverites don't know how to dress for success. If I show up at a restaurant wearing a basic sport coat and decent trousers, I get treated like I am a visitor from another planet.

The soaring popularity of hockey jerseys plus the seductive and available comfort of Lululemon clothing lines leave our citizens at the bottom of the fine fashion barrel. Tough luck that Milan doesn't have an NHL franchise or a summer that lasts two weeks out of the year, or else they'd be us.

I am not trying to set myself up as the Omega Man in a world filled with fashion zombies, as I have enough questionable choices on my clothes horse. But I can wear simple, classic fashion when I feel I have to.

It could be worse. We could be like Fashion Cowboy, the only buckaroo in Metro Vancouver who knows what the word "shantung" means (hint: it's a type of rough silk cloth). To see the Fashion Cowboy, check out JSVB post #120 by clicking here.

455 - Autumn Cranes

2011-09-26T23:54:00.000-07:00

I believe I have found photo-artistic merit in a pair of loading cranes at the dockyards. For human scale, those are stairs for longshoremen leading up the leg of each crane.

454 - Where She Been?

2011-09-24T17:14:00.000-07:00

For today's JSVB post I revisit the topic of the Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl, hopefully for the last time. There is no frontal nudity, however the subject matter is intended for mature audiences only. Scroll down only if you are allowed to see adult content!

We are getting close to the new ~~Vancouver~~ ~~riot~~ NHL season. I was wondering how my favourite hockey mascot fared during the summer. I refer, of course, to the mildly famous Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl who showed the entire nation her endowments during the dying minutes of a playoff game against the San Jose Sharks. So, what was she up to during the off-season?

Maybe she visited the dedicated volunteers who cleaned up after the 2011 Canucks Riot, you know, to give them cheer.

Perhaps she visited the barber shop where dejected Roberto Luongo got his postseason "victory beard" shorn.

Here, I've depicted her visiting the sick children at the Canucks Place hospice. Well, maybe not. There's no way I am going to draw Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl lifting her jersey for a bunch of kids!

The most likely thing Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl had to do this summer was explain to her parents what the blazes she was thinking at the hockey game that night.

So, here's to the new Canucks season, and let's see if they go all the way this time. As much as I appreciate the talent of the Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl, and as tired as I am already of the too-tight bodysuit antics of The Green Men, I hope this year the Canucks find a fan mascot the whole family can appreciate.

For other JSVB posts on the Drunk Canucks Flasher Girl, please click here and here. Please note that both posts feature some mature content.

453 - Scannergeist

2011-09-23T23:31:00.000-07:00

Scannergeist, or ghosts in my scanner. Not real ghosts, of course, whether or not you believe in them.

A while ago, I repaired the broken spine of my current sketchbook with duct tape. Some of the adhesive made it onto the glass of my tabletop scanner. As you would expect, I simply used Photoshop to erase the smudge from several weeks of JSVB posts. Today, the smudge went across a drawing, so I resolved to clean it out.

My wife ran a special cleaning cloth over the glass while I pressed the scan button to allow more light on the subject. The result was this image, which shows what the scan head sees as it swept past my wife's hand. This looks so cool, it is pre-empting my intended JSVB post, which I hope to upload tomorrow.

Way back in the old days, animators would use photocopiers to squash and stretch their drawings. If you knew how to time the movement, you could shift the artwork on the glass by hand as the light bar moved underneath. Then, you'd get some interesting, transformative result. You can still do this using a photocopier or a flatbed scanner. It's interesting and fun! Nowadays, artists just use Photoshop to achieve the same effect, but with greater precision.

Below are some examples. I took yesterday's JSVB sketch of Sergeant Penny and transformed the scan. On the left, I stretched her by moving the drawing as the scanner operated. On the right, I took a pristine scan and made roughly the same transformation using tools in Photoshop. Neither method makes for a pretty Penny, but in a pinch and with a steady hand, you can make decent squashes and stretches without using computer applications.

Moved by hand.

Transformed using Scale and Liquefy.

Original scan.

452 - Sergeant Penny Of SHAPE

2011-09-22T23:45:00.000-07:00

From what I know of creative writing, writers sometimes play games to challenge their imagination. Artists do the same thing, although graphic art often requires more dexterity and less imagination than writing, in my view. Artist exercises tend to bulk up the connection between the eye and the hand, and often leave the imagination out of the loop.

I found in one of my art books an exercise by Will Eisner. Will Eisner's books in my opinion focus more on the imagination than on dexterity. Burne Hogarth tends towards the opposite. In any case, the Eisner exercise has the artist create a full body pose based on a random set of circumstances pulled from a matrix.

I rolled CHALLENGING-MILITARY-WOMAN WALKING-FROM A FRIGHT. The result is Sergeant Penny, above.

James Bond fans will recall that SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) is the operational command for NATO. Sergeant Penny was transferred to SHAPE to act as executive secretary for Col. Drake. Drake is handsome in a hard-jawed way, and attentive to Penny's charms, perhaps to the point of distraction. However, he retreats into his own dark space with mention of the secret file room in the east wing. Certainly, Drake would never believe in the wild stories of ghosts that have haunted the file room since the days of the Cold War, but then how else to explain the flickering lights, the icy temperatures even with the heater on full, the disembodied groaning noises, and above all, the mysterious disappearance of Sergeant Wulreich, Penny's predecessor?

Penny does not believe in ghosts, either, but she refuses to let the matter rest. Gathering her courage, she seeks out the far corner of the east wing. Are those glowing red eyes past the microfiche stack? Or the elaborate ruse of an as yet unseen Communist spy gambit?

I kind of riffed on of Eisner's poses for Sergeant Penny. I also Spielberged the gun out of her hand and replaced it with a flashlight. The writing on the top of the image is just notes in my sketchbook, and have no real meaning.

451 - Inchwormie

2011-09-19T23:41:00.001-07:00

One inch per second is 0.5681 miles per hour, and this little fellow easily hit speeds of almost up to 0.569 m.p.h. Blistering! That's 0.914 kilometers an hour, if you are keeping track in metric.

I think it's quite something how this little inchworm sports a colour scheme that so closely matches the center of the sunflower. In a moment, he's completely hidden.

450 - "Terry Fox On The Far Shore"

2011-09-18T23:25:00.001-07:00

Terry Fox stands on an uncertain shore. Knocked down but not beaten, he arrives in St. John's, Newfoundland in April of 1980. He is a cancer survivor, but he has lost his right leg to osteosarcoma. He has trained himself not just to walk but to run on a crude artificial leg. Not everyone has come to believe that he can do what he wants to do.

The beach is rocky and polluted. Even the more sure-footed tend to avoid walking right up to the oily, freezing water. He dips his artificial leg wearing an Adidas track shoe into the Atlantic Ocean, then turns to face the marathon he will run today. He wants to run across the entire Canadian nation, and again dip his leg in the far shore.

One hundred and forty three days later, Terry Fox has run as far as he can, almost to the western border of Ontario in central Canada. The cancer has returned. Ultimately it will claim his life. Terry reaches his far shore.

Although Terry Fox cannot, we continue the fight in all our own little ways.

What was Terry Fox thinking, about to take that first step? I drew this pencil sketch in an effort to find out. A few years ago, I stood on the same beach as Terry Fox, at the monument that marks the very beginning of his Marathon Of Hope. Please click here to see JSVB Entry #209, one of my most popular posts, and find out more.

Although Terry Fox made some beautiful and compelling speeches along his route, he likely had little to say to begin his journey. He groaned out loud when he took his foot out of the water and saw the massive steep hill he had to climb just to get out of St. John's Harbour.

Several months ago, Blogger statistics informed me that people were searching for the answer to "Why did Terry Fox dip his foot into the ocean?". I thought that would be a worthy follow-up to my previous Terry Fox entry, and I had an elaborate graphic visual in mind. Eventually, I decided a simple pencil sketch might be better, as several municipalities are planning to upgrade their Fox memorials, and they have some exemplary designs.

I did write to the Terry Fox Foundation, just to make sure somebody knew why Terry chose to get his artificial foot wet. Donna White from the Foundation replied:

"Terry’s goal was to dip his artificial leg in to the Atlantic Ocean to mark the beginning of his Marathon of Hope and to then again repeat this same thing at the Pacific Ocean when he returned home to British Columbia and to celebrate the end of his amazing journey. "

Today was the 31st annual Terry Fox Run for the cure for cancer.

449 - Tokarev's Piece

2011-09-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

I don't particularly like guns. Nor do I draw them very often. I do pay attention to them, however. I took a sketch I drew some time ago of a Tokarev TT-33 handgun and colourized it.

The TT-33 was a World War II-era Soviet-made sidearm. It would have been favoured by the Eastern Bloc mercenaries hired to take down Ian Fleming's James Bond. White dinner jacket with a blood red carnation in the lapel, fez, and a dark moustache would have been optional dress, at least until Labour Day.

448 - Twitter Background Template

2011-09-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

Another day, another template. This one is for a Twitter background. Exactly as I have absolutely no interest in using Facebook, I also do not want to use Twitter. What possible use can I have for tweets when my focus is on graphics? A picture is worth a thousand words, so goes the saying.

Yet here I am again designing templates for social media. As cryptic as I find the setup for Facebook, Twitter is positively byzantine in my opinion. The Twitter interface is designed for ease of use for text, but not for graphics. Twitter employs a "floating" menu system which allows their text boxes to conform to a variety of screens, from high definition widescreen televisions, to handheld smartphones, to wireless tablets, to old school cathode-ray tube monitors.

How this affects the graphic designer is that he or she must create a template that fills the screen but averages out where the floating menus may go. That's what I believe this template does. You can put contact information or logos in the boxes anywhere to the left of the three vertical lines. The floating menus should cover up most of the Photoshop-style gradient.

Or you can enjoy this piece as minimalist abstract artwork that took me a lot longer to put together than you might think.

447 - Facebook Banner Template

2011-09-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not on the Facebook social media site, nor do I plan ever to use it for myself. However, from time to time, I do work for people who use Facebook. I find Facebook difficult in part because of all of the background research one has to perform to be able to use the product correctly. A case in point is the Facebook banner system which changed recently but which I feel was not widely announced.

Previously, banners could be 200 x 600 pixels. Facebook has suddenly changed the dimensions to 180 x 540. This makes the old banners illegal, either causing cropping faults or page errors. After some research, I found out how the new regime works, and in an almost unbelievable act of charity, I will pass on my findings. I am also including a real-size template you are free to use for your own banners.

To begin, 180 x 540 is the maximum banner size. You cannot have a banner that is more than three times tall than it is wide. Nor can you use banners with dimensions that have odd-numbered pixels (i.e. 179 x 539). You may have smaller banners if you wish.

The Facebook banner is built around what I call the "hot square", although I do not know what the Facebook engineers call it, if anything. On default settings, Facebook will crop your banner to a 180 x 180 square exactly in the center of the image. Formerly, this used to be a 200 x 200 square, which makes sense as many social media sites use a 200 x 200 square image for avatars (your personal picture). Now that the banner has shrunk, so has the hot square. For maximum readability, or if Facebook changes to defaults without your input, you should fit the most important part of your banner within the hot square. That way, if Facebook re-crops your banner, it can still be readable. You can usually adjust the crop manually within Facebook, after you have uploaded your image.

There exists around the edge of the image a "gutter" which is 17 pixels wide all the way around. The gutter is the dark part on my template. This gutter is to account for any inaccuracies that Facebook may exhibit when cropping your image. While you are free to use this space, I strongly suggest not allowing text or any important graphics to reside within the gutter space. Anything in the gutter has a chance of getting cropped.

Finally, you will want to keep your file size extremely small. Try to avoid exceeding 20 kilobytes, which is asking a lot. Facebook uses an undisclosed image compression algorithm which is very lossy, meaning that it will distort your colours and make your image blurry if it is too large. Facebook will do whatever it takes to make your banner conform. The smaller your image is, the less compression Facebook will apply to it.

Your best bet is to convert your image to 256 Indexed Colours, and then save as a .PNG file. That's what I did for my template. If you have to use a .JPG, you may have to experiment a little. Likely, Facebook will compress a banner that is saved at full .JPG quality. Even at 50% quality a .JPG can suffer. Probably 30% may be okay, or you may have to go as low as 10%! Watch the file size: as you approach 20 kB mark, you should see less degradation in Facebook. The other alternative is to save as a .GIF. How your moral compass swings may affect your choice to use .GIFs, for until the year 2004 the .GIF format was under legal dispute. Users should now be free to use older .GIF compression technology, but newer .GIF forms may be under legal protection. Use at your own risk; I simply avoid .GIF as much as I can.

Avoid using fancy blend modes in your graphic, such as complicated drop shadows or gradients, as the Facebook compression may turn them to mush. Simpler is often better, and clean, crisp images will capture the most attention.

I wish I could take credit for coming up with all of this, but that would be a lie. I credit Mr. Kieth Heustis of Clear River Advertising & Marketing, and also his friend Kathy Burckhardt for cooking up a concise method for creating a functional Facebook banner.

446 - "Grey Venus Rising"

2011-09-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome once again to Ungood Art Day on JSVB, traditionally the 13th of every month. This also happens to be my thirteenth ungood Art presentation, for which I've prepared a doozy.

Today, I present to you the grandiosely titled "Grey Venus Rising".

What I recall of the construction of this piece was that some years ago I had the opportunity to work with modelling clay and a nude model. I remember thinking that the model's poses were far too benign for an artist of my calibre, so I set to the task of improving them in my sculpture. Although Grey Venus has a certain abstract charm, she also has certain abstract proportions, musculature, and facial features that put her closer to the "I made an ashtray in art class" node of the clay-modelling axis, and farther from, say, the "I successfully emulated the Venus de Milo" node.

My normal disclaimer for nude art stands: in no way does this work represent anybody that I know by name, and that the model was anonymous.

Another disclaimer: watch out next month, because Venus has a sister! I'll show her then, unless I happen to make a bigger art blunder in the next four weeks.

445 - Gatherers' Sketches

2011-09-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

After months about complaining about the weather, it's nice to be able to get outside with my sketchbook. The local animals are busy harvesting their ripening produce. I've documented a Steller's Jay triumphant with one of my wife's blueberries. Elsewhere, a manic squirrel has been hauling away green crabapples from one of our neighbour's trees and burying them in our yard.

444 - V-K the Lumpenproletariat

2011-09-06T23:54:00.000-07:00

"Stop right there, pal! You're not cop, you're lumpenproletariat," growls Bryant, the nominal boss to bounty hunter Rick Deckard. His threat is as menacing as it is un-politically-correct. He doesn't use the word lumpenproletariat, though. Leave it to the Germans to come up with a word that means what Bryant meant, equally nasty, but at least not insulting to modern audiences.

In the "Blade Runner" movie (1982), Deckard uses a V-K machine, the Voight-Kampff test (spelled Voigt-Kampff in the original 1968 book, if anybody cares), to check if people are androids, or vice versa.

I have a V-K test to see if you are a proletarian, one of the masses who sell their labour until they are eventually retired. This is in honour of Labour Day, the Celebration of the Working Person, which was yesterday.

It's only one question. Did you get paid a bonus to work on Labour Day?

If you answered yes, sorry, you're likely as anything to be a prole.

Your employer was guilted into playing you extra to work on this particular long weekend simply because it's supposed to be in honour of the common worker. In union labour terms, this is called working a "superstat": a statutory holiday that pays off at 2 ½ times the going rate or better. There are three superstats: Christmas, Good Friday, and Labour Day. Why these three days? Go ask a unionista.

In any case, non-proles don't get paid bonuses to work superstats. Either you're a big wheel Eldon Tyrell with a salary that supercedes superstats, or you are Roy Baty rabble. Either way, what bliss.

The preceeding JSVB entry was presented to you by the Shimago-Domínguez Corporation: "Helping America into The New World".

443 - Night Skunk

2011-09-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was heading for bed, I noticed that the motion-sensing light came on in our back yard. Here was a large skunk cavorting on the lawn.

442 - The Naughty Schoolgirl

2011-09-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

I read on another artblog that every artist should have a drawing of a naughty schoolgirl in their portfolio. So, here's my concept:

441 - Plumbing The Depths

2011-09-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

We broke the tap on our bathroom sink. The tap was old, so there was no surprise.

What was vexing were the repairs made under the sink made by the previous owner of our house. All of the fixtures were fastened so tight that even the Incredible Hulk would complain that they were hopelessly stuck.

Worse still, the pipes were altered in such a way so that it was impossible to operate the water cutoffs. Risers, drains, pipes, and stopcocks created a Gordian knot of hardware beneath the basin. I've replaced taps on my own before, but this job was on a whole new magnitude. We resorted to calling in a handyman, who also puzzled over the bizarre plumbing.

Together, we hit upon the solution of installing a new stopcock past the stuck cutoff valve. It looks like the repair ought to hold!

440 - Coloured Flying Cars

2011-08-31T23:56:00.000-07:00

I've coloured in the flying cars from my JSVB post a couple of days ago. At some point, I will cut them out and composite them into the animation I am planning.

To see the original flying car sketches, please click here.

439 - Background Check

2011-08-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

I've been working at throwing my futuristic city background into a new animation, my plan all along. All I've got to show for it so far is the inclusion of a tower in the forground and a camera move.

It took me all day just to do that! Flipbook is awesome software, but the documentation and interface seems to be turned just thirteen degrees towards the obtuse for me. Once I figure out the trick, it's easy, but figuring out the trick in the first place is very heavy going.

If I was doing the camera move by hand, it would have taken about the same amount of time, using one of the old-style multi-plane cameras. Two minutes to set up and take down each exposure times three hundred frames equals six hundred minutes, or ten hours. That's what this little film cost me today. The next one I set up will take ten minutes, or less.

There's more to do: add flying cars, animated lights, effects, and an audio track. I am checking each step as I go to make sure I understand the production flow. Then I have to figure out how to upload a higher resolution version of the final product.

438 - "Dude, Where's My (Flying) Car?"

2011-08-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

Like many people I know, I am waiting patiently for the big auto companies to release a flying car for public use. From time to time I also draw them, although I am not all that big into drawing cars, and I probably should use a ruler more often.

I don't think I'll ever work up enough money to buy a flying car, nor the nerve to pilot it.

These sketches are necessary monkey work for myself because I want to composite some flying vehicles into the futuristic city scene I created a couple of days ago. These designs seem to me derivative of others seen in movies and videogames. I'd rather have aircars that look too familiar as long as they are quickly recognizable as flying futuristic vehicles. I don't want to invest hours coming up with a technically outstanding design that looks in the final run like a dog turd hovering in the sky.