Beer Is The Path To The Dark Side.

Is it really 5 years since I last blogged? Time certainly gets away. Last week makes 41 years since the first Star Wars film was released, and it definitely doesn't seem that long to me. When it was new I think we saw it at the cinema 9 times. In those days cinemas would buy a print of their biggest earners and run them for literally years on end. Crocodile Dundee screened for so long at our local independent, they had a gigantic painting of Hogan and Kozlowski applied to the side of their building. Rings a bell its season ran for 3 years. When Star Wars came out I was only 3 years old, so seeing it regularly with my sisters possibly counted as big-screen child-minding as much as it attested fandom. Now, of course, Star Wars is a Disney juggernaut, pumping out new films just about every year for better or worse. (For mine, most assuredly worse in the case of a fully CG, horrifyingly Uncanny Valley Peter Cushing - and I'd hoped Blood Beast Terror would be the greatest indignity to befall him.) But the nostalgia lives on - and I still have considerable affection for those first couple of films. (It started to fade a little when the Ewoks showed up.) For the last few years I've been making beer labels for an old friend who runs a bar called The Catfish, in Fitzroy. Special short-runs of beer have been produced to mark each of the fine establishment's birthdays, with illustrations for every brew helping to mark the occasion. The bewhiskered fish itself always makes an appearance in the artworks, thrown into whichever situation the particular style of beer demands. For the most recent anniversary, The Catfish worked with Cavalier Brewing to produce an Imperial Pilsner. And what self-respecting publican Star Wars fan could resist having a beer with a name like that do anything but go to The Dark Side? So it came to pass that a Catfish Emperor ruled over an effervescent amber galaxy - not so long ago, in a bar not far away.

Give in. Let it flow through you. USE THE SAUCE, LUKE!

This was a really fun picture to make.

The Cavalier Catfish Imperial Pilsner strikes back.

Findings Of The Arsegravy Historical Society.

A couple of months ago I was in my hometown, two thousand or so miles north in Queensland. The humidity up there is the kiss of death on anything made of paper, leaching out all the acids & setting in with rot faster than a Poppy Z Brite story. There's also a legion of tropical creepy crawlies sprung straight out of Temple of Doom who are always hungry for a tasty fix of illustration board or acrylic paint. With that in mind I figured it was time to do some preservation work. So I cleared away the cobwebs, vacuumed up the inches of daddy long legs shit and had a rummage through my old art cupboard. After a while spent dusting and washing away the fungus, it was nice to see a few salvageable bits & pieces floating to the top. Some of them went right back to high school, in the late 80's - surprising given that voracious climate. Here's a bunch I thought were just about worth sharing.

This would've been Year 9 or 10 of high school. I remember regularly trying to shoehorn art into subjects that had no real requirement for it - in English it'd be making a book cover to go with a review, in history spending far too much time on a political cartoon, or in a variety of other classes designing the "title page" (marking the beginning of a new unit of study) would maybe get a little more of my concentration than it should've. I actually did enjoy Biology.. but perhaps not quite as much as drawing a guy with a cross sectioned head.

Growing up I was obsessed with the long-running English TV show "Doctor Who". I'm not sure why I fastened onto it so firmly.. although the combination of its instant-satisfaction gothic pulpiness and the ABC's decade-long policy of hypnotic non-stop reruns probably contributed. I suppose most people have obsessive interests of one kind or another - football, music, cars, shoes, Star Wars.. whatever. This was mine. And it provided an endless supply of exactly what I was always after - subjects to draw.

These little pictures were cassette tape covers, about 10 by 6 centimetres in size. Now I look at them and envy the undiminished eyesight that allowed such tiny work unassisted! This was unintentional good training for an illustrator - making them taught me about concentrating on portions & shapes rather than the image as a whole, as well as layout, colour blending and how interesting it can be to draw with the reference upside down for greater objectivity.. Oh, and the cassette format came as a result of two things - our family's lack of a VCR in the early 80's, and the ABC's simulcasting of television audio on the FM band in regional Queensland. I often tape-recorded TV shows and listened back to them like audiobooks. Friends did this too. As an odd dividend I can occasionally remember large chunks of old-TV dialogue! Certainly feels a long way from the everything-on-demand digital world we're all in now..

There was also a bit of figure sculpting that came as a result of the enthusiasm for Dr Who. I would've been 16 when making this Patrick Troughton.. He'd be about 10 or 12 cm tall. I remember slaving to keep detail while the Modeline synthetic baking clay kept either squashing or crumbling. He's a little chunky, but I think he holds up OK. And photographing him up close really made me want to get back to doing some sculpting..

Now here's a few from Uni days. I did a Bachelor of Visual Arts at James Cook University, with an Illustration major. Recently I learned that Visual Arts studies at JCU, while operating out of a lovely new building, no longer include painting or sculpture. Another victim of "rationalisation" and the market-driven reforms at Australian universities in the last 20 years. I'm doubtful that broad, high-quality education is the winner.

This Gregory Peck was one of a few first-year projects designed to test our ability to reproduce faithfully from a photographic source. This one was a bit too hurried, and I ran out of time to finesse the little details.. A good lesson.

My acrylic and coloured pencil stab at Flagg's stony-faced Uncle Sam. Part of a series of six, metamorphosing from the statue of liberty. Not the greatest, but it was a good chance to - tentatively - test out mixing pencils and airbrush, for the background.

It was 1991, I was 18, and Terminator 2 was everywhere. To the present day me, T2 looks like a loud marketing exercise with fun special effects and some remarkably poor dialogue. To the 1991 me, it was irresistible. This picture was still a lesson - not so much in the fun to be had making an image out of dotting with a Rotring pen (arrg!) - but in not improvising details on the fly. The original photo had been taken from a paused video on our convex-screened cathode tube, and the mechanical details were hazy. I didn't work out an approach to dealing with this in advance, and by improvising as I went, those areas just ended up looking fake. Planning helps.

In 2006 McDonalds were still clearing rainforest in the Amazon to plant soya. I have no idea if they're still up to it, but I don't imagine I'm going to warm to them anytime soon regardless. This was still 1991, and the brief was to make a poster addressing environmental concerns using no more than 3 words to convey it's message. It's a mixed media combo of coloured pencil, airbrushed acrylic and crayons. The Crayolas were used for the soil and plants. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Despite that choice, and some figure-ratio & layout problems (he's on a hill OK?), I'm fond of this one.. Maybe it's the killer clown angle. Or maybe it's just fun to throw poo at a really rubbish company.

On this one the brief was a dummy magazine cover. Silence of the Lambs was a big, disturbing hit at the time, and I jumped at the chance to paint Hopkins wonderfully rumpled face. For the retro-airbrushing fans out there I was using a Paasche VL. Still occasionally use it to this day - really versatile piece of kit, (double action, suction-feed for faster colour switching & capable of very fine lines) and a much simpler, easier to use design than the Badger I recently tried. This was my first attempt at using a lot of hand-held masking to make an airbrushed image, and it probably suffers a bit on close inspection. But I'm still happy with the overall effect - and if the writing looks ever-so-slightly wonky, it's because it was all hand-cut masking, just a scalpel and frisket film. Must've taken ages. I think I've blocked out the trauma.

The madwoman was a last-minute (overnight!) job for our graduation exhibition guide in 93. Solidly into the airbrush years by now, I was experimenting with a spatter-effect, achieved by scratching the inside of an old Paasche tip with a compass to make it spit paint instead of atomise. This did make it prone to accumulating large drops of paint every so often, but regular daps with a cloth meant illustration disaster could be avoided. Just like Trust Your Doctor, she's a combination of loose masking cut from acetate & placed on the surface, and hand-held masks, kept away from the surface to soften the lines. It's a very simple piece, but I still think it was reasonably effective.

Yep, it was the 90's. Clapton was enjoying his resurgent fame as a result of the Unplugged album. I did like it, and yes, I do apologise. In my defence, I could at least tell - even then - that Tears In Heaven was a truly horrible song. Let's pretend I did it as a dedication to his work with the Yardbirds, Bluesbreakers or Cream and move on.. This was a third year exercise - another test of observation & use of materials - requiring an illustration as similar as possible to it's photographic source. The original photo is by Albert Watson, and I loved it's dramatic light. The surface is a nice smooth Illustration Board and it was painted with a triple 0 brush using Winsor & Newton gouache. I wasn't a huge fan of gouache, but those were the rules for this project - and I wanted to skip the airbrush on this one, just to make sure I could still blend paint by hand! It probably took about 6 weeks on & off - looking at something that closely needed decent breaks for other work. A strange piece this one - I'm very pleased with it's technical side, but I've never felt the urge to hang it. The curse of this exercise is, if successful, you end with an exact copy of someone else's work.

To finish, one last bit of pop-pulp. I was really enjoying Anthony Hopkins face at this time. By 93 he'd been in Coppola's messy, operatic Dracula, doing his entertainingly hammy Van Helsing. He was almost enough to make you forget the travesty of Keanu & Winona. Almost. The frame was salvaged from a building site by my Dad - once the bottom right corner was restored with a bit of the same synthetic baking clay Patrick Troughton was made of, it was good to go. He was painted almost continuously over two and a half days, oil on canvas. I hadn't blended with oils before & couldn't get the effect I wanted quickly enough - the brushes were ditched and out of desperation I dipped cotton balls in the paint to get it the way I'd pictured. Used with the same kind of hand-held acetate masking I'd tried on the madwoman, it came up fine. Doesn't bear intense scrutiny - the stubble's a bit dodgy, as is the cravat/scarf thing - but for a two day quicky, I think he's fun.

That's all for the Arsegravy Ancient History Show N Tell. I do hope you've enjoyed checking out what was under the cobwebs and spider scat. I guess I should also do an update for the Wildlife Art years that came after today's selection - but that's a horror for another day.

Aliens Ate My Desk Set!

The library I work at can get pretty jam-packed at times. For a while they'd been noticing people leaving a few possessions on the jelly-bean desks in the morning to "reserve" them, and having planted the flag, wandering off for a good chunk of the day. With demand for space high, they wanted to get the message out that the resources needed to be shared. I was asked to draw something up on an A0 sized whiteboard - something eye-catching so as to get punters over & reading the fine print, and not too officious or tut-tutty. The tagline was "Don't Be A Space Invader", which left it pleasingly open to drawing some familiar big-brains, bug-eyes and killer 'bots. Here's the finished product.

It's Scribblin' Time!

Here's a few more examples of the library quicky-cartoons I mentioned in the last entry. Perfection isn't the goal with these - usually it's just to draw something silly and keep my hand in. Drawing something - anything - every day really does help with shaping ideas and keeping and your skills up. Also it's fun, so why not? Some are scribbles left on the slips of paper meant to indicate which library campus a box of books is headed for, while others have been left on lonely whiteboards, abandoned in the digital scramble. An empty whiteboard is surely a terrible thing to waste.

Most of these date back to the time when we had a whole campus reserved for business-related studies. It's the reason we have books in the collection with titles like "Be Know Do", "Power Mentoring!", the touching "HR From The Heart" and most ludicrously, "Sun Tsu's Art of War for the Sales Warrior". To express a low opinion of the entire "business community" might appear to be a terrible sweeping generalisation - if "business" is taken to cover everything from the local fruiterer & bookstore, to film-making, music, restaurants and my very own illustration services inclusive. So just to be clear I'm not insulting everybody in the world here - the "business community" I'm talking about is everybody's favourite old cliche-because-it's-true Big Business, and it's commonly accompanying philosophy of the ethical vacuum, Whatever It Takes. In Australia I'm thinking of the Chambers Of Commerce, the Minerals Council, the Murdochs, the Packers, Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest, Clive Palmer and well-paid industry PR hacks like the Institute of Public Affairs. The kind of people who refer to laws designed to protect the environment as "green tape" and keep the details of bent multi-billion dollar Public Private Partnerships a secret on the basis of Commercial In Confidence clauses. I'm also thinking of their army of facilitators, like the plethora of giant commercial consultancies, nourished partly as a consequence of 30 or more years of hamstrung "rationalised" universities desperate for funding & retooled as for-profit enterprises pumping out management graduates without specific expertise in the industries they go on be paid like gods to be  Executive Officers of and, not aware of or believing in the resource of knowledge & experience to be found within the organisations they run (and always keen to ensure buffers for later blame-shifting), calling in expensive, unnecessary external advisors. Basically an anti-egalitarian distillation of self-regard, bad faith, incompetence and corruption. As John C. Hall of King Missile would say, oh, don't get me started. Which reminds me of something else he said - "Life is hard, brutal, capricious and unfair. Sometimes there is a benefit to seeing it clearly and acknowledging it truthfully... and other times it is best to find something to laugh about, lest despair crush one completely." Here's some scribbles.

Supermatters Arising.

A quick follow up on the Big Blue project. First I just wanted to share one of the stupid scribbles from my other job working in a library. Every day we send boxloads of books back to the uni campuses they belong to. So the couriers will know which place to take them we leave a note on top of the box -usually they'e headed to Carlton, Bundoora East (pleasingly known as Beast) and in the past, to the (now-closed) Business campus. If I have 5 minutes to spare, or a teabreak when really keen, adding a cartoon to the note seems like the polite thing to do. The dumber the better. Working on Superman meant I'd become acquainted with this picture:

The cheeky chappies of Carlton are quality genre buffs, so it seemed like they really needed this:

Stay classy Metropolis.

I like this idiotic thing so much I'm tempted to turn it into a full colour print.

Lastly, this - discovered in the uni library collection while making my comic cover was a book charting the strange twists & turns of Joe Shuster's career. Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster were the high school friends who together went on to create Superman. Disagreements with the publisher led to a contract-ending falling out, and the removal of their creator credit from the comics. The company held the rights, so with no royalties and little success creating another major character, Shuster had to pick up work wherever he could. His years illustrating spanky bondage comics with a yen for torture (knives & hot pokers seem to have been popular) were probably not his favourites. Then his eyesight started to fail. Later in life they did both end up with a settlement and restored credit for Superman, so at least the awfulness isn't completely unleavened. The whole tale of Shuster's "lost" years is told in this book by Craig Yoe:

It's great. The full story and the sometimes-funny, sometimes-nasty plates are a terrific piece of investigative art history/journalism. Tame but quaintly salacious sample:

The work itself reminds me of the parallel career of Archie artist Dan DeCarlo, in that it's obviously the same hand & almost exactly the same characters, now retasked to carry out all the closed-door fantasies often implied by their mainstream comics. The squeaky-cleaning imposed on most big publishing houses of the time certainly wasn't indicative of actual public taste or demand, so as you'd expect the things suppressed just hid away & intensified. This is a fantastic peek in the closet of pop culture. Highly recommended.

It's A Bird, It's A Plane... It's An Illustration Job!

About a year ago an old friend from high school approached me with an idea for an illustration - he had a major Superman fan in his life, and for a special birthday present he wanted to have her appear on a comic cover with the big boy in blue. It sounded like fun, but I was a little hesitant.. Despite being a comic book fan - and having obsessively traced and copied the covers & characters when I was very young - I'd never done anything in that style as a grown-up picture-maker. He asked me to think over some image concepts & get back to him. I then looked at A LOT of comic book covers, from every period of the character I could find, including some of the great Neal Adams work I grew up with. As a kid I was never big on Superman - he was usually the backup if Spiderman or Batman were unavailable. The Christopher Reeve movies gave him a boost when I was 5 or 6 years old, but by the time the horrifyingly mulleted "Nuclear Man" showed up looking like a rock-opera escapee in the awful fourth, my enthusiasm was fading. He always seemed a bit too clean cut & indestructible. Years later I was vaguely aware of him having been revamped with long new-age hair & amazingly it didn't inspire me to pick up an issue.

No.

Absolutely not.

But the minute I was drawing the icon himself, none of that mattered. Sitting down at a drawing board featuring the Daily Planet, Lois Lane and that costume gave a definite thrill. Particularly at the colouring stage, adding those hyperbolic hues.. This surprises me still. Maybe some images are so connected to childhood excitement they're impervious to adult reason. As well as bullets.

Here's a quick run through the process. After looking at all the old covers, the original idea of um.. lets call the girl I was inserting into the picture Lana, for the sake of vestigial privacy.. Ok, so the original idea of Lana being substituted for Lois in Supes substantial arms, safely rescued and in flight, developed into the jokier idea of Lana rescuing him & speeding him away from a choice selection of super-baddies while Metropolis receded below. As Lana was to be dressed in her distinctive daily clothes (red hoodie, shorts & green sneakers), no extra costume design was needed. I was keen also to reference as much of the history of the comic as I could, this being for a fan and all, and a picture of a mid-rescue super-Lois became a central influence. 

All this & a Pulitzer too.

It was in the search for reference pics of women carrying men that I stumbled on the "Lift & Carry" fetish - muscular women hauling slim men about the place, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. Hey, to each their own - and one of those snaps became my major reference for the hands, legs & feet! 

Up and away..

For other elements, like clothes & light, friends kindly did a bit of posing, sans fetishy buzz. I think.

Superhoodie.

Metropolis was a straight steal of New York, as in the post-Shuster comic itself. In my Superman world, the Daily Planet has been so successful they've moved right into the Empire State Building and done a little remodelling on the roof. Drawing the Planet's famous rooftop globe was one of those jobs that you expect to be simple and quick, but which was actually kind of torture. Instead of making it up off the top of my head, I measured everything, designing it 3 dimensionally & endlessly drafting & redrafting. Pretty stupid, given the simple requirements of the finished work. Another live & learn experience. And a lesson in how sometimes a good guess can come out about the same as a painstaking calculation..

The job spilled over into time I was booked to be away from my studio set up, 2000 miles north in Queensland. This changed a few things - the choice of art supplies became the available acrylic, coloured pencil & Uniball pens, and the workspace was an improvised one.

My temporary folding-table studio, mid tropical summer..

This was the location in which everything finally came together. At drafting stage I tend to work on 60gsm tracing paper, to make easier the process of combining the various more usable bits of different drawings.. Here's a few of the early doodles & experiments. 

Lois ala Lift & Carry. Just figuring shapes at this stage.

Tricky hand types. Should look surprised, but not horrified..

Rough heads, hoodie body & that globe!

After a lot of this, there was finally a usable combination of faces, buildings, clothes and muscles. Lana's legs were a difficult one to sell - she was a combination of four completely different people - but at last it stopped looking like bride of Frankenstein & fitted nicely.

Starting to look like something..

This was also when the design was simplified to strike out the supervillians. Not only did that mean a lot less design & figure work, but a stronger idea emerging - Lana was now saving Superman from the daily grind of rescuing the ever-plummeting Lois. Leaving Lois to make her own way to the ground floor seemed to give the joke more bite - and it turned out Lana had never been much of a fan of Miss Lane.. Perfect. (Insert scheming laugh here.) I moved on to the inks. For some reason I was working at A4 size. Not sure why.. But to get a decent likeness I switched to A3. I decided this having already started to ink A4 size, so the plan was to leave out the faces, xerox the incomplete inked image onto 220gsm art paper, then finish the remaining inks & colours full size. Overcomplicated, but sometimes them's the breaks.

A4 inking in progress.

The A3 upgrade. Colour at last!

This really was an old school illustration - I just noticed the Magic Plus tape masking the white border around the work. Haven't had to do that in a long while. So, at this point the job was basically done - some earthy colours on the cityscape (a palette chosen so as not to let the figures disappear into the background) & finishing on the Daily Planet and bam.. or shazam.. or something.. but finito anyway. As a result of the circumstances of it's production the delivered work had a very handmade look that I was pleased with & might not otherwise have tried - that grainy, almost lumpy coloured pencil look made it something that couldn't be mistaken for the machine-printed sheen of a real comic book & spelled it out as a love-letter to one instead. Here's a slightly over-compressed version of it - 

The delivered work.

And the reason I've included a fairly low-res version is because there is one more - as time went by I couldn't resist going back & doing a little retouching. I liked the finished work, but couldn't help picturing it with one of those exclamation-prone story headlines below the figures, and maybe some whoosh lines under Lana to balance that up... I also took the opportunity to bring some grey into the sky area, like it's a smoggy Metropolis day they're getting up & out of. I'm happy with it now, (as much as you can ever be with a finished piece) & really glad to have had the chance to work on something that struck me at first as perhaps not the most exciting job. I need to offer my apologies to the man of steel on that front. Sorry Superman. You were really good fun.*

Superfinished.

Supercloseup.

*Superman apology does not indicate change in personal preference for Spidey or Batman. Nice try Supes.

Sketchy Details Emerge From Bug Powder Dust.

Some recent rummaging in the bottom drawer turned up this quickie sketch of Peter Weller, playing everybody's favourite Exterminator in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Really had forgotten about this one - made at a time when some friends & I were trying to figure out a good plot for a gangster-monster clay animation. We watched & read a LOT of pulp, but sadly never did quite crack it. I guess this pic must be about 15 years old now.. drawn by pausing the VCR & working out or fudging details through the videotape haze, just using pencil on cheap butcher's paper. It's rough, but seeing it again I didn't mind it - worth sharing for the Weller/Cronenberg/Burroughs fans out there anyways. And I still think a gumshoe splatter flick would be fun. You know the drill - something boiled so hard it's head explodes. Down these tentacle-infested streets a man must go who is not himself tentacle-infested, and so on. Yeah. Hard to give up on that. Maybe one day..

Eureka. It's Greek For Knob Gag.

Today at Arsegravy Headquarters I've been rummaging through the carefully arranged piles of newspapers, bills, sketches, junk mail & biscuits and from out of the dusty clouds two old cartoons of mine shook loose.

I think the first one is from about 8 years back, & while it was never used I do at least remember having a lot of fun making it - any time hideous rubbery faces & deformed human organs are required is a good time, right? This was also a project done before my current thin grasp of search engines & the interwebs had been established, so it involved lots of library visits checking out medical books, magazines & movies to see what surgeons & patients should look like. Also to see how minimal I could be with drawing surgical equipment while still making it obvious that the guy in the picture was in hospital & not just being tortured.. The extracted organ ended up combining tongue, intestine, heart, stomach lining, scrotum & some blistery disease I forget the name of. Good times.

In the past I'd been happy to do cartoon inks using just a couple of different gauge ball-point pens - the way you can vary the line thickness through more or less pressure on the tip always appealed - but this time I swapped over to the UniPin series. They've got a good range of nib sizes plus water & fade proof ink, don't cost a fortune & they seem to be available everywhere. Unfortunately the scan I've managed of the inked version is a tad lacking in fidelity, but the original is holding up well. The colour was added using the cheap student acrylic Chromacryl - great colour range & so non-toxic you could probably eat it. Having said that - kids, don't eat it.

The other picture was a quick one done for the Mechanics Institute, marking the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade. Their request for a cartoon on this subject was not immediately inspiring. I just didn't see a bloody revolt by goldfield miners over taxation without representation translating into a laugh riot. I remember talking to my friend Nick K about this & as usual he had good advice. He basically reminded me that being overly respectful of those caught up in an historical event wouldn't help make the point, or the joke - be honest & be blunt about it.  Then I thought about all those pictures of guys panning for gold. Bent at the waist.

Yeah. When in doubt, knob gag wins every time.

The Shipping News. Now With More Flying.

Time to get back to some regular politics-free illustration. In an earlier Arsegravy post I think I mentioned taking way too long on a tattoo design of a flying ship for a friend. For myself, I've never trusted my own tastes to be long-enough lasting to take the inky plunge. Combine that with changes of general style, obviously happening all the time but usually in a very noticeable way say every ten years or so, & the idea of choosing poorly in the pretty permanent department of skin art has put me off. Sure, with the right person & design they can look great. But when it goes wrong, it can REALLY go wrong - how bout a picture of your fiance that comes out looking like Mr Potatohead? Fail. Then there's a photo in one of the art books at work of a fella whose back is one big glorious, full colour presentation of all the characters from... A Nightmare On Elm Street. Gotta wonder if he's still happy with that.

With this in mind I opted for a cooling-off period & dragged my heels. Not that I didn't like his idea - I really enjoyed the dreamy, Munchausen steampunk aspects of it - but I did want him to be sure. Kieren - the man with the plan - had given me a sketch of what he was after & as the months went by (3 of them I think) I slowly looked at references but kept it on the backburner. Eventually he spelled it out - super keen, classic idea, get a wriggle on. Even kept a shoulder reserved for it. So I made a start. 

In retrospect I'm very glad to have done this job - it was a great reminder of how rusty I'd got taking time away from constant illustration in the last decade. My perspective work was - well frankly, a total guessing game. After way too many stabs in the dark I bit the bullet & reread my old notes from uni. It meant a lot of redrafting but felt like it was good for me. An odd side-effect was the tendency to trace vanishing points for random objects wherever I went. Just double checking that everything was obeying the rules, I guess. Still, when you catch yourself being quietly entertained establishing the horizon by guessing the intersection of the lines of the supermarket lights & floor it probably is time to get a grip & take the groceries home.

From that point on I looked at a mountain of material dealing with hot-air balloons & dirigibles, steam engines, boat design & everything that stemmed from them - seafaring knots, anchors, mastheads, netting, boilers, paddlewheels, lamps, gas-burners, steam-whistles, rigging.. the works. Partly I went into the little details because the research side of illustration is something I enjoy - don't judge - but also it was because I've never been big on technical or machine drawing. I was never one of those kids who could sit down in school & draw a beefed up racing car or a Robotech monster from memory. People, faces, landscapes or cartoons, sure. But if you wanted to cross a Monaro with the Batmobile, not so much for me.

Despite the unfamiliar territory - or maybe because of it - the work was fun. One of the rules was not to make it too posh - no Spanish Galleons, much more functional & industrial. Also not to go over the top with minute detail, given it was going to be tattoo sized. So no pinching from Baron Munchausen, sadly. But I did find one really terrific & obscure image that turned out to be a big influence - it was a print from the early 1800's detailing the plan of a Belgian physicist, painter, ex-priest, balloonist & showman named Etienne Gaspard Robertson to build "La Minerve". Robertson (extending his name from Robert for the stage) was notorious for his exaggerations & seems to have "borrowed" substantially from previous designs. The seriousness of his suggestion is also doubtful, with one contemporary commenting that La Minerve was "of such baroque extravagance.. that Roberson was either mad or clowning.." And it really was a big idea - a massive 160 foot diameter balloon carrying a 150 foot ship below & a crew of 60, whose aim would be to travel the world on voyages of discovery for up to 6 months at a time. It would feature an observatory, kitchen, library, church, gymnasium, theatre & launching platforms for smaller balloons. It's goal was pure research & it took its name from the owl-loving Greek goddess of wisdom. She was goddess of a whole bunch of other stuff too & also showed up in Rome but that just complicated things, so I ah.. ignored it.

Unsurprisingly, Robertson's project never happened. People weren't keen. Hanging the toilet underneath the ship from a silk ladder probably didn't help. And admittedly the epic scale wasn't overly practical. But I did love the concept, and I felt like it was a nice sideways-reference to the enquiring mind of the tattoo's recipient. Just bring down the size & haul in the facilities, and we had a ship with a purpose - and a name. The Minerva.

^ Robertson's original Minerva design.

^Just a few of the references & sketches stacked up in the designing process..

^The finished Minerva tattoo design.

One last note - if there happen to be any odd format issues on the page, my apologies, but I really do struggle with the Blogger programming sometimes! A while back they changed some part of their code which deliberately or not, led to captioned photos being inactive. Which is to say no longer able to be enlarged by clicking on them. Although the old captioned ones still seem totally active & fine. So unless that changes I'll just be writing below the pics from now on I guess. Unfortunately Blogger also only allows you to write below pictures  from the left margin of the page if the image is medium size. I know that makes no sense, but them's the breaks.
Sorry folks, I'm just not the IT crowd.

Heros & Villians.

The Liberal Party, now out & proud as Conservatives (in all but party name of course) had its big campaign launch today. You might wonder why this would happen a fortnight after the announcement of the election. Building the breathless anticipation of an excited nation? Nah. Apparently the reason both the major parties leave it late as possible is because it's only when the launch occurs that the parties are obliged to start paying their own way. Up to that point it's all paid for by the public purse. So you go as late as you can, naturally. The Labor Party, still in the closet about its own conservatism (in all but deed of course), launches next week.
Shortly after being welcomed by a 90 second ovation current Lib leader Tony Abbott described an elderly gent down the front as "A HERO!" Perhaps it was an attempt stir memories of George W's "Man of Steel" sentiment, because yes, the ol' hero was of course the Deputy Sherriff and philosophical wind beneath Tony's wings, John Winston Howard. Having brushed off his recent rejection by the International Cricket Council & the accompanying reruns of film of him repeatedly & unsuccessfully attempting to bowl a cricket ball, the former PM entered the campaign with obvious relish. And why wouldn't he? Abbott's vision is simple -  the Howard Years rerun in lycra instead of tracksuit. Man of Steel, father of Iron Man. 3 years go by & the electorate are now bathed in nostalgia for the time of a leader whose slippery deceits were so notorious that his own cabinet & colleagues nicknamed him "The Lying Rodent." Good to have the bar set so heroically high.
Given all that, I figured I should join in the commemoration by dusting off a couple of my pics. The first is called "Catch His Fire (Fahrenheit 457)" & dates from the thrilling time when the Howard team were both courting the Catch The Fire ministries evangelical vote and overseeing the rorted 457 working visa, which charged foreign workers large sums to come to Australia & get screwed over on wages or do work they hadn't agreed to (abattoir work, for example). Any complaints would see them sent home. Around the same time the PM was also attacking schoolteachers & various academics for being "idealogical". All that ironfisted far-rightness with its eyes on shutting down debate reminded me of Beatty the Firechief in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - a cunning, well-informed zealot, burning up books & people "for the good of humanity". At one point he says, "fire's real beauty is that it destroys responsibility & consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it." Perfect for the era of the Hot Button Issue, with all of its deliberate stoking of angry heat & none of the light of informed debate.
The second image was made after the 07 election, when boredom rather than any ethical considerations saw JH finally ejected from office. A scene from the end of the old Flash Gordon movie came to mind. The one where the apparently unkillable & dastardly emperor Ming the Merciless is at last despatched by impalement. Howard's own political hero, Robert Menzies, was nicknamed "Ming".  It seemed like a fitting tribute.

Catch His Fire

Hail Ming!