Digger chain

Cycling in to work this morning I saw this interesting sight. A hole so deep that the diggers had to form a chain just to get the buckets of dirt out. Actually only two diggers were involved in the chain, the lowest one of the three had a jack hammer on the end to break of chunks of the shale, rock or whatever it was. Whatever it was it hadn’t seen the light in several million years I’ll bet. After that initial exposure it was pushed rudely out of its bed, scraped up into a bucket, transferred to another bucket and then unceremoniously dumped into a truck, with hardly a moment to enjoy the sights and sounds of twenty first century downtown Toronto. The truck then hauled it off to join other bucketfuls in some massive pile out of town somewhere I suppose. It can't be easy being a chunk of rock.

Look deep into my eyes

Remember I said I was going to have my eyes checked a couple of weeks ago? Well, it happened and while I was in there they took some digital shots of my retina. Here they are. Now, I know all you armchair optometrists are thinking "Crikey Loppy, you've got a serious case of 'cross-eyed-itis' going there. We'd better get you under the knife to separate those two puppies as soon as possible." Well, actually I think they are supposed to look like that. The veins there are the vessels at the back of the eye. I may have the scans swapped around.. but who but a professional really knows?

Anyway, thought you might like to see... apparently it's not only designers, photographers and illustrators that produce cool images.

A work-free weekend, yeay!

To look at this blog one would be forgiven for thinking that the Lugster had dropped off the face of the earth, but no, I'm still here. Working feverishly. "Team Lugs" are currently engaged on a relatively large project for a large agency on behalf of a large client. That's about as close as I can get with my description except to say that it involves us doing a lot of drawings. The project has been going for a couple of months now but only now is it cranking up. It will be good once it is done but right now we are only in the early stages of it. Can't show you anything until it is done and published, of course.

This weekend though, no work for a change, so it was all about the forthcoming Halloween, carving pumpkins, cleaning out the garage so we can decorate it for Wednesday... and building a storage unit in the basement, that sort of thing. I'll leave you to decide which Lug family member carved which pumpkin.

On drips and newspapers

Last week the major project was turning some rainwater droplets in a stock shot into paint drips for a trade show booth. Assistant Lugs was plugging away at the Jazz newsletter. She finished the rough layout, had it approved and started refining it on a page by page basis. She also helped me on the drips. Drawing path selections for over a thousand drips is quite time consuming. The job happened quite quickly. I uploaded the final art to an ftp site and then they send it off to the States to be turned in to the backdrop for a display booth.

Toward the end of the week I was doing many newspaper separations of whisky bottles, drinks and mood shots for a newspaper insert. These images are always a challenge, largely because they are often dark but also because it is very difficult to achieve the rich colours of some of the drinks with only a maximum ink density of 240. You have to be creative with it. Even though doing newspaper separations might seem boring, the challenge of making it look as good as possible is enjoyable.

It will still look like crap when it hits the newspaper, no matter what you do. But it will be good crap, or at least better than what might have been had you not tinkered with it.

Canadian Thanksgiving

This past weekend was a treat. It was a treat to get away for one thing. We went down to our little cottage in Prince Edward County. The County is a rather large island that sits in the eastern end of Lake Ontario. It's a place of vineyards, farms, coastlines and beautiful scenery. The type of place that after spending 2.5 hours on the road from Toronto you stop the car, turn off the engine, and all you can hear are birds. It's also rather isolated. Treat #2: no internet or even phone. Well, we have the cell phones but service is sporadic to say the least. We're "doing up" the place and I spent a fair amount of time sanding and plastering the third bedroom. We are trying to make the place cosy and serviceable enough that we can rent it out. This time out though, the place became family-oriented as family visited and Ms Lugs cooked a fine Thanksgiving dinner that left us all holding our bellies. That was treat #3. Came back to Toronto on Monday to spend much of the remaining day setting up the new imac I bought for home. That monitor is much bigger than I thought it was in the store. Another treat. Unfortunately I couldn't get the old mac to properly hook up to the new machine so all the settings and user information had to be transfered manually, and let me tell you, that was and still is, no treat.

Dental work

Well if this isn’t the week for a full human tune-up. Went to the dentist yesterday. After a filling I had one of my wisdom teeth pulled. Should have had them out years ago but couldn’t afford it. Well, one of them was in the standing way for the second filling this morning so I had it yanked. We’ll get to the actual filling in a couple of weeks. The doctor had it out before I realized he was doing it. I think that is because the tooth was above the surface and it had relatively short roots. So, now there’s a hole in my mouth and I feel as though I have been punched. Hey I never said I was going to talk about important stuff on this blog.

On the work front... a job that was supposed to happen was considerably reduced in scope, so, with all this spare time, we are archiving like mad bunnies here in anticipation of a busy week next week.

Eyes checked

I went and had my eyes checked yesterday. You’d think that for a person who makes his living from what his eyes tell him he’d be having his eyes checked more frequently than every four years. Well, maybe this was a turning point. Perhaps I’ll start going every year or two. It would probably make sense... not that I am known for my sensibility.

Anyway, the doctor sat me down and determined with all that fancy equipment what my prescription would be and then she dropped the pupil dilating drops in my eyes. Once they were large they took photos of my eyes (copies of which i will upload here when they become available). Then it was back to the doctors equipment-heavy room to check the health of my eyes. She was nice and it was all very painless. One or two things struck me as odd. The business cards that they give out are almost illegible. Perhaps that is to ensure that their customers realise they need help in the visual department. The type was small and it had a very low contrast with its background colour. It was only by using a magnifying glass that I was able to determine the spelling of the name of the doctor I had just seen.

Well, $120 bucks later, I left with a slip of paper indicating the new prescription for glasses I needed. I am looking forward to getting new glasses because when she had me wear the test glasses that matched the new prescription everything looked so crisp it practically jumped out at me. It’s amazing how your peepers can change over just 4 years.

"That time of the month" is over

It’s the middle of the week and now we are back to doing artwork. Assistant Lugs has started to put together the latest newsletter for a Canadian Jazz organization and I am turning my attention toward doing the retouching for some wine ads for a newspaper. It is a welcome change... I suspect I will whine interminably in this blog about how I hate doing administration at the beginning of every month. This month will be no exception.

I hate administration... I am always losing $3000 dollars, only to find it tucked away where it is supposed to be an hour later. Or I am ready to send out an invoice but it just needs one more P.O. number before I can send it and no-one can tell me what that number is. The wrinkles in billing, quoting and accounting are endless and I am impressed by those that can deal with it all the time. Every time I spend a couple of days at it every month, I think “Wow, how do those suits do it?” It’s a skill I don’t have and probably never will. I procrastinate on the billing issue and thus just make it worse for myself. Still I have dropped the invoices in the mail for all the jobs completed during September and I can now turn my attention back to what I really love to do: working with images.

Smile, you're in Timmys

Stop into any Tim Hortons coffee shop across the country this week and I suspect you will see many iterations of the smile cookie I painted for their agency a couple of years ago. At both my local Timmy's I saw window clings and small size posters. The t shirts the staff were wearing had it on them and it was also on the in-store television monitors.

I remember it was a fun job to do. I had to buy a lot of cookies to use for my "research", yeah, let's call it research. Funny how so many of the cookies ended up in my belly after I had finished researching them.

No, I don't think that having these images up all over the place makes me famous (Little Lugs always wants to know "Does that mean you're famous daddy?") but it is a blast to see it up and being used. Unfortunately, to put up the smile cookie window clings they had to take down one of my other illustrations of a park for an anti-litter campaign. Win some, lose some.

A great setting

Sunday afternoon saw family Lugs heading out to Kleinburg to visit the McMichael Canadian Collection art gallery. There can be few settings as gorgeous as this one in Canada for the enjoyment of Canadiana art. The log and stone gallery sits nestled in pine trees on a knoll overlooking a lovely river flood plain. The trails around the property are magnificent. Originally designed to house works by the Group of Seven the gallery seems to have diverged from its origninal direction since the McMichaels ceded the place to the government. It was to see one of thes divergences that we went to the gallery on this lovely fall day.

They were having a show of works by the great Canadian naturalist painter Robert Bateman. It was a superb collection of pieces and I particularly enjoyed the personal notes from the artist that accompanied practically every piece. There were pieces from every era of his career. Interestingly, I had seen several of them in books and magazines but in real life the painting were quite different. You could see brush strokes and they were the type of brush stroke one wouldn’t think when laid over the top of one another they would add up to the magnificent whole, but they did. He never really uses black yet, in all the books I had seen the tonal range always went right to black. Well, it was a wonderful show and I was quite moved by several of the pieces, particularly those dealing with clear cut logging and driftnet fishing. We left the gallery quite inspired on a number of levels.