Sunflower Saturday
Every Spring in our backyard, we get a lot of plants randomly growing here and there from the birdseed we throw out every weekend — milo, millet and beautiful sunflowers. I don’t know how it happens (from undigested seeds in bird poo, perhaps?), but we enjoy it a lot. Heavy rains this year have produced a bumper crop of sunflowers, including a couple of massive seven foot tall plants sprouting atop our compost heap. I took some photos last weekend when they were attracting plenty of bees and other flying insects (one of which was caught midflight in the pic below).
In other backyard news, our victory garden is coming along well. We’ve already gotten lots of lettuce which I never anticipated would grow so well in our soil. Carrots and green onions are growing nicely as well. Time to make carrot cookies! We also grew a half row of tomatoes from seeds. I wasn’t expecting much (again, desert ≠ verdant gardening), but the tomato plants have gotten so huge that they’re taking over neighboring crops. Having the garden located in a space that doesn’t get our killer afternoon sun might be helping. At any rate, I’m looking forward to having bunches of tomatoes to go with our lettuce, carrots and onions.
In the Garage
Last week, I went into the little studio we’ve set up for printing LitKids and took some photos to share. I have a nifty little corner of the garage set up with an old drafting table and a few inspirational things hung up on the walls. Things have been moving along okay, if a bit slowly for my tastes. There is so much trial and error involved in home screen printing, especially the method I’m using with photo sensitive goo and light exposures. I won’t bore you by going into too much detail; just want to mention that last Thursday I made the most perfect screen yet — a five minute sunlight exposure with four sharply defined images ready for printing.
Anyway, the photos below show some of the stuff I’ve been working on lately — a screen stretched with a cherished old silk shirt with a comic book pattern (which didn’t stretch right, soaked up too much liquid, and eventually got ripped), a piece with pages from a circa 1900 copy of Treasure Island pasted on, inks, papers, and all that good stuff. Enjoy!
The Cable/Satellite Trap
This New York Post story on how supposedly millions of Americans are giving up their cable and satellite services struck a chord with me. The article mentions that the average cable/satellite customer spends $70 a month on services, about the same as our DirecTV bill here at Chez Scrubbles. With every month that I must fork over that sum, I question why we’re paying so much when we can get the same programs on DVD or online. Do we really use it that much? I still love to watch Turner Classic Movies, but I only record about five or six movies a month on that. We also watch the occasional Modern Marvels or Project Runway, but it seems like everything on cable is about haunted houses, Nostradamus/Bible prophesies, macho men on the job, people with eighteen children, people with physical deformities, people who are grossly overweight, etc. etc. I’m paying for that?
By contrast, our monthly Netflix bill is less than a third of DirecTV’s — and we get so much more entertainment value out of that. Netflix probably hates the way we burn through dozens of movies every month. Now that we have our Wii and wi-fi set up with them, we can watch streamed content on the TV through them as well. I really want to try paring down the satellite to just the local network affiliates for a few months to see if we feel deprived in any way. What do you think?
Heidi Heidi Heidi Ho
Just finished doing another round of Lit Kids prints featuring a different character. These came out even better than the Anne of Green Gables one. Slowly, I’m learning this screen printing stuff.
One of the characters I have coming up is Heidi from Johanna Spyri’s novel of the same name. I designed the character first, then read the book. Interesting … more religious than I anticipated, but Spryri nicely conveys the atmosphere of a quaint, rustic Swiss village and its humble inhabitants (mostly kids and old people, oddly enough). I do think I aptly captured the impish, nature loving quality of Heidi herself in my design.
The copy of Heidi I just read is a nice “Rainbow Edition” from the 1940s with illustrations by Leonard Weisgard, much admired in artist circles for his modern approach to kid’s books. This edition also has some great binding with a pine and acorn pattern. Yeah, I can’t wait to rip this thing up for printing! That’ll have to wait for a later print run, however, since the first book I’m using is a different vintage edition published by Grossett & Dunlap. Its binding looks like it’s from about 1950, but the inside pages appear to be designed 20-30 years earlier with beautiful typography and ornaments of flowers, butterflies and the like (see the bottom three photos). Those pages laid underneath my modern-looking illustration should be a neat combination.
Turning Over a New Leaf
After a year, I think it’s time to give a sneak peek of my new venture — one that grew out of my frustrated inability to find work as an illustrator. I’m not going to dwell too much on the negative here, but lately it has been very difficult to find any freelance work at all. Last year, I put a lot of time and effort into sending out dozens of self-promotional postcards, only to find a chorus of crickets chirping in response. It was depressing as hell, but instead of throwing myself off a cliff I decided to channel that creative energy into something that’s on my terms. I’m making my own art and will try selling it on Etsy.
The photo below is the first fruit of my efforts. It’s a drawing of Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables screen printed atop facing pages from the book that bears her name. This was an, how we say, interesting experience. Many of the prints came out off-register and with blobby looking lines, but I might be deluded enough to believe those elements add to their funky handmade charm. They’ll get more professional looking in time. Anne is the first, but I have great designs ready for five more characters. The process has been an expensive learning experience, but I’m having a lot of fun with it. Each print is completely unique, and I think there are a lot of factors involved (nostalgia for printed books, new mommies wanting something special for their kids) that might possibly resonate with the Etsy crowd. Most of all, it’s a lovingly handcrafted project that totally reflects my style, not something someone else imposed on me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s already a success.
The Etsy store is not officially open yet. I want to get another character printed up so it’s not just Anne sitting there by herself. The shop ought to be going live in a few weeks.
Friday Fun
Christopher had the day off work today, so we decided to head out to Scottsdale and Tempe for some outdoor fun. Our first stop was Desert Botanical Gardens. This place is a a total snowbird tourist magnet, but it’s also a Phoenix area institution that reminds us of the beautiful flora and fauna that can still be found around here. C. had free passes, which included a special butterfly exhibit. The butterflies were great, and several of them were oddly attracted to my green shirt. After the gardens, we went thrift shopping and I found a set of small brown melamine bowls for my secret project. Then it was lunch at our favorite Mexican eatery in the area, La Fonda (a place that has stood in the same Scottsdale strip mall since I was a wee one!). We then drove to nearby Tempe to view the lake pouring water into the Salt River, and an exhibit on Chuck Jones at the Tempe Center for the Arts. The Jones exhibit was fantastic. It was mostly paintings and cericels from Jones’ personal collection, along with pencil drawings and other wonderful artifacts from the Warner Bros. cartoon vaults. A nice day — now I’m exhausted!
Gardening — for Victory!
This nice sunny Saturday was a perfect opportunity for us to plant the seeds for the very first vegetable garden in our backyard. We had actually been planning our victory garden for a while now. Christopher prepared the plot for planting last fall, and heavy rains over the winter caused the ground to get nice and soft. We have a good variety of crops including carrots, onions, bell and hot peppers, and green beans (marked by hand-drawn stones pictured below). I have no idea if the Arizona soil is good for vegetables, but we’re planning to water it diligently and hope for the best.
Wheels on Fire, Burning Down the Road
Welcome to our latest acquisition (Price Is Right voice) — a new car! This 2005 Pontiac Grand Prix was among the fleet of company cars for the place where Christopher works. When they came up for sale, we thought long and hard and decided to go for it. I loved my trusty old ’97 Geo Metro (a hand-me-down from Christopher), but it was getting to the point where it was rattling, the AC didn’t work right, etc. So it was with a heavy heart that we donated the old vehicle to a local charity for the blind. This Pontiac is nice and sturdy, bigger than what I’m usually used to but very nimble and smooth on the road. Design-wise, I had this impression that Pontiacs were the cars made for dudes who think a framed Nagel print was the height of cool. This particular model is not too bad looking, however. Stylish, even.
Those Are People Who Died, Died
I was in the middle of reading about the fascinating people profiled in the annual Lives They Lived issue of the New York Times Magazine when I heard shocking news about the passing of another fascinating person. One that I knew, actually: Brad Graham of Bradlands.com. It appears that he died in his sleep of natural causes on December 31st, at the young age of 41. Yeah, I don’t believe it, either.
Brad was one of the earliest bloggers I knew of, and pretty much the kingpin of the (small) community of gay bloggers around in the early ’00s. Back then it was such a thrill to be writing on the net, and having someone else noticing what you were doing was an even bigger thrill — especially when that someone was as friendly and witty as Brad. His August 3, 2001 post, using the first Scrubbles redesign to explore childhood fear of Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, was typical Brad. We weren’t close friends or anything, but his warmth and humor was something I treasured over the years (we even briefly bonded over the ’70s kiddie-com Big John, Little John on twitter last year). I’ll miss you, Brad.
Fine Feathered Friends
I’m pleased as punch with the illustration for our holiday card for this year. Best wishes for the season, everyone.
From Beautiful Burbank
Christopher writes on our adventures attending a taping of The Big Bang Theory last night.
One thing he didn’t mention: after the taping, we were allowed to walk through the empty nighttime Warner Bros. studio lot by ourselves. Since we walked to the studio and the normal audience exit was at a parking structure on the opposite side of the lot from our hotel, they allowed us to take a shortcut (as long as we didn’t “dilly dally,” according to the studio page who helped us). The Warner lot has such a history, and being amongst the cavernous buildings where Bette Davis and Humprey Bogart once walked was such a thrill.
Scarf It Up
Earlier this year, I made a deal with crafty Kris of web-goddess fame: in exchange for designing a spiffy new weblog banner for her, she got to use her superfly knitting skillz to make me a striped multicolored scarf. The banner was finished last Spring, but it’s only tonight that the scarf has arrived from Kris’ homestead in Australia. Neat! I always wanted a scarf, and this one’s a beauty. Here’s a picture of me rockin’ it with my usual nighttime t-shirt and pajama bottom ensemble:
Mama Cat v.2
Good news — a revised and updated version of our 2003 children’s book, Mama Cat, is now available at lulu.com. This was the book that Christopher wrote and I illustrated based on our beloved cat Eames. For this new edition, I went back and re-scanned all of the original artwork, touched them up, and saved them as high quality 1200 dpi bitmap files. The new art is a huge improvement over the old. Although the paper quality in this Lulu edition is slightly thinner and less textured, the higher quality printing makes the text and graphics really pop and look sharp. We’ve had a lot of compliments on this book from cat lovers and those who have undergone the loss of a pet; they are very appreciative of something that addresses their unique situation in an intimate and caring way.
By the way, the original self-published edition is still for sale at Amazon.com.
Witches’ Night Out
It’s Halloween! What spookiness will be planned? We’re having our yearly ritual of turning off the porch light, avoiding the neighborhood kiddies, shutting ourselves into a back room, and watching a scary movie. Because needy little sugar-addicted brats are the scariest things on earth! Here’s the only Halloween decor we have at the homestead:
Despite the avoidance of trick or treaters, I want to state that I am far from the Halloween version of a Scrooge. Earlier this week, I uploaded some scans of these terrific vintage “You’ll Die Laughing” cards that my friend Julie sent me a few years back. These wonderfully dark cards were illustrated by Mad man Jack Davis. Check out the four that I have in my Kiddie Korner flickr set.
Finally, I’ve also posted a Halloween-themed edition of my online comic, Two Bunnies and a Duck. I’ve been plugging away at the biweekly Two Bunnies for almost two years. While the project serves as a good way to keep my drawing and Photoshop skills honed, the thing barely gets any visitors or comments and it’s very discouraging. Please visit and, if you want to cheer me up, leave a comment. Thanks. Boo!
Wednesday: On the Beach
And now… the conclusion of our Los Angeles trip:
- Wednesday — This was our “beach day,” a nice way to wind down our vacation. I’d never been to Venice Beach before, and previously I’d only known the spot for its image as a hangout for surfers, bodybuilders, tattoo artists and other stereotypical Californians. That morning, we walked around the boardwalk and observed everyone getting ready for the day. It had a funky and kind of mellow vibe. One of the first photos I snapped was a shop window selling a custom-blown glass bong in the shape of Bart Simpson. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Much of this area looked vaguely familiar from being filmed for various movies and TV shows. I even recognized one building as a locale from the Linda Blair Roller Boogie movie. We searched around for a spot to eat breakfast, but the only shops available were snack joints that hadn’t yet opened for the day. Long story short, we ended up back at the hotel and having the attendant get our car (one of the annoying aspects of the Hotel Erwin) so we could take the short drive to the recommended restaurant. Unfortunately, the first place we tried was lousy. We had to wait 15 minutes before being waited on. Then the waiter informed us the muffin I ordered from the menu hasn’t been available for months. A few minutes later, they told us that they ran out of the croissant I also ordered. All we wanted was a simple, quick meal! We got fed up and bolted for another place across the street (which was better). About the only good thing to come from this time-consuming jag was the opportunity to see Jonathon Borofsky’s notorious ‘Ballerina Clown’ sculpture. Back to the hotel, we finally got our time to relax on the beach. It was nice, with flocks of seagulls, sandpipers and plovers to keep us company. I got in the water up to my knees and Christopher swam out to a rocky outcropping. It was a balmy morning and the beach hadn’t filled up yet — perfect! We walked around the boardwalk some more, eventually buying a stack of t-shirts from one of the overstuffed souvenir shops lining the way. We got back to the hotel, packed our bags, and shipped off for home on the venerable 10 highway. Of course, it wouldn’t be L.A. without at least one traffic jam, and we hit a doozy on the way out. Before passing over the Colorado River into our home state, we did one last “California” thing — lunch at the Thousand Palms In-N-Out Burger location! So ended Matt & Christopher’s California Adventure.
