I'll invite somebody else to write an essay on the gender issues in this short. What I'm wondering is why in the world this wasn't titled "Bride of Frosty"?
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Art of the Day
Time to add some Jack Frost fanart to the pile:
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winter. Show all posts
Monday, December 21, 2015
The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day 21: "Frosty's Winter Wonderland"
It's the Winter Solstice, and therefore a good time to accidentally create life according to this sequel to "Frosty the Snowman".
I'll invite somebody else to write an essay on the gender issues in this short. What I'm wondering is why in the world this wasn't titled "Bride of Frosty"?
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Art of the Day
Time to add some Jack Frost fanart to the pile:
I'll invite somebody else to write an essay on the gender issues in this short. What I'm wondering is why in the world this wasn't titled "Bride of Frosty"?
-----
Art of the Day
Time to add some Jack Frost fanart to the pile:
Thursday, December 3, 2015
The 25 Weird Days of Christmas Day 3: The Old Magic of Christmas
Christmas has always been weird. That's the unspoken message of The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year by Linda Raedisch, a book that I snagged during Amazon's Cyber-Monday sale and promptly read virtual-cover-to-virtual-cover. It's still relatively inexpensive, so if you've ever wondered about the "There'll be scary ghost stories" line in "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year", this book has answers and then some.
But as for specific Christmas folklore, that brings us to the...
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Art of the Day!
So, snow fairies, ice queens, winter witches, and other female Anthropomorphic Personifications of cold weather are sometimes said to take flight in the form of geese, swans, and other large aquatic arctic birds. There's another bit of folklore that says if you see geese "skating" on the morning of St. Martin's Day (that is, if the water is already icy on November 11), the winter will be nice and calm. If the ice hasn't formed yet and the birds are swimming, expect a rough winter.
Combine the two ideas while watching an old ice skating special (stay tuned) and voila:
But as for specific Christmas folklore, that brings us to the...
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Art of the Day!
So, snow fairies, ice queens, winter witches, and other female Anthropomorphic Personifications of cold weather are sometimes said to take flight in the form of geese, swans, and other large aquatic arctic birds. There's another bit of folklore that says if you see geese "skating" on the morning of St. Martin's Day (that is, if the water is already icy on November 11), the winter will be nice and calm. If the ice hasn't formed yet and the birds are swimming, expect a rough winter.
Combine the two ideas while watching an old ice skating special (stay tuned) and voila:
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Holiday Hangover - Happy 2011!
Happy New Year! And I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season as well! Now it's time for Seasonal Affective Depression until mid-April, yaaaay!!!
I'm proud to say that I've kept last year's New Years Resolution to share the smudgy, unpretty, brain-farty part of the creative process by sharing full scans of Sketchbook pages. I'm going to keep this up, which means I get to start up a Sketch of the Day 2011 Flickr set. I am way too excited about this.
You may have noticed an influx of "Super Mario Bros." related doodles in the last few entries in the "Sketch of the Day 2010" set. This is because my family is g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y working our way through "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" in an attempt to stave off cabin fever. This is a bad, bad idea; if you are playing this game with people who are familiar with the Mario series and who are totally into it, then the game is so much fun it shouldn't be legal. But, if not, then you want to try and complete this game during a time of year with nicer weather, so you can go outside and be not in the same room with the other players for a while. I don't want to ruin what makes this game different from other Mario games in case you don't know, but the "Simpsons" quote (there is one for every occasion) that has been haunting me since we've begun is, "Ooh, a Rubik's Cube! Let's all try and solve it together!"
Wishing everyone a safe, happy, healthy New Year! Regular posting schedule will resume... next week sometime. Until then, here's DJ Earworm's semi-annual mashup of the past year's most popular songs. "Hey Soul Sister" is actually not annoying now:
(And it must be pointed out that I started last year with Don Bluth and ended with him. Totally unintentional, but awesome.)
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Feederwatch Wednesday!
This is the data from the week of the big storm. Snow brings the biodiversity:
Mourning Dove 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Black-capped Chickadee 4
White-breasted Nuthatch 1
European Starling 1
Song Sparrow 1
Dark-eyed Junco 1
Northern Cardinal 4
American Goldfinch 7
House Sparrow 35
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First Sketch of the Day of the Year!
I'm proud to say that I've kept last year's New Years Resolution to share the smudgy, unpretty, brain-farty part of the creative process by sharing full scans of Sketchbook pages. I'm going to keep this up, which means I get to start up a Sketch of the Day 2011 Flickr set. I am way too excited about this.
You may have noticed an influx of "Super Mario Bros." related doodles in the last few entries in the "Sketch of the Day 2010" set. This is because my family is g-r-a-d-u-a-l-l-y working our way through "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" in an attempt to stave off cabin fever. This is a bad, bad idea; if you are playing this game with people who are familiar with the Mario series and who are totally into it, then the game is so much fun it shouldn't be legal. But, if not, then you want to try and complete this game during a time of year with nicer weather, so you can go outside and be not in the same room with the other players for a while. I don't want to ruin what makes this game different from other Mario games in case you don't know, but the "Simpsons" quote (there is one for every occasion) that has been haunting me since we've begun is, "Ooh, a Rubik's Cube! Let's all try and solve it together!"
Wishing everyone a safe, happy, healthy New Year! Regular posting schedule will resume... next week sometime. Until then, here's DJ Earworm's semi-annual mashup of the past year's most popular songs. "Hey Soul Sister" is actually not annoying now:
(And it must be pointed out that I started last year with Don Bluth and ended with him. Totally unintentional, but awesome.)
----
Feederwatch Wednesday!
This is the data from the week of the big storm. Snow brings the biodiversity:
Mourning Dove 1
Downy Woodpecker 1
Black-capped Chickadee 4
White-breasted Nuthatch 1
European Starling 1
Song Sparrow 1
Dark-eyed Junco 1
Northern Cardinal 4
American Goldfinch 7
House Sparrow 35
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First Sketch of the Day of the Year!
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
"You can stand under my um-ba-rella-ella-ella-eh-eh-eh!" - Thoughts on _Winter World_
Right now, beavers are headed into their dens for a perceived night that will last for weeks and weeks. Snapping turtles are settling down in the bottom of the lake, and there they will sleep without taking a breath of fresh air for up to five months. All the Monarch butterflies from the entire east coast of the United States are dormant in a single mountain forest that is *just* the right temperature for their liking. Some animals have slowed their bodies down to a point where they are barely alive, while others are preparing to brisk about in life, day and night, at temperatures that would make a human cry.
Among these animals is the tiny Golden-Crowned Kinglet, a hummingbird-sized snow-fairy of the Arctic woods. Your Field Guide probably spends a grand total of one paragraph on Kinglets. I'd only seen them in the wild once or twice, and thought they were cute. I did not know that they were also incredibly bad-ass.
That is the way of all winter creatures, and their stories are told in Bernd Heinrich's Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. It's a terrific book and I am struggling to finish it on this, it's date due back to the library. I don't want to get too off-topic, but I don't know what happened to me. I feel like I devoured long nonfiction books in high school and now it's like I lost the patience for them. I haven't got the slightest idea why this is so; I love learning and Heinrich's books always leave me astonished at the biological wonders I did not know.
Bernd even throws his hat into the long-running argument over how birds evolved flight feathers. Body feathers are a remarkable insulation -- when they are dry. Getting them wet would be lethal. Wing feathers, therefore, may have initially appeared as built-in umbrellas.
As for the Kinglet, this theory is pretty sound. Bernd illustrates the book with his own sensitive pencil illustrations, and one such illustration (page 112) is of a Kinglet underneath all the feathers. Turns out body feathers add even more perceived bulk than I ever suspected. That the plucked songbird looks astonishingly like an old drawing of a small theropod does not go unnoticed by the author.
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Oh, hey, the Golden Globe Award nominations are out and... huh.
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Festive Thing of the Day!
Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is this year's Jolly Christmas Song That Won't Leave Me Alone. And I will admit that I was among those who thought it was stupid and annoying... until I saw the video for it.
The video is trippy as hell and at least ten kinds of distinctively late 1970's music video awesome:
Best parts include the giant constellation-God-thing that sprinkles Dust all over Paul's piano, the choir in space, giant flying disco balls, a giant irradiated horse in the sky, Paul and friends watching... themselves on TV, two glowing figures in space who seem just about to make out but don't, and that huge exploding gift at the end. Holy Christmas.
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Sketch of the Day!
I am not even going to make an attempt to top that:
Among these animals is the tiny Golden-Crowned Kinglet, a hummingbird-sized snow-fairy of the Arctic woods. Your Field Guide probably spends a grand total of one paragraph on Kinglets. I'd only seen them in the wild once or twice, and thought they were cute. I did not know that they were also incredibly bad-ass.
That is the way of all winter creatures, and their stories are told in Bernd Heinrich's Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. It's a terrific book and I am struggling to finish it on this, it's date due back to the library. I don't want to get too off-topic, but I don't know what happened to me. I feel like I devoured long nonfiction books in high school and now it's like I lost the patience for them. I haven't got the slightest idea why this is so; I love learning and Heinrich's books always leave me astonished at the biological wonders I did not know.
Bernd even throws his hat into the long-running argument over how birds evolved flight feathers. Body feathers are a remarkable insulation -- when they are dry. Getting them wet would be lethal. Wing feathers, therefore, may have initially appeared as built-in umbrellas.
As for the Kinglet, this theory is pretty sound. Bernd illustrates the book with his own sensitive pencil illustrations, and one such illustration (page 112) is of a Kinglet underneath all the feathers. Turns out body feathers add even more perceived bulk than I ever suspected. That the plucked songbird looks astonishingly like an old drawing of a small theropod does not go unnoticed by the author.
----
Oh, hey, the Golden Globe Award nominations are out and... huh.
----
Festive Thing of the Day!
Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is this year's Jolly Christmas Song That Won't Leave Me Alone. And I will admit that I was among those who thought it was stupid and annoying... until I saw the video for it.
The video is trippy as hell and at least ten kinds of distinctively late 1970's music video awesome:
Best parts include the giant constellation-God-thing that sprinkles Dust all over Paul's piano, the choir in space, giant flying disco balls, a giant irradiated horse in the sky, Paul and friends watching... themselves on TV, two glowing figures in space who seem just about to make out but don't, and that huge exploding gift at the end. Holy Christmas.
----
Sketch of the Day!
I am not even going to make an attempt to top that:
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