Many of us probably know Rien Poortvliet for Gnomes, which is an undisputed fantasy/fantasy illustration/speculative biology(?)/well, spec-bio-adjacent masterpiece. But he had many other beautiful books to his credit and among them, surprisingly, is a work of Paleoart:
Journey to the Ice Age, published in English in 1994 by Harry N. Abrams is every bit as beautifully crafted as Gnomes and once again, Poortvliet's love and careful observation of the natural world shines through. The paintings are based on his thoughts wandering while sitting in his hunting hide.
A highlight of the book is it's focus on prehistoric people. I'm especially fond of the series of paintings speculating that the first human to ride a wild horse was either very brave, very stupid, or some combination thereof and also somebody triple-dog-dared them.
And now, the mammoths. Poortvliet had a few mammoth specimens on hand, like hair and a vertebrae; tactile reminders of the beasts, so they are never far from his mind. This is a very beautiful book and I'm happy to have stumbled upon it.
Three out of four hawks like being in this painting.
We'll round out our look at Thanksgiving specials with the very freshly premiered Lifetime Original Movie "Jim Henson's Turkey Hollow". Here's the trailer:
Based (in the sense that the setting is called Turkey Hollow and involves Creature Shop creatures and literally no other way at all) upon Henson's recently rediscovered "Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow" story, this sure is a Lifetime movie in which Creature Shop creatures show up, with all that implies. As usual, my transcribed notes, for your amusement:
* - "Why am I even here?" - Ludacris
* - There have been a lot of insufferable kids in the specials we've seen this week but *daaaaaamn*... I want to see both of these brats get messily eviscerated by turkeys or monsters or both.
* - I would like a Ghillie Suit for Christmas, though. Oh, the fun I'd have...
* - "Hey, kids! We know what the Internet is!" - Whoever wrote this
* - It takes 40 minutes for the monsters to show up and... I don't know if it's worth it.
* - Hey, take a photo of the monsters, you stupid kids! The walking barfed-up hairballs are right in freaking front of you!
* - Take pictures of the Uncanny Valley pumpkins while you're at it!
* - Oh, FML, is this turning into a "science vs. just believing" thing?
* -The stupid kids find a "Pikmin 2" tunnel that might lead to a Magical Land, and not only do they not take a picture of it, they don't show any interest in it at all. I really hate these insufferable idiot kids.
* - Take a photo of the villain-guy's illegal turkey operation (Jiminy Cricket, look at what I just wrote; this f-ing movie) you stupid, stupid..... Oh, hey, they're actually taking pictures now. Huh.
* - And then their one phone that the stupid kids brought with them in the ancient, sprawling, monster-infested forest overnight is stolen by the bad guys and stomped upon.
* - The bad guys have locked the kids in their illegal turkey pen overnight, it's now the next morning, and JUST NOW they remember the sister is allergic to feathers. (Screams and screams...)
* - Take a photo of the monsters roughing up the bad guys, you stupid kids!
* - "Auntie, you discovered a new species? Why did you keep them a secret? You could have been rich and famous!" - stupid kids
Yeah, like all those many and varied super-rich and famous biologists out there! Household names living in solid gold mansions, the lot of them! You know, like... I'll think of one, just give me a minute...
* - "Well, I kept them a secret because I wanted to keep some *Magic* in the world!" - Auntie
Auntie, if somebody runs over or shoots one of your monster friends because you never let anybody know that the forest really does have a unique species in it that the locals should be familiar with and whose forest home should be protected, I want you to know that it's going to be your fault. Specifically your fault because of your "screw science; magic and mystery for life" bull.
(Damn, I just came up with a more interesting plot. When does NaNoWriMo start? Oh. Well, maybe next year.)
* - Oh, and these Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow sing exactly one song in this 90-odd minutes of, to borrow a phrase, "Hashtag Boring". And it's right before the end credits.
So overall, from these Thanksgiving specials, I have learned that Thanksgiving is super weird and often involves annoying furry creatures and insufferable stupid children. Also something about Pilgrims, Indians, Turkeys, and food, I guess. Seriously, though, I hope your holiday was and is awesome. Will we be exploring weird Christmas specials next month? We shall see...
I hope people find Woodpeckers as cute as I do.
...
I hope everyone on my holiday gift list likes birds...
This is the least-bad of the Thanksgiving specials I watched this week, so it gets to be posted about on the big day itself. It's still not very good.
* - This opening sequence. Ahaha,*damn*. Kids, memorize these lyrics and sing them to your family for hours of fun.
* - That one little dance those folks were doing is... something.
* - Yup, this sure is a Hanna-Barbera cartoon about Thanksgiving.
* - The Native Americans make out a *little* bit better in this special than in the others we've watched so far, but, eh, don't get your hopes up.
* - We learn that the first Thanksgiving was almost cancelled because of two annoying kids.
* - The squirrel has to save the two annoying kids from being chased around by a wolf. Why didn't he stop the two annoying kids from chasing the wolf pups around in the beginning? After all, that's what started this whole mess.
* - What the hell sound was that bat making?
* - What the hell sound was *everything* making?
Seriously, though, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving. I am thankful for all of you. I mean that.
It is time for us to deal with Buttons and Rusty. I narrowly avoided having to tackle their Halloween episode earlier, but theirs is one of the only Thanksgiving specials available on YouTube, so here we are.
* - You'd be forgiven if you assumed most of this special was based on the obvious conflict inherent in "Hey, let's invite our turkey friends to Thanksgiving!" It's not. It's a lot less interesting, but then, turns out most plots for Thanksgiving specials would be.
* - Holy Mary Mother of God, the first Thanksgiving dream Buttons and Rusty have...
* - Specifically, I can't even with Kitu and his family. (Screams internally.)
* - But I do need to call out this line of dialogue: "Look! People with feathers!!!" (Screams internally forever.)
* - So here's your actual, non-that-awkward-moment-when-you-invite-turkeys-to-Thanksgiving plot: it looks like the wild turkeys of P*ckerwoodClusterf*ck Chucklewood Park are being captured by poachers. But then the poachers say they are really from the "Wildlife Conservation Society". And they're taking the turkeys away from their home to another place with more food.
You may have noticed that Thanksgiving specials aren't really a thing as much as Christmas specials, Halloween specials, or even Easter specials are. It's hard to say specifically why that is, but it feels like making a good Thanksgiving special is hard. I mean, it says something when even the first Thanksgiving-themed episode of "The Simpsons" was a bummer that I almost never saw in reruns. Maybe watching what few Thanksgiving specials I can find on YouTube will help explain some of this.
To start, let's watch "The Mouse On the Mayflower"!
On second thought, let's not. Because I just watched it for the first time in ages and it's the *specific* kind of awful holiday special that could ruin the holiday in question.
But if you do decide to watch it, here are things to look for:
* - I really should not have watched this special in the immediate wake of watching this.
* - That opening song...
* - Scratch that. ALL the songs...
* - The only reason I know this 1968 Rankin-Bass oddity exists is because of the one time my aunt confused it's box at the video store for that of "An American Tail". See if you can guess where "Mouse on the Mayflower" lost us.
* - I also had "Mouse on the Mayflower" confused with "Night Before Christmas" for years. It doesn't have the distinctive Paul Coker Jr. character designs of the latter special, but the mice look similar enough.
* - If you watched "American Tail" as a kid and thought, "They really are not paying enough attention to the humans on this boat," boy have I ever got a movie for you.
* - If you watched "American Tail" or "Night Before Christmas" or anything really as a kid and thought, "This needs more staggeringly clueless and offensive depictions of Native Americans," boy have I EVER got a movie for you.
* - This romantic subplot...
* - They just won't stop *singing*!
* - Even ignoring the talking animals, this account of the first Thanksgiving doesn't strike me as very accurate. (This will, needless to say, be true for all the specials we watch this year. Because when you are spending the amount of time you have to in order to make an animated short, it is way hard to carve out a few hours in pre-production to do the research you guys. Even for more recent specials. Especially for more recent specials.)
Yesterday I made an attempt to make my various social media empires more visually consistent. Now my Blogger icon finally matches my business cards. Over at Twitter, I'm experimenting with my own background, which I made from these little paintings that I don't think I ever shared here. Here they are at closer to life-sized:
I painted these in September and each one is only five-by-five-inches. I thought they'd look nice in a tile pattern. They do, but I want to see if I can live with that as a background for a while.
Now the part that tripped me up, as it so often does, was my Blog header. I swapped my crow out for Tsintaosaurus and... eh, I don't hate it. But I'm not in love with it either. I'm either going to draw something from scratch or find something that'll actually fit in that space better.
And next week, I will hopefully be writing one lengthy post, since I am waiting on something very interesting to be delivered. If all goes well, we'll be catching up with an old friend...
The last run of posts have been very wordy, haven't they? So this week, let's chill out a bit. I'm going to share some watercolor sketches from a trip to see the incredible views from Hacker's Hill, one of the best-kept secrets of the Sebago Lakes region. You get a fantastic view of the entire Lakes Region as well as, on a clear day, the White Mountains.
I was a little overwhelmed by the views but I gave it my best shot. This run of paintings was a little abstract, just to get comfortable:
Traditionally, a Triptych is a painting or panel in three parts, often forming an alter-like shape. Sometimes, as in this case, it simply means three similar paintings with a shared theme or design element made at the same time.
Which is to say, I had three small canvases, didn't know what to do with them, and decided they should have cute little animals on them.
For an extra challenge, I decided to do each of these as a speed-painting. They might not be the prettiest things, but I like them.
Here's the former-Jackalope-now-Rabbit:
Here's the baby Mammoth (here's hoping he's not too cutesy for the Art Evolved Elephant gallery -- I don't know if I have time to work on anything else for it):
And here's a little guy you may recognize from last week:
All together now: Awwwwww...
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Sketch of the Day! I think I may have to make the top half of this page pretty later:
It sucks beyond all manner of sucking that Don Bluth Month had to end on such a low note, because this overview began on such an emotional high. When you go back and watch Bluth's early films, they are absolutely beautiful. Hell, I even appreciate the animation [if not the story content] of "All Dogs Go to Heaven" now. When you watch "Anastasia" or "Titan A.E.", they have moments of absolute beauty as well. So that brings us to the unspoken, awkward question that I'm sure is on the mind of a lot of Don Bluth fans including myself:
What happened?
What went wrong in-between "The Land Before Time" and "Thumbelina"? (The answer is probably "Rock-A-Doodle", but I have a hard time picking on a film I didn't get to watch. Yes, "GET to"; at least it would have been a hell of a lot more interesting than "The Pebble and the Penguin".) How could the man who so hated "baby talk" and sh**ty animation possibly go on to make "The Pebble and the Penguin"? How could a person sound so excited in the commentary track about the new technology he got to play with in "Titan A.E." go on to make... *nothing*? How does the director who made the movies that shaped the childhood of every person around my age, even more so than Disney, seemingly vanish without a trace? Where the hell is he know that we need him?
We do. We need Don Bluth to come back, and we need more people to pick up his "animation is an art form and should be treated as such" mantle. Because right now, the world of animated films is a grim place indeed. My heart goes heavy when I wonder if there's even a place for a hand-drawn, totally analogue animated feature film in today's "Eh, let's make another 3D live-action/CGI movie based on a beloved -or not- vintage cartoon" environment.
(Addressing another sauropod in the room: Yes, I know the next Toon to get this treatment will be Bugs Bunny. And as a fan of classic Looney Tunes, after years and years of things like "Space Jam" and "Loonatics" and other monstrosities of that ilk, I'm just too exhausted to muster as much outrage as I should about this. I can only heave a sigh that sounds suspiciously like this: "Goddammitsomuchwarnerbrothers...")
I don't want this to end on a total bummer. So I should note that "Bartok the Magnificent" isn't the last we ever saw of Don Bluth, thankfully. He has a very nice website, and he has made several books and CDs about art and animation principles. And there is this little oddity called "The Gift of the Hoopoe", which was apparently directed by Don Bluth. Sadly, there is hardly any information outside of IMDB and those storyboards about this short film.
I also need to finally share what I was working on during the month:
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Painting of the Month! Click for huge:
It's called "There Had Never Been Such a Herd Before". It is my humble tribute to "The Land Before Time" and my entry in Art Evolved's "Pop Culture" gallery. I figure that when I ever feel the need to do fanart, I better go big.
So here's the first acrylic-on-canvas painting I've made in... I don't want to think how long. I won't feel sad if you all laugh at it. This is what happens when you follow along with "The Joy of Painting" using really old brushes, the wrong kinds of knives, and acrylics. It's pretty obvious here that there are some serious differences between oils and acrylics. I wanted to go back into it again later on, maybe in a day or two, just so it wouldn't be so transparent.
Now a funny thing happened between me deciding this and this painting's ultimate fate: somebody closely related to me happened to see the painting.
This person (who wishes to remain anonymous) saw this painting and said she loved it and wanted it and could she give it away as a present please please please? I said, sure, but I need to work on it before I let anyone else see it. See, it didn't feel like anything I'd paint.
So, I went ahead and added in an Oviraptor.
Because why the heck not? By the way, the people who now own this painting love it!
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"Inception" is out this weekend, and we should all go see it. Because buying a ticket to this movie is an unspoken vote for creative, director-driven, non-sequel, non-spinoff, non-franchise movies in what has so far been a spectacular summer for astonishingly bad movies. My feelings are more eloquently expressed in this old Devin's Advocate article from CHUD.com (which, by a happy coincidence, involves another crazy-ass director-driven movie that just happened to be released by the Dubya-Bee; emphasis and visual bleeping mine):
"Know that you went out and voted with your ticket, that you sent a message to Warner Bros that you'd prefer them to keep taking chances, to keep trying new things, to not always be safe. Know that you sent a message to the studios that they don't have to make horrible movies... that you won't wait to see the interesting films at home. And if you don't go, I don't want to hear you complaining the next time there's a sh*tty remake or a sh*tty sequel or a sh*tty movie based on a sh*tty toyline or cartoon." - Devin Faraci
It should be said that "Inception" is one of only two, maybe three, movies I am 100% on board with this summer. I *just* got to see the first of these, so next week is Movie Week! Which will hopefully build to something very special for August...
I took apart my old French easel to sand and stain it, then I put it back together again.
Right, now for what actually happened.
I had this French easel for years and years and never really played with it. This summer, I decided I ought to get back into acrylic painting, something I abandoned years ago for whatever reason. Before I did that, I wanted to spruce my old easel up, hopefully making it easier and safer to use. So I unscrewed everything, removed all the metal pieces, and took the easel apart. Then I sanded and applied several coats of polyurethane stain to each wooden piece. I set the whole thing outside to dry overnight.
I came back in the morning to put the poor thing back together.
Here's how the easel looked when I was finished.
This is the best reason to use this kind of easel: The whole thing folds up into a convenient box shape. At least it's supposed to. I had a hard time folding my easel back up and let me show you why:
Um... hrm...
Helpful Hint: If you ever feel the need to take a complicated thing like this apart for whatever reason, TAKE LOTS OF PHOTOGRAPHS BEFORE YOU BREAK OUT THE SCREWDRIVERS! I didn't but I have the excellent excuse of not having a camera handy. So I brought everything indoors, looked up catalog pictures of French easels, and after an hour of squinting at low-res photos on my laptop, here's my easel, all folded up...
And here she is in alt-mode. Glad to have you back, easel. You and I got a date with a Bob Ross DVD!
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Sketch of the day!
Or rather, another Watercolor of the Week! Here's a very-sensitive-if-I-do-say-so-myself study of the view from part of Long Lake:
