(NOTE: I apologize for the crappy photos throughout this post. I would have used my scanner but this book is very old.)
As mentioned in an earlier post, I found something for four dollars at Amazon.com that I had to buy immediately:
John Gilbert's Dinosaurs Discovered, with illustrations by Guy Michel, was the only nonfiction dinosaur book I owned as a child growing up. It was published in America (translated from the French) in 1979. I have no idea why or how I acquired this book, and I never even read any of the text (hell, this was the first time I ever read it at all). But the illustrations in this book are lodged deeply in my subconscious... even though science has marched on and left this artwork in the dust. Hey, I may have gotten some strange comments (but also a Crowning Moment of Awesome) on this drawing, but wait until you see some of the old depictions of dinosaurs in this book. Heck, just look at the cover scene above. No wonder Greg Paul rocked my world when I found his art. So, let's take a look at our cast of characters:
Hoo boy. Dig that Velociraptor in the upper-left. And get used to seeing Iguanodon with a giant scary tongue, you'll be seeing it a lot:
Iguanodon figures prominently in this book because the focus is not about the lives of dinosaurs as it is about the history of paleontology. That may go a ways to explaining why some of the information about the dinosaurs themselves tends to be... strange. Apparently, there was a theory -now faded into obscurity- that Iguanodons had long prehensile tongues like giraffes. There's a handwave given that one particular paleontologist looked at the lower jaw bone and decided that they indicated a long tongue. The text says that this has since been debunked... yet every Iguanodon in the book is doing their Gene Simmons impression. Huh. You tend to see text-to-illustration discrepancies a lot in older dinosaur books, and it's most often because so many of them relied on illustrations recycled from other texts. Anyway, here's a montage of animals dying in horrifying ways:
The famous Bernissart Iguanodons fall to their doom and into history.
No offense to that Hadrosaur, but for my money this is the unintentionally funniest painting in the book. It's the wonky anatomy (what are his arms doing?) and the "Aw, damn" look in his eye. Also, the hilarity of an animal who is depicted as an aquatic creature (we'll get to that) wandering onto land... to get eaten by an aquatic animal. It's also pretty graphic and horrifying, so who knows why my parents let me read this as a six-year-old.
Actually, this one's pretty hilarious in it's own right. This is as good a time to point out that the Real is Brown trope affected paleoart like nothing else ever.
It's hard to see here, but the Tyrannosaur's face is just a mass of warts for some damn reason. It may have been an attempt to illustrate what we now know as Tyrannosaurs' facial crests. It's one of the strangest interpretations of a dinosaurs' appearance in the book. But here's the weirdest:
When was the last time you ever saw a stegosaurus drawn like this? Weirdly, there are more conventional looking stegosaurs in the book too. It's like they were hedging their bets that at least one of the spikey-thingy configurations would be accurate. It confused the heck out of me as a little kid, though, especially since there was no explanation for the two different interpretations. So about those aquatic hadrosaurs:
This was the default illustration for any and all hadrosaurs for the better part of my childhood. And as far as anyone knows the reason -the one and only reason- why hadrosaurs were depicted as aquatic creatures is all in the beak. It looks like a duckbill, so they *must* have swam around in the water all day like ducks... right? Speaking of swimming...
I don't even know what I could add to this. This might just be the single strangest image in the whole book.
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Sketch of the day!
I glossed over how the book treats theropods, so here's my take on a Ceratosaurus who appears in the book. D'awwwww...
EDIT: By a happy coincidence, the wonderful Tetrapod Zoology blog has referenced Dinosaurs Discovered as well. Darren points out a particularly weird non-dinosaur reconstruction in the book I never even noticed (as you've seen, there's a ton of trippy stuff in the book).
I know, but It's going to take me a while to process the "Lost" finale. (Exceedingly minor spoilers in that link.)
So here's a rundown of mysteriously abandoned characters and plotlines from another television series my entire family was in total agreement of and that none of us wanted to end. Supposedly, the producers are working on some feature-length direct-to-DVD sequels. Hopefully, these will be at least be addressed if not fully wrapped up. Mind you, I love the hell out of this series. Unfortunately, this kind of thing kinda comes with the territory when the network decides that they're only going to give you half a season to wrap everything up in your epic fantasy series. Wah. These are in no particular order:
The White Lotus Society They built this up so badly in the final season. This secret society made up mostly of cool older characters did show up in the finale, but their previous mentions in the series were so mysterious. So this isn't technically a dropped plot, but it's one of those things, like the Blue Spirit and Combustion Man and, infamously, Uncle Iroh's jailbreak, that we expected to have a much, much bigger payoff
Toph's Family For a lot of people, this is one of the big ones. So Toph is a character who joins the main cast early in the second season, and she quickly becomes one of the best characters in the show. Thing is, she is a runaway; she went off on her adventures with Aang and company without saying anything to her rich parents. In the *final season* she decides to send a message to her mom to let her know she's alive. This is never again acknowledged. Heck, we don't even know if Toph's family received the message, as it was sent via Sokka's messenger hawk. And since I brought Hawkie up, that leads us naturally to...
Dropped Characters This is a series with loads and loads of characters. Not all of them are going to appear more than once, but there were several who seemed to have been developed enough that they were going to have larger roles later on. Among them are Aang's mentor Guru Pathik, eerie spirit Koh the Face-Stealer, the aforementioned Hawkie, and probably many more that I can't remember right now. But the big one here deserves her own entry:
OK, So What's the Deal With Ursa? She is Zuko and Azula's mother. She has been missing, presumed dead, since before the series began. There is a great deal of evidence that she's still alive in the series, she appears -as a hallucination- in one of the final episodes, and in the very last episode it is revealed that she is indeed alive. It is wildly speculated that the first DTV film will focus on her somehow.
And Finally, What's the Deal With Bosco the Bear? Katara: (reading a newspaper) "The king's having a party tonight for his pet bear!" Aang: "You mean platypus-bear?" Katara: "No, it just says, 'bear.'" Sokka: "Certainly you mean his pet skunk-bear?" Toph: "Or his armadillo-bear?" Aang: "Gopher-bear?" Katara: "Just... 'bear.'" (There is a pregnant pause.) Toph: "This place is weird." That dialogue pretty much speaks for itself. Bosco is the pet bear of the Earth King and he is one of the odd little non sequiters in the show that was treated as kind of a joke for those of us who were paying attention. However, this "joke" has some pretty weird implications for the Avatar universe. All of the non-supernatural animals seen in "Avatar" are weird hybrids, very likely in tribute to "Dungeons and Dragons" (Owlbears anyone?) Taking for granted that the very act of calling a Turtleduck a Turtleduck is a translation convention and normal animals like Bosko are unknown, if Wuzzles/Firffels are normal for the Avatar world then...?
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Totally unrelated, but happy Towel Day!!! Also, here's a nifty interview with Don Hahn via the wonderful /Filmcast. Also via /Film, a preview of illustrations for Josh Cooley's upcoming book Movies R Fun! Oh good lord, they are beautiful ALSO also via /Film, our first look at fully-rendered CGI Wile E. Coyote in Three-Effin-Dee. Dear reader, you can probably guess with 99% accuracy how I feel about this...
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Sketch of the day! Let's consider this a teaser for the next post:
I went to the Library the other day on a mission. It did not end well. It went something like this:
TRISH: "I notice you have a few World and Owl back-issues. Do you happen to have any Ranger Rick back-issues?"
LIBRARIAN: (Out loud) "No we don't save Ranger Ricks." (With a heavily implied) "Why do you want to read some kiddie magazine about animals, weirdo? As you can see by the look in my eyes, I am judging you! JUUUUUUUUDGE!!!"
TRISH:
So it doesn't look like I'll ever be able to follow-up on this old post (unless I get really lucky somewhere else; but I have no idea where else I could look). I sadly wandered around the rest of the children's library -- and found myself face-to-face with their Dinosaur section.
It will come as a surprise to nobody that I used to haunt this section of the library. I was very happy to see that I did *not* recognize most of the titles. I did, however, find one old nonfiction book and one old fiction book I remembered from childhood. And so, in lieu of "The Most Haunting 'Adventures of Ranger Rick'" (which I could probably do from memory anyway, but dammit, I want to be able to show you the illustrations) or something, here's a nice lengthy post about the strange world of 1980's dinosaur books.
The earliest publishing date in my copy of Dr. Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies (where's your copy?) is 1986. This is important. One may even go so far as to say that it is wikkid important. Paleontology was experiencing a sea change, and dinosaur books for kids were caught right in the middle of it. Up until the very early 1990's, most publishers realized they could no longer get away with recycling information about prehistoric animals from the 1960's (I wish I was kidding). That shows you just how long it takes popular science to stumble along in the wake of -uh- unpopular science as it marches on.
This little book is fairly typical:
Anyway, this is where the illustration of, uh, Brontosaurus up above came from. (Open letter to any Paleontologist reading this: If you have the good luck to discover a new genre of sauropod, please take one for the team and name it Brontosaurus. Because this confusion has been going on for the better part of one hundred years and it is getting ridiculous.) Ignoring the name issue and some anatomical weirdness, this illustration isn't so bad. At least they are not up to their crotches in a swamp.
This next picture is probably the most entertaining illustration in the book. Check out those Deinonychus:
What you're looking at here is the standard for "really accurate" paleoart in the 1980's. It does look a little strange now, but I don't think a modern take on this same scene would be all that different. The 'raptors wouldn't be nudists for one thing.
Now as for the fiction dinosaur kids book I found (illustrations by Susanna Natti):
Oh good Lord, the nostalgia buzz. I received this book as a young child because of one of those heartwarmingly (or not) misguided family member decisions. One of my aunts (I think?) caught wind that I liked dinosaurs, and picked up the first two kids books she saw with the word "Dinosaur" on the title. (If you ever wondered how "Goodtimes" video stays in business, there's your answer.)
So that's the reason why I owned this completely random entry in the Cam Jansen mystery series. I haven't re-read it yet, but I remember there's nothing interesting going on in the illustrations...
Yeah. Guess who the villain is!
The plot involves some crooks who manage to steal a Ceolophysis tail bone(!?), hoping to sell it for a lot of money. The one other thing I remember is that Cam's friend-who-is-a-boy rides a bike with a broken kick-stand, which ends up factoring into the climax. Harry Potter, this ain't. Still, a nerdy girl protagonist (Cam remembers everything she reads) is always good to see.
(Incidentally, having read the book again, it's astonishing how many plot points I remembered... close enough. Not correctly but close enough. For example, it's Cam's bike that's broken.)The other book I got from this aunt (maybe) was In the Dinosaur's Paw by Patricia Reilly Giff. I couldn't even find a picture of this on Amazon. I only remember this stupid little book for two reasons. It was the first time I ever ran into a work of fiction with a "Bait and Switch" title. It's also the first work of fiction I ever read with a cop-out ending.
The plot: There is no dinosaur at all in the book. That's all you need to know. (Just a head's up, this movie does not involve dinosaurs either.)
Seriously, the plot involves a kid who finds a ruler with the initials "T.R." written on it. He naturally assumes that the ruler belongs to a Tyrannosaurus rex. (I don't remember how old this kid was that he would make this intellectual leap. If he was supposed to be over five then... eek.) At some point, one of the characters who gets in on the mystery draws a Tyrannosaur holding a ruler. Finally, in an ending that rivals the end of "Vanilla Sky" in it's "Oh come ON!?!"-ness, the owner of the ruler shows up and turns out to be a girl named Trudy Rabbalabba or something. Exciting.
There was another book I looked for in the library because it was, for years and years and years, the only nonfiction dinosaur book I owned. Thankfully, while researching this post, I think I found it. Used copies were going for *a penny* on Amazon (well, $4.00 with shipping.) I figured if it did turn out to be my childhood book, it'd be worth four bucks. Because holy crap, I can not wait to make fun of it.
For the sake of suspense (and also allowing for the possibility that this is an entirely different book), I won't tell you the title of the book in question. Instead, here's our
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Sketch of the Day!
This one's going to be a bit picture-heavy, but this is the first time I remembered to take pictures while I modified a Sketchbook. Let's get right into it. Pick out a spiral-bound Sketchbook you like.
You'll want to get a good collection of different cover papers going. Don't ever throw away any wrapping paper. Save the papers you like from any gifts you get, and collect free samples too.
Since this is going to be my Spring/Summer Sketchbook, I've picked out this nice garden-themed wrapping paper, with complimentary string and tissue paper.
Take your covers off and set one of them aside. Use the other as a template to cut the cover paper from your wrapping paper sheet. Give yourself no less than one inch extra around the cover.
Smear some glue all over one side of the cover. Most book-making instructions will tell you to use white glue and an old paintbrush here, but I've found that a glue stick works just as well if not better. Using liquid glue would get us into trouble later anyway.
Flip your cover over and apply glue to the corner paper. Fold it over and secure it with a strip of masking tape as shown. When you've finished the corners, do the same with the sides.
It should look something like this when you're almost finished. Go ahead and repeat all this for the other cover. Then cut your complimentary... we'll call them Fake Endpapers to fit.
This is why we're using a glue stick. This is probably the easiest way to do your fake endpapers if you've for some reason chosen to use a really thin paper for them, like I have. Set your covers aside to dry for a while. This should take less than an hour and a half, but if you've got an hour and a half, go watch "Sita Sings the Blues". You can watch it for free in, like, twenty different places online and this is all approved by the creator of the movie. Do it. I'm not going to write a big long review, but trust me, the film is absolutely delightful.
Now there comes the tedious part: uncovering the holes we've covered up. Get a sewing needle (and keep it around because we'll need it soon), and use it to find, by touch the holes that attached the cover to the spiral binding. Then take a sheet of paper from your book's "innards" and use it to mark off where to punch the holes. Cover this area with clear packing tape to reinforce it, if you wish.
You don't want to use a normal, sissy-poo hole punch for this. Head to the office supply store of your choice, and invest in a 2-hole punch like the one you see (upside-down) above. Your hands will thank you.
We're almost done, so give your Sketchbook a title! I stick an address label in the inside front cover as well. If you want, you can wrap the covers in clear tape. Do whatever, just make sure you've re-attached the front cover first.
Note how the back cover is attached in the above photo. Thread the needle from earlier and use your string to tie the spiral-binding together to secure it.
Here's the finished Sketchbook, with all the supplies I used to create it!
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Sketch of the Day!
Here's the first thing I drew in my new Sketchbook:
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By the way, "Heroes" is canceled. And it's a little sad that my reaction to this news was, "Oh. Huh."
Just a head's-up, tonight and Sunday are the last "Lost" episodes ever. I expect to be a bit more torn up about that.
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Well, first of all, holy mythology episode, Batman!
As we all know, it takes a very, very long time to make an animated feature film. With that in mind, it isn't all that surprising that many of the films in the Disney Animated Canon were significantly different during the various stages of their production. Other Disney movies never even saw the light of day. Recently, I read (but did not remember to take pictures of) two very different books about this very subject. Both of them were interesting reads, but varied a great deal in content.
Mouse Under Glass by David Koenig, 1997 - Billed as the hidden stories behind Disney movies and theme parks, this is a very quick read. I polished most of it off while waiting in this line:
I don't think I mentioned this before, but there was a very impressive line for Boston Comicon. That's new...
There are no Disney illustrations in this book; the few illustrations are from the literary source materials for the movies. Each chapter covers a different movie in the Canon. A lot of the stories are fairly well-known (and you can find many of them here). There are some cool stories about the controversies over certain Disney movies, but nothing particularly shocking (and you've already read about most of them at Snopes or the aforementioned TV Tropes.) What's most puzzling about this book are it's omissions. "The Black Cauldron" gets a lot of mentions - but, of all movies, it's one of the few features that doesn't get it's own chapter! It's a very strange oversight among several. Also, I think I'm going to be taking some of the trivia in this book with a grain of salt the size of my head, thanks to things like this. Spot the surprisingly common mistake, kids:
The Disney That Never Was by Charles Solomon, 1995 - Actually, I read this book before I read Mouse Under Glass, which turned out to be a mistake as this book put the other one to shame. There are TONS of artwork, salvaged from the Disney Vault and shown to us unwashed fans for the first time. Most of the never-finished films are actually shorts, and altogether not all that interesting. However, there is also a great deal of information about unfinished full-length films like "Chanticleer", "Gremlins", the original "The Little Mermaid" and the "Hans Christian Anderson" anthology film, and all the stalled "Fantasia" sequels.
It should be noted that both of these books made me appreciate "Fantasia" much more. Walt Disney was essentially the James Cameron of his day, making a movie with technology that he had to invent as he went along. Some of his plans for the first "Fantasia" were almost insane. "Odorama" (scents -including real gunpowder- filtered into the theater during key scenes) before there was a word for it. Three screens stitched together for a sort-of Cinerama effect (you can sort of get what Disney was going for by watching the very nice "Impressions De France" film in EPCOT.) And a sort of primitive version of the infamous (and failed) "hologram" skeleton idea kicked around during the production of "Black Cauldron", where the magic brooms in "Sorcerer's Apprentice" would march along the walls of the theater. The whole point of "Fantasia", even as it is today without any of the aforementioned effects, was essentially Disney and his animators getting to say, "Look at what we can do!" Therefore, the many planned periodic "Fantasia" movies (of which we got... one) would have been the animators saying, "Look at what we can do NOW!"
The lack of periodic "Fantasias" may be the single most haunting Disney could-have-beens of all. Think about it. They could have altered the history of American animation!
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Phylo (the game formally known as Phylomon) got a mention on GeekDad last week! My little House Sparrow was picked as one of the accompanying illustrations! More exposure, yaaaaaay!!!
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Dammit, Blue Sky, I thought you were different! :(
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Sketch of the Day!
I have to counter the Worst Thing I Have Drawn Recently (see the previous post) with the BEST Thing I Have Drawn Recently. As always, click to see the big version:
Well, three Anime series and a movie based on one of said series. Here be SPOILERS GALORE! (But no fanart. None. I am not going to draw Jack as a wolf or Locke with an automail arm. No. Just, no.) We all know this is a series that's not going to end with the old "main character looks into an empty room with a sad smile and closes the door" option. I will make two real predictions here: 1) A lot of fans are going to be really, really upset. May want to give them a break that Monday morning. 2) This series finale will inspire essays. Long, long essays. Now, the three best complete Anime series I've seen (thank you, Netflix) had exactly those kinds of endings, so let's try to use them to predict how "Lost" will end. Important terminology note before we begin: Borrowing from "Futurama", the "still stuck on Craphole Island" continuity will be known as Universe A, while the "815 landed safely" continuity will be Universe 1. "Wolf's Rain": Similar in (very) broad strokes to Watership Down, this series ended it's televised run by wrapping up a major conflict, but it didn't conclude the story. This was "fixed" with four episodes that went straight to video, essentially a four-part series finale.The "W.R."-ish Last Episode of "Lost": Every conflict in Universe A is resolved -- but not before everybody dies violently. Jack is the only character left alive, and even then he lies bleeding to death in the bamboo grove. As he slowly passes on (and a ridiculously sad song gradually builds), he gets to watch Craphole Island return to it's pre-crash, pre-Dharma, pre-Jacob and Not-Locke state. But before the credits role, we get a brief look at Universe 1. All the Universe 1 versions of the Candidates, no matter where they are, suddenly sense something. And then Jack starts running... Notes: Change a few of the details and I think this is the most likely ending of all. We are in for a bittersweet as hell ending. "Fullmetal Alchemist": Great series. Probably my overall favorite out of this bunch. Note that we're going with the series ending, and will be ignoring the "Conqueror of Shamballa" movie. Most people do anyway. (Seriously, Fritz Lang is somehow involved. WTF?).The "F.M.A"-ish Last Episode of "Lost": Sawyer is able to destroy NotLocke after that creepy kid (the one who looks like a possibly older Aaron) shows him NotLocke's weakness. Meanwhile, Jack is killed and somehow "wakes up" as Universe 1 Jack. Desmond is conveniently there to explain what's up. In the end, all the Losties in Universe A mentally merge with their Universe 1 counterparts -- and, as Desmond comments, none of them remember a thing about their Craphole Island experiences. And Jack? He's stuck in Universe A, and starts on the search for a way to cross over...Notes: This may be the best integration of the two Universes. And I'd be surprised if Jack gets off the Island. "Neon Genesis Evangelion": For the two or three of you who have never heard of this series, it is essentially to the original English-language dub of "Power Rangers" what "Lost" is to "Gilligan's Island".The "N.G.E."-ish Last Episode of "Lost": Forget the various mysteries of the Island, anything about Universe 1, who or what Jacob and NotLocke are, which characters end up on what side, or anything like that. None of that gets resolved. Instead, Jack gets to talk through his daddy issues with some other people. The end. Notes: You KNOW we're going to hear something about Jack's father one more time for the road. Why not base the whole finale on that and really get it overwith? The main case against this ending: Carlton and Damon probably enjoy breathing. "End of Evangelion": After the uproar over "N.G.E."'s... underwhelming series finale, the producers got together again and made this movie. (It was originally how they had intended to end the series, but time and money were uncooperative.) This new ending was.... ye gods, it was somethin'...The "E.o.E."-ish Last Episode of "Lost": The main conflicts of the show are, thankfully, resolved... and then some angelic beings in the form of Sayid come and hug everyone in both Universes, causing them all to dissolve into Slusho. In the end, Universe A Jack finds himself on a desolate shoreline somewhere doing... something inappropriate... to Universe 1 Locke. Locke compares this situation to getting his period. Notes: Yeah...
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Sketch of the day!
Arrrrrrgh. I was just curious. :(
This will be a Blogger exclusive, as I don't want to stain either online portfolio with this. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sadbeard McJackwolf:
And since I am the kind of person who thinks that any horrible art thing worth doing is worth doing all the way (and Jackwolf needed some friends), here is The Worst Thing Ever:
This is essentially an amalgamation of all the worst kinds of fanart I've ever seen.
Disclaimer: No, I do not for a second regret joining Deviant Art; I've met lots of cool people there and made some great new contacts. But every so often you run into something like this and...
The thing about DA is this: Think about all the art you did in junior high that you loved at the time, then went back to look at it and said, quote, 😠. OK? Now consider: back when you and I (presuming we're around the same age, dear reader) were just starting out as artists, our embarrassing-in-hindsight artwork was safely hidden in our Sketchbooks, journals, math notebooks, and so on, where nobody else could see them. These kids have their old shames on display for the whole wide web to see. Dang.
So, anyway, "Lost"!
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I am afraid my brain has turned into mush lately. Therefore, I completely forgot to post this lovely Mother's Day song:
Wrapping up the Great Basement Cleanout, I ran into a few things that are poignantly obsolete. Things like VHS tape rewinders (tape decks tended to wear out and be the first part of a VCR to break, so this little machine would save them some stress), VCR head cleaners (special VHS tapes that cleaned the tape decks), cassingles (pretty much exactly what it sounds like; one of the amusing album covers below is a cassingle), dot-matrix printer paper (which came in big, long reams that you had to tear apart; I wish I had a picture to explain this better), and these guys:
These are backup disks for our very first computer that ever had a hard drive. I have no idea what's on any of them, so we couldn't really toss them. I'd gone through a lot of trouble taking our old computers apart and squirreling their hard disks away. (Yes, computerS. They retired to the basement and appeared to have multiplied) :
Wait for it... Wait for it..... Dude, I dissected a Dell. (Really, nobody? Huh. Oh well, I didn't think it was funny ever.) These are the "guts" (all except the hard drive, which would have fit into that empty space occupied by wires and stuff) of a Dell PC from the late 1990's. This was the youngest computer I had to dismantle. I saved the oldest for last:
Wa-hahaha... oh wow. (I apologize for the fuzzy photos, but I was taking them in a hurry while juggling my trusty screwdriver and pliers.) This is our old Apple IIGS (Apple 2: Graphics and Sound), the very first computer my family ever owned. You can read more information about this baby at Wikipedia. I want to point out the objects in the lower-left, because I'm sure some younger people are looking at them and thinking, "what?" Those are floppy disk drives. The smaller one near the middle was for 3.5 Floppies, the same kinds of floppy disks I showed earlier. They were called 3.5s because they were the then-remarkably tiny size of... three and a half inches. For the record, this kind of disk just went extinct very recently (I think I read that a major manufacturer just shut down production of them last week.) They were the dominant storage medium of the late '80s-well into the 1990's. Unfortunately, their capacity wasn't very large. Generally speaking, if you had a document that was more than 500 K, you were pretty screwed. The larger disk drive is more hilarious/heartwarming to me. This was for a 5.25 inch floppy disk. These disks were actually floppy in that the namesake floppy disk was protected by thin sheets of just-barely-less-floppy plastic. Their capacity usually ranged just over 100 K, but they could be double-sided. Even so, you often had to stick in a veritable conga line of these disks just to get one program running. A modern desktop may take a while to boot up, but it's cake and ice cream compared to this. So what does it look like inside?
Fascinating. The green piece (which I've saved and kinda want to frame because it's pwetty) fits over the front part of the drive. This was as far as I could dismantle this drive (I couldn't even crack the 3.5 drive.) Inside the CPU...
There's a lot more empty space in here than there is in modern computers! I'm assuming that large object on the left is a fan or something. I have a great love for the "TRON" landscapes inside old computers.
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Sketch Crazy Found Art of the Day! Here, have some funny cassette tape cover art:
Not sure who the band on the right is, but thanks to this cover, I think I like them even if it turns out they are responsible for all the songs I've ever hated.
"You birds have a hundred thousand bad drawings in you; start getting rid of them now."
— Chuck Jones, quoting one of his art school instructors
I should preface this by saying that the basement is mostly clean now. Yay!
Also, as you've noticed, I don't usually comment on current events. But given that my aunt in Florida called us this weekend to ask if we were okay, I think maybe this calls for it.
We're fine. The pipe burst is mostly affecting the city of Boston proper, but the water supply to the suburbs has been diverted to an alternate reservoir. The only thing is, it hasn't been treated to kill the possible naturally occurring bacteria, so we shouldn't drink it in large quantities unless we want to crap out a kidney later (obviously younger and older people, and people who have very little built-up tolerance to bacteria shouldn't drink anything but bottled or boiled water at all). We can do pretty much anything else with the water, though I've held off laundry and washing dishes for a while just to be on the safe side.
The thing that gets me is the reason why I hate televised news. You'd think our tap water had been hooked up to a vat of battery acid the way they've been going on about it. It's just lake water, calm the heck down! Generally speaking, I made better art in high school than I did in my first year in college. That may sound counterintuitive, but I'm pretty sure you're going to agree with me when you look at what I dug up.
I had completely forgotten about the paintings and drawings you are about to see. I thought they were lost forever and, honestly, I wasn't too sad about that. These are probably my least favorite college pieces, which is why this is the only place you'll ever see them online.
Remember when I found the painting from high school and said that it made me realize just how much figurative space there is between the person who drew it and the person currently looking at it? And how the scary part comes in when I realize both those people are me? Yeah. In hindsight, that painting was whimsical and cute. A lot of these paintings are freakin' scary.
(It should also be noted that these were all created in a small dorm room with thin, thin walls -- and the guy who lived on the other side of the wall liked to blast his favorite album over and over and over. That album was "My Own Prison".)
Aaaaaaa-ny-way...
This is pretty typical of my early-college output. I obviously hadn't got used to using watercolors yet; many of the characters blend into each other and into the background. Some of those character designs are just awful, but I kinda like the werewolf guy in the lower-right. I'll be on Team him.
The assignment was to design a set of paper goods for a Halloween party. One of the requirements was the snazzy display you see this piece mounted upon.
It should be noted that our professor was an older gentleman. According to him, in our professional careers, we'd always have to send the original artwork through the mail, mounted in such intricately cut matboard displays. That's the way he did it. It was 1998, and as far as he was concerned - and WE were concerned- computers were for writing essays and playing "Doom" and "Tetris", not for making art. Certainly, never for *delivering* art. That's unpossible!
(This has been your Funny Aneurysm Moment for the day.)
I remember mentioning in an earlier post that I was not blessed with the ability to create three-dimensional artwork. These guys, made for a project in high school, attest to this.
They aren't the only sculpture I found. This next one comes from one of the strangest aspects of my first year of college. The way UMass' Fine Arts track went, we were all required to take both 2-D and 3-D art classes no matter what our actual major was. You wound up with sculptors struggling to paint and painters having to try and wield sculpting tools without losing a finger. A couple of students in my classes actually complained about how pointless this was, and the professors countered this with, "Oh, well, we wanted to let you try out all kinds of art! So you're going to spend your entire first year of college doing stuff you hate! Misery builds character!"
So that's why I -- the only 2-D major in a class of 3-D majors (whew, that was all kinds of fun) -- had to spend four hours a week building things that *sort of* resembled what they were meant to be out of matboard and balsa wood and tons and tons of hot glue gun glue, instead of taking that computer graphics class that looked cool but always filled up fast and ran the same time as something pointless I had to take in order to graduate. (This is your second Funny Aneurysm Moment of the day.)
Anyway, here's what I made when I was told to do a relief sculpture out of clay, which would be the mold for the plaster final version seen here:
I am very, very curious to know if anybody out there gets what I was going for here. Because *NOBODY* in my class did.
So what was I producing in the 2-D class?
OK. This image was not my idea, it's the result of Professor Meddling. MY original version of this "parody a print ad" assignment looked more like this. Ironically, this is much closer to what I can do now:
Guess what version I like better. Go on! And let me say right now that the "Professor Approved" version (which I never questioned at the time and probably should have) is NOT the most embarrassing thing I'm going to share with you today...
I don't even know! I DON'T EVEN KNOW!!!
(Trish goes to the fridge, pours herself a pint of UFO White out of the Growler, and downs half of it in preparation for this next... THING...)
In case it isn't obvious, this isn't the whole painting (my first -and last- ink wash). It's just a small excerpt. You HAVE to trust me when I tell you that this is the LEAST scary and/or inappropriate part of this illustration I could have posted online for all to see. Of all the old art we've seen today, this is the only piece that genuinely made me upset and ashamed.
Now, let me assure you that this was also part of an assignment and it also was not my idea. I remember the context rather vividly and I really did not want to make this drawing; I don't think anyone else in my class was really thrilled about this assignment either. There wasn't anything we could do without getting really offensive.
The assignment was to do a political cartoon about a then-recent historical event (circa late-summer 1997, and that's the only context you're getting). And when I say "then-recent", I mean it. Like, it happened the week before we got the assignment, WAY too soon for us innocent little illustration newbies to really digest how we actually felt about the event. Maybe professional political cartoonists eventually develop the ability to immediately comment on something that is traumatic on a very large scale; we sure hadn't. Hence the monstrosity you see before you. Ugh. Just ugh.
I need to go to the Old Shame TV Tropes page, so I know everybody has something like this. Also...
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Sketch of the Day!
Actually, I'm going to cheat and show off a finished piece I really like. Look at this classy Icthyosaur. I sketched him before I came up with my final idea for Art Evolved's Icthyosaur Gallery. I still liked him, so I went ahead and brought him to final:
Note: In case there are any art directors out there, ignore everything else on this page; this is what I can do now.
