Thursday, September 30, 2010

Raccoons and Tornadoes

tornado damage-tree across streetWell, this has been an... interesting month. Parts of it, anyway. I spent most of the month chained to my computer trying to meet a few deadlines... But one evening, just as I'm about to take my daily walk, the sky suddenly turns green and I look out the window and see the air is full of horizontal rain, or some kind of precipitation, and whatever it is, it's so dense and blowing around so fast I can't see a thing out there... Naturally I postponed my walk. And shortly thereafter I learned that we'd just been struck by the famous Ten-minute Tornado of Brooklyn!

Hurricanes, yeah, sure, we get those, but tornadoes!? Weird.

The rest of this month's excitement was provided by an invasion of plumbers tearing my bathroom apart - my very own indoor tornado, complete with drills and blowtorches and strange skudge left all over the sink afterward...

RaccoonOh, and raccoons. We have a family of raccoons in the park. They all like to hang out together in one particular tree in the evening, so I stare at them, and they stare at me... I've managed to get a few doodles of 'em when they were out before dark, here they are!

Raccoons in a treeRaccoons in a tree


We need a few obligatory tornado photos, too, of course. Mostly kind of dodgy, I'm afraid - my camera is broken so I had to use my phone, and most of the immediate post-tornado photos were taken at night... so, yeah, not pretty. Most of the damage in my area seems to have happened to trees and cars - as in, mostly trees falling on top of cars. Oddly, only a small part of the park was hit, the rest looks totally normal - but that small area definitely looks like a tornado hit it.

tornado damagetornado damagetornado damage


tornado damagetornado damagetornado damage - smashed lighttornado damage - smashed light


tornado damage-street cornertornado damage-falen tree in parktornado damage-street corner


tornado damage in parktornado damage in parktornado damage in park


tornado damage in parktornado damage in parktornado damage in park


tornado damage in parktornado damage in parktornado damage in park


tornado damage in park


tornado damage at nighttornado damage at night-sidewalk upheavaltornado damage at night


tornado damage at nighttornado damage at nighttornado damage at night


tornado damage-fallen scaffoldingtornado damage at nighttornado damage at night

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Illustrated Dreams...

So. A contest comes along with a theme of illustrating your own dreams... guess who has over ten years worth of totally weird, wild, and eminently illustratable dreams written down? HA, there's no way I could resist doing this! And now that I've done one dream picture... I think I want to do more... oh dear.

If you're really curious, you can read the dream here (and see the final picture as posted for the contest.)

That Picture Again (Somewhat Smaller):


Flight and Fetters - the Finished Picture



Life studies for the picture, because I'm a perfectionist (look, HANDS!):


Life drawing for Flight and Fetters - the captiveLife drawing for Flight and Fetters - captive's hands

Life drawing for Flight and Fetters - rescuer's handsLife drawing for Flight and Fetters - The Rescuer

Life drawing for Flight and Fetters - Escapee in the background


WIP it good! Various stages of progress:


Rough SketchTight SketchWork in Progress 2

Work in Progress 3Work in Progress 4Work in Progress 5Work in Progress 6

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Whales!

(Dusts off blog...) Whoops, haven't been updating this as often as I'd like... Eh, it's summer, between ridiculous heat waves and sporadic vacations I guess things get a little slip-shod. And I have a whole pile of stuff to scan and post, time to catch up.

Speaking of vacations, I've recently recovered from a frenetic mini-vacation in the general area of Boston and the New England coast. We covered Boston, Cape Cod, Plum Island, Rhode Island and Vermont in the space of a week, it was slightly insane. AAAAND... we saw whales! Humpbacks! Jumping! I've never seen humpbacks before, and I've never ever seen whales actually breaching before, and this guy was doing breaches and half-breaches and tail slaps and fin-waggling and everything! It was amazing. Of course it was on a lurching boat in a near-storm with spray all over the place, so I wasn't able to take any pictures on the spot, but I scraped together a bunch of sketches from memory to reconstruct the event. Here you go!

humpback whale breaching


humpback whale breachinghumpback whale breaching


humpback whale breachinghumpback whale breaching


humpback whale breaching


humpback whale fluke slappinghumpback whale fluke slapping


humpback whale fluke slappinghumpback whale fluke slapping


humpback whale breaching


humpback whale back


humpback whale waving its finshumpback whale waving its fins


humpback whale waving its fins


humpback whale breaching


Also, we pressed our noses on the windows of the New England Aquarium to watch the seals, so here's some seals (fur seals and regular old harbor seals.) Also some seals that were frolicking off the shores of Cape Cod...
fur seals


cute harbour sealFur seal grooming and looking fuzzy


fur seal doing something with its nose


floating harbor sealfloating harbor seal


Seals cavorting off the coast of Cape Cod