1451 - The End Of 2017

Well, here we are at the end of another year.  JSVB was started January 1st 2010, so I have eight years' worth of material to recall.  Tomorrow, I'll collect the items for 2017 and provide a retrospective look at that year.  

 I'll see you in 2018! 

1450 - Pin Up Sketch II

Well, I made a mistake that over-wrote some of the iterative saves of my file.  I had to re-create about an hour or so of missing work, and then I shaded with hatching the main values on the girl.  I thought about making the lines much darker, which is why I switched her from a blonde to a brunette.  The black is way too dark, though.  What I plan to do is use the solid black parts as Magic Wand selections in Photoshop to be able to mask those areas (blocking out all the rest of the drawing thereby preventing any lines from straying) and shade them with some kind of pencil.  I'll delete the black and be left with proper shading.

1449 - New Year's Pin-Up Sketch

Yay, I am drawing again!  I thought I'd work on a pin-up girl for New Years, since I like drawing pin-ups.  

 

1448 - The Starbucks Effect

Did you see any nurses on Christmas Day?  Were they cranky?  

I discovered that nurses (and by extension many essential service people) were ornery at work on Christmas.  Union labour gets a substantial bonus to work on this holiday, and a sizeable number of workers don't celebrate Christmas, yet the ill cheer was unilateral.

Then I also discovered that all the Starbucks coffee shops were closed for Christmas.  The nurses were irritable because they had headaches from caffeine withdrawal.  

"Could you not make your own coffee on Christmas?" I asked, naïve as some twig-legged fawn in an old Disney movie.

"Ghrrrahrrr!" was the reply.   

 

1447 - "This Is For Zhora"

Please click the picture to embiggen.

"Jeff, I need a Christmas card I can e-mail," my wife says.

"How about a holiday photo of our hamster?" I suggest.

Zhora the hamster is notorious for being very, very active.  I've tried dozens of times to take a decent picture of her, and I can say with all honesty that is one is one of the best.  

I made a nice Christmas banner to enliven the photo and I even wrote a Christmas poem (think of Nat King Cole's Christmas Song... Chestnuts roasting on an open fire... etc.):

Camera’s pointing at the chesterfield
Hamster is posing like a pro
Christmas cheer is what we feel
Shooting this Christmas card photo

Everybody knows any turkey can work this gizmo
It helps to set the camera up right
Set the shutter and the f-stop, but oh, no!
You forgot to take the lens cap off, you Luddite

Now the hamster’s done run away
She’s had enough of waiting for me for all flipping day
And when I snap the pic no matter what I try
This is the picture all year you’ll have to abide by

And so I'm offering this Shyluk phrase
To folks who’ve known a hamster or two
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Furry Christmas to you! 

Read some more JSVB Christmas poetry, if you dare, by clicking here, here, and here.

I have more Christmas Hamster themes  you can look at by clicking here, but alas (or thankfully, depending if you read the previous links), no more poetry.

1446 - A Christmas Banner

Looking at clip art for inspiration for a Christmas banner, I decided I could pretty easily draw my own.  Copying and pasting a couple of hand-drawn fir branches and doing the same to a hand=painted bow and ribbon made this a simple enough task. 

 

1445 - Archangel Gabriel IX

Just as I am getting a handle on my icon, I have to quit for a Christmas break.  Instead of hunching over a painting table, I'll eat turkey and drink wine.  

Incidentally, the angel's hand isn't making a sideways thumbs-up (Fonz Voice: Aaaayyy!!).  That hand will hold its own recursive icon, only I haven't drawn it yet (you can look up The Droste Effect if you care to learn about this).  This miniature icon represents what the icon bearer is best known for, so saints of a particular cathedral will hold on to a miniature cathedral, and Saint John the Baptist holds his own severed head - something that throws back to gory uncanniness or an Addams Family prank depending on how orthodox you are.  

So, the angel is going to be holding the entire Universe.  Anybody have any concept on how to draw that in a circle about the size of a Canadian nickel, please e-mail me, I'm wondering on this myself.  It's the biggest reason I haven't painted anything in that lower right corner yet. 

 

1444 - Hostesses/Mostesses Redux

My wife brought me to her Christmas party with her friends and co-workers.  Hot friends and co-workers, I'll be honest.  We had a great time!  I adapted the sketch from the last time we went to that Christmas Party (yes, I make sketches of parties I go to) to account for one of our hostesses thoughtfully dressing up as a reindeer for the photo booth. 

See the previous sketch from JSVB Post #1182 by clicking here.









 

1443 - Old Turtle IV (Ungood Edition)

Well, today is the thirteenth of the month, which means Ungood Art Day on JSVB.  Previously, I had posted a bunch of old turtle artwork from the 1990's.  I had found a small stack of old archived artwork in one of my storage boxes, so without too much shame I used them to pad my JSVB post count.  

This one, well, it's an old Turtle too (an inside joke).  My friend Earl returns to his most natural form: the Star Trek Captain.  The girl is a friend who somehow didn't become his wife.  Well, I was never all that good at drawing her, so I guess not having to make any more portraits of her is a blessing for all of us.  

 

1442 - Archangel Gabriel VIII

Eyes!  Putting the eyes into the face transforms it away from being an uncanny yellow mask.  Unfortunately, I got carried away with the clothing - too shiny and angular - but I can fix that.

1441 - "Kookie The Christmas Ghost"

That netherworld between Hallowe'en between Christmas, where we are routinely announced the countdown of shopping days until gift-giving time, needs a mascot.  Well there's Jack Skellington, but he's shackled to The House Of Mouse for eternity.  

I needed something cute to cheer up the pre-winter interholiday span, and I knew I had a winner when I went the bank to negotiate my line of credit (I tend to shop early).  At the teller's window was an old Hallowe'en ghost figure, the sort you'd pick up from a dollar store to decorate a bank that measures annual profits in the billions. Too disinterested in the tiny ghost to remove it after October 31st, the person in charge of corporate holiday cheer simply put a red Santa hat on the ornament.  Now our spectral friend was ready for the next holiday!  

I knew I could draw that, and it made so much sense at a time when the stores are packed with simultaneous Hallowee'n and Christmas decorative overlap.   So, when you dream of Disney-free pre-post inter-hallowed-mas shopping time mascots, please think of Kookie!  

 

1440 - Archangel Gabriel VII

Would Captain Gabriel Lorca from Star Trek appreciate the icon of his namesake?  Would Jason Isaacs?  (He's the actor who portrays the strong-willed Captain.)  Useless things to be pondered while correcting several mistakes in my icon.   

 

1439 - "Princess Hamster"

So here's a picture of our hamster Zhora at the window of her new castle.  She seems ready to wave regally to her loyal, cheering subjects!  

--- --- ---

EDIT: My friend Moose says: "Romeo!  Romeo, where fur art thou?"

I wish I'd said that!

1438 - Princess Hamster Castle II

I should have posted the Hamster Castle pictures sooner, but I forgot.  Here is a shot of the castle nearly finished.  

 

1437 - "Ire Robot"

I discovered this angry robot drawing amongst my archives.  It's on ACME-punched paper, so I sort of recall drawing a bunch of these for animation.  The robot is definitely my own design, I remember going through a couple of dozen tries before it looked right.  Note the diesel engine backpack it uses for its power source.  There's gaps in the artwork since that's where the animation likely was supposed to go.  I recall that the hole rendered in the robot's side was because it had been shot in some automated war, and now that it was missing some of its critical internal components it had gone mad with rage.  

I think I may have drawn this somewhere around the year 2000 or so.  It's not new artwork, although if I need another angry robot I might use this one again.