Leaving on a jet plane... prerequisites

I’m at the passport office. Why do I feel guilty? Maybe everyone feels guilty when they brush up against officialdom. Oddly, the people behind the counters servicing all the passport applicants all seem to be rather cheerful and happy. Not what I was expecting. It’s like that time I went to get a special permit form from the City of Toronto and they fell over themselves trying to make sure that I was comfortable and that I didn’t have to wait too long. Definitely not what I was expecting. I am here to apply for passports for family Lugs. Little Lugs and I are going to whizz over to England during March break. He wants to see castles and they have them there aplenty. It will be good to visit Brother Lugs and Nephew Lugs too.

Brother Lugs just sent me a detailed potential itinerary (he lives over there) which is most unlike him. That is something that the other Brother Lugs would do (and he lives in Calgary) Still, he had some good suggestions in there, they are worth investigating. It looks like it could be fun planning this jaunt.

Moving on

Assistant Lugs has wrapped up her belongings in a red spotted hankerchief, slung it over her shoulder on a bamboo cane and taken off, choosing to seek her fortune elsewhere. Well, she may be back to help on some jobs occasionally, but for the most part it is now just me again. I’ll miss her. There’s something empowering in a work environment where you can say “we” as opposed to “I” Well, I wish her all the best.

Things are still pretty hectic in the illustration pit here so I expect this will mean longer hours and later nights for the next while. Currently I am still working on the big posters for the agency of the large beverage firm, I am finishing poster number three of four. I am still in the middle of all those icons and I have a few retouching jobs coming through all the time.

Forced into cleaning up

I was moving some stuff in the basement on the weekend (to make way for more stuff) and I discovered a box on the floor that contained piles of examples of my work during a certain period of my career. It was from the heady early days for desktop publishing when we first started exploring the use of computers to do graphic design and layout. Unfortunately the box had lain in a damp part of the floor and much of the lower portion of the box was a solid sodden mess of newsprint, negatives and magazines. I discovered all sorts of things in there I had long forgotten about: magazine articles I had written or were written about me, posters that mentioned I would be speaking at a certain event. It was odd to see it all reduced to this sodden smelly mess. I managed to recover about a sixth of it and had to toss the rest out. It filled a garbage bag.

Well, nothing like circumstance to force you to clean up. I am pretty bad at that sort of thing so at least it gave me a criteria for the clean up: Mouldy = Toss, Clean = Keep.

Well, I blew that!

Turns out it had been 250 gig all the time. For some strange reason I had assumed it was a 500 gig disk in the G5 but it wasn't. That was pretty embarrassing. I can only assume that I got confused by the fact that I had installed a 500 gig drive in the recent imac I bought and that I was thinking of that. Well. I am still installing software on the machine on and off and the whole thing was pretty irritating. Still I am back to normal now (mostly)

Update on the drive

As if you cared. Hah! Well, the story does have some wrinkles and it isn't over yet. Here's the scoop. I took the computer in and we all sat on our hands waiting patiently while Apple send a new drive down for installation at the store, Carbon Computing. That was on Wednesday. Assistant Lugs and I shared the laptop one day... not a good experience I can tell you!. I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call on Friday that the new drive had been installed and the G5 was ready to be picked up. I went over and as it had been repaired under Apple Care, paid a nominal fee just for the rush service I had requested. I then dashed over to the Apple Store at the Eaton Centre to pick up a family pack of the new Mac system software: Leopard. I figured that with a brand new drive this might be a good time to upgrade. I get it home, eager to start installing stuff but soon realised that I don't have any DVI monitors. This Mac has 4 DVI ports on the back (Illustrators: we need lots of monitors, what can I say?) but I only have a spare analogue monitor at home. So I waited until this morning to bring the computer in to the studio and power it up. Immediately I notice that they had installed a drive of the Wrong Freaking Size!! It went in with a defective 520 gig drive and came out with an operational 230 gig drive. I was hopping mad. So my commitment to installing all this software was immediately tempered by the knowledge I may need to have to take the bloody thing in again. Still I had to install it so I can work this weekend. That took three and a half hours. I am still mad.

I do like Leopard though. I thought I wouldn't have much used for it but I'm thinking the new features will be quite useful. Okay, rant over, now back to your regularly scheduled blogs.

It all grinds to a halt

What a great way to start a new year! The main drive in my honking big Mac at the studio has gone kaput. You can’t believe how annoying that is, well, I suspect you can, actually. I will now have to endure 2 or 3 days of mild frustration (at best) while the tech people replace the disk and move the existing content over from the old disk or two weeks of complete torture while I rebuild the contents of the disk from 2 month old back ups.

I back up my working files every day and I have 2 copies of those. But the main disk which contains all the software and stuff I have been remarkably lax with when it comes to backups. Oh what a fool I have been! Let’s hope I recall the discomfort of the next few days clearly for an awfully long time to ensure that I also back up my main disk at about the same frequency as I back up my working files.

The Annual Gap

This gap between Christmas and New Year’s is always a weird kinda time. I often have to work but I admit it is very half-hearted. Family time and new things are calling my attention away and that is a good thing. Ms Lugs gave me a book on Pigeons for Christmas. Who knew that they would be such interesting creatures? Not I, that’s for sure. I haven’t read a book in ages but it was super today to just curl up on the couch for a few hours and read. My thoughts of work were fleeting and rare. Not so tomorrow, though. I have to get back to it then... but today was a nice break.

It’s not the work you remember but the other stuff

One of the things that bugs me is that during the busy times, the work gobbles up all available time. It chews up all the time that would be given over to doing the fun stuff with family, reading books, seeing movies, things like that. Look back on that time and all you’ll see is a big hole in your life because I don’t think you remember the work. Sure, you remember the resulting image. As an illustrator, if I like it enough I’ll stick it up on the wall and probably look at it almost every day at some point in later months, years. I forget the amount of work that it took to get there, but I know I am missing the memories of the time I could have been spending during that period doing the fun stuff I listed earlier. Well, I guess I’ll never know.

First day back

First day back after the Christmas break and I am feeling a little sluggish. Plenty of issues to deal with. There are the usual issues: Too many thing to do, not enough time in which to do them. A list of things to do that resides entirely in my head and the ever present fear that if I write it down it will get bigger. Add to these all the holiday related issues: the holiday was so good I have a hard time remembering what I do for a living. Having a hard time focusing, that sort of thing and I think this "working-during-the-holidays-when-everyone-else-is-off" is a recipe for disaster. So, I am going to make a very specific list of the things I want to do this afternoon. Just the key things and I am going to make sure that I accomplish them at the very least. Yes, that's what I am going to do. Just watch me.

Winter festival scene done, on to the next

In the run up to the holidays things have gotten pretty sluggish in the blogging department That’s not to say we have been idle in Studio Lugs. Quite the contrary. We’ve have been very busy. So busy, in fact, we even had to miss a Seasonal Party or two. The icon project continues sporadically and the series of four illustrations we were engaged to produce has occupied this illustrator's every waking moment practically. The results have been great though. Here’s a portion of the winter festival scene we have been working on lately. It is a massive image and this bit is just a very small part of it. The full image is out pending client final approval approval.

This is bugging me

The Lugs family had been to the cottage for the weekend. Upon our return Ms Lugs found a suspicious 3mm long "creature" attached to the top of our dog Nuala's head. It looked as though it had burrowed in partly under the skin. (sorry for the details there) Nuala was taken to the vet where the tick (for so it was) got to be extracted and sent away for testing to see if it carried Lyme Disease.

Two days later Ms Lugs was stroking Nuala and she found ANOTHER tick near the site of the first one. I looked at it and tried pulling it out. It relinquished Naula's scalp with a large clicking sound. For some reason that sound really grossed me out. On closer inspection I found yet another but considerably smaller tick at the same site. He wasn't trying to dig in but was just ambling around instead. He too was removed and put into a sealed container.

Later, Ms Lugs called me from the Jeep with what has to be the funniest call I have had in ages. She said "I can't believe I am driving a tick and his little buddy to the vet today!" That might have sounded good as a tweet.

Winter scene done, onto the next

The winter scene we were working on is now complete. As soon as I have seen that it has been published I will upload the full image. In the meantime I can let you see just a part of it. But this will give you an idea of the paint style. No rest for the wicked though. The moment this job is in the client’s hands we turn our attention toward the production of the next one. This next one will be the second in a series of four. The first was done a couple of years ago and this second one is an image of the same event as that picutred in the first. I am really looking to get back this scene. It should be cool to produce another image of the same event, but from different angle. I’ll be using a different set of models this time as it is suposed to be in a slightly different location.

The funny thing is that I do these scenes in photo studios and 3D programs and elsewhere on the computer and then, sometime toward the end of the illustration my mind starts believing that the event or scene actually occurred. Strange what the mind will do.

If a torpedo hits the water, does it make a sound?

Here’s a little graphic we did for the Canadian Acoustics Magazine cover. I have been doing the covers for that magazine since I was quite a young lad. They are never really spectacular... how nifty can you make sound wave look? It is an ever present problem with that magazine. The covers are always a challenge. Well, on this one the challenge was to illustrate two concepts and make them look like they belonged together: an audio file retrieving system and an article on methods of tracking the progress of a torpedo moving toward the device that is tracking it. This was our solution. I did the 3D bits and Assistant Lugs did the rest.

The march of progress

We picked up a new printer for Studio Lugs the other day. Well, I picked it up, Assistant Lugs held open the doors, cheerily enquiring of the store owner how much delivery would have been.

The printer is great, it does all sorts of things; scans, copies and prints, reads from SD cards, all that stuff. All for $200. Maybe I am dating myself here but my first laser printer (the Apple LaserWriter) cost me over $10,000.00. That was only 300 dpi, black and white and certainly didn’t make photocopies.

While some things (the price of housing, for example) continue their slow rise into the stratosphere, other things defy logic. For half the price you can get something that weighs half the weight and does twice as much than a similar machine did two years ago. Now that kind of progress I can get used to.

Making an early winter scene

We are taking pictures of people today. Reference for a winter scene illustration. Part of the image reference will be created in a 3D program and the people will be shot as photographs with similar lighting and then dropped in. The image will then be used as reference for the final painting which will have a higher contrast and more saturation probably but will generally look the same. The benefit of doing it this way is that the art director can give the go ahead on the painting and know that it won't look too different in the final from the thing he approved. That's important on crazy deadline jobs like this one. Crazy deadlines also generate other problems too. There is no time to do anything twice so we have lined up twice the number of models we need for the shoot. That'll cover for any that don't show up and also give the art director some extra leeway in his selection of the ones that he wants to use. I'll post some of the shots after the shoot.

What happened to the calm before the storm?

Here in Studio Lugs we are getting ready for a huge onslaught of work. We were already pretty busy but now we are likely to be doing another four big illustrations before Christmas. In the normal run of things each one of these would take two to three weeks. It is going to make for a very busy, but productive time. I am excited by it but with a fair amount of trepidation. Still maybe that dash of panic makes the final work all the more vital. Anyway, we’ll know in the next couple of days whether we really are going to be that busy or not, but it seems pretty likely. Once again we won’t be able to show you the results until published but we might be able to show you little parts of the jobs as we go.

Riding can be heaven or hell

It gives me great pleasure to have a little digital camera in my backpack. You never know what you are gong to see cycling to and from work. Take this scene I shot on my way home from work recently... I liked how there was this glorious sunset going on able the distillery district and yet it seemed as fit the area had its own business to attend to. Lights were just coming on and businesses were setting up for the evening with no thought to what was going on overhead.

I have often wondered about having a video camera on board. Not just to record the trip but to also have some record of what actually happened during some of the random yet inevitable altercations that seem to occur when bikes meet cars. Like this evening for example. There I was riding along the bike lane, minding my own business, when an owner of a car parked next to the bike lane opened his driver side door to get in right in front of me while I rang me bell. "Watch your car door please" I yelled. He looked up at me as if I wasn’t there "What? Didn’t you see me?" I said pointing to my twin headlights as I passed. "No" I heard him call after me. Yet, moments later, his car practically touched me as he swerved into the bike lane to show me how clever he could be behind the wheel of his big ugly lump of steel and rubber. Maybe he did that to teach me a lesson... and the lesson is that he’s an idiot! I hate people who use their cars as weapons. I could have done with a record shot of his license plate.

Therr’s a prolbem here smeowhere

Can your fingers grow longer after you pass, 20, 30, 40, 50? I am wondering this because as I get older I become more keyboardishly dyslexic. The word “from” now always goes in as “form”, to becomes ot, some becomes smoe. I think of my fingers have grown and this accounts for the errors. Or perhaps my mind has started to speed up ad now works at a rate far in excess of what my fingers can achieve. Hence the error. Maybe, the Mac now has a system to detect these keyboarding errors but there is an error in the software and, because I am not making the mistakes any more, the computer is messing things up. Notice how all my suggestions (exuses) for the problems appear to be based on improvements at my end?

Hmm. See you aonther tmie.

P.S. Yikes, Grandmomma Lugs who loves to draw my attention to every typo I have ever made is going to freak if she sees this post.

Making it real

Woah!... the days are getting crisp. Just spent the weekend at the cottage. trying to finish off a third bedroom. It is nice to turn from tablets and screens to plaster and sand paper for a change. The room is pretty well done now, just needs painting and something covering the floor. This weekend I built a box to hide the electircial panel. There is something immensely satisfying about using tools to create something real. some edifice (even if it is only a box). The other work I do is so ephemeral I don’t think it is real. It is only real when it gets printed and you walk past a poster of it as you enter a store or drive past a billboard with the image on it. So, there is a definite pleasure in creating something real, something you can grab on to.

Casting envious eyes

Assistant Lugs is doing some small paintings for an art show and I am extremely envious. For once it would be neat to wallow in traditional media and all the spontaneous unplanned things that happen as paint hits canvas. When you are working on the computer pretty well everything you do happens because you plan it to happen. There aren't too many things that happen all by themselves on computers and yet IRL* that’s what you are working with all the time: the texture of the media, the viscosity of the paint, the temperature of the environment. And the smell, remember the smell of the inks? The computer only smells twice; when it is brand new and when it's about time to toss it out.

* IRL = in real life, I mean