March 10, 2010
Are You My Mother?
I needed a couple of sketching projects for practice ... and someone's little ones were enjoying twittering with Mommy & Daddy ... so I volunteered to draw them each a little drawing from their favourite Dr. Seuss book. First up is actually a PD Eastman book called Are You My Mother?
This weekend I'm hoping to get 'round to the second piece - from The Sneetches and Other Stories.
Posted by Red Monkey at 4:08 AM | Comments (0) | Sketches
March 9, 2010
My First Munny
So, there are these things called Munnys which are just vinyl "shapes" that you can buy and decorate yourself. Or, if you're more into collecting than doing it yourself, you can collect various artists' renditions of Munnys. (Or Dunnys or any of the other critters they make.)
There's a huge Flickr group of customized Munnys if you want to click through. But here is a regular white Munny ready for customizing:
So I decided it was time to try my first foray into the fine art of Munny-making. My first one is quite simple, but something that was quite meaningful to me. I still have a larger white one to decorate as well as a large glow-in-the-dark one. I'll get more creative with those, I'm sure. I'd like to do some sculpting on one of them, at the very least.
This one is based on a Sunface Kachina doll. We lived in Albuquerque for all of three months when I was three years old, but I was fascinated by the culture then and remain so. The face is a typical Sunface - eagle feathers bordering and the red and yellow quarters. The face is sometimes white, sometimes turquoise. On this Munny, the eagle feathers are white leather. A leather loincloth and belt have also been glued on. I've contemplated doing a kind of "sandpainting" design on the back of the head ... that seems to be a Munny tradition of sorts to do an elaborate paint job on the head ... but in the end, I think I prefer the simplicity of this design as it is. Maybe I'll do another Pueblo/Hopi/Navajo-area-inspired design later on.
Posted by Red Monkey at 4:15 AM | Comments (1) | Design | Sketches | hobbies
March 7, 2010
The Designer Man
The Designer Man
(sung of course, to the words of the immortal Billy Joel's Piano Man)
It's 7 o'clock on a Saturday
The regular crowd's still in bed
Photoshop's sitting next to me
Making love to the beachball of doom.
He says, "Son, how good is your memory
Are you really sure how this goes
Which filters you used on which layers to complete
This logo of a dog wearing clothes.
{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum
{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Make us a website tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for drop shadows galore
And you've got Photoshop, right?
Now John at the bar was a friend of mine,
He got me my wifi for free.
And he's quick with a joke or Clients from Hell quote
But there's something he'd just rather see
He says, "Dude, I believe this whitespace must go"
And the smile ran away from my face
"Well I'm sure that you could fit more up in here
Like a picture of my bar out in space"
{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum
Now Paula's a real estate agent
Who never has time for a brief
And she's talking brochures with Comic Sans headers
And printing it all on a leaf
And my kid sister is practicing Illustrator
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Building contests and spec work for crappy designs.
WIthout Twitter I'd feel damn alone.
{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Make us a website tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for bevels and gloss
And you've got Photoshop, right?
It's a pretty good gig when clients behave
And the AD gives me that smile
'Cause he knows that it's me they're all coming to see
And I won't have weekends for a while
And their brief reads like a carnival ride
And the Art Director smells like a scotch
And clients smile their best, and refuse to write checks
And say "Dude, we should pay you HOW much?"
{Bridge}
La lala didi da
Lala didi da, da dum dum dum
{Refrain}
Make us an image, you're the designer man
Remove this skyline tonight
Well, we're all in the mood for rotating logos
And you've got Photoshop, right?
Posted by Red Monkey at 8:11 AM | Comments (0) | Design
March 6, 2010
Toasted
Several friends on Twitter were discussing various home kitchen incidents today. I won't name names, but the exploding rice in the microwave was not the kind of "honey, I exploded the microwave" I was thinking.
Which all reminded me of the toaster we had in Austin, back in the days when a toaster was a major kitchen appliance and cost, apparently, 80 bazillion dollars. Our toaster no longer had a working timer. The toast would not pop up and Mom would not splurge on a new toaster. This one still worked, after all, you just had to stand there by it and count to sixty. Then pull the lever up and voila! Toast!
So, Grandma was visiting and Mom had to go run some early morning errand. She tasked Grandma with getting us fed breakfast and getting us dressed for the day. Presumably so we could all go shopping at the mall, not exactly a great motivator for me. Mom gave me her serious face and told me to {insert booming announcer voice here} "Make sure Grandma counts to sixty at the toaster."
My little sister is in her chair, eating breakfast and Grandma and I retreat to my room to pick out clothes for the day. Honestly, I didn't need help, I was SIX, for crying out loud and I can dress myself, but you know, it's Grandma and any attention is good, so I GUESS she can come help me pick out "appropriate" clothes. Let me give you a hint. It was the 70s. There were no appropriate clothes. *shudder*
My two and a half year old sister (maybe it was 3.5?) comes strolling into my room and I'm puffing up to holler at her about how this is MY room and she is supposed to be eating breakfast, when she pipes up with:
"Grandma, the kitchen is on fire." And calmly walks back into the fiery kitchen to eat her breakfast.
Grandma and I exchanged that utterly panicked look and took off running for the kitchen.
Flames were shooting up out of the toaster, but luckily, nothing else had actually caught fire yet. There was soot on the light fixture and the cabinets, but they weren't even blackened yet. We lucked out.
My sister was back at the table, calmly eating breakfast and just kind of watching Grandma put the fire out and begin the cleaning process. Grandma was trying to get everything perfectly cleaned up before Mom got back ... and of course no one was going to say a word about this to Mommy, right?
And of course, Mom came back just before Grandma could get the light fixture back together.
Somehow the flaming toast was actually my fault ... even though Grandma was the adult who really should have remembered to count to sixty.
Come to think of it, Grandma's the one who taught me to clean up and hide my wrong-doings ....
We did, however, get a new toaster after that fiasco.
Posted by Red Monkey at 7:37 AM | Comments (1) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken
March 1, 2010
Sometimes the Internet Just Sucks
I got my first babysitting gig when I was 13. It was for the kids across the street, the oldest of whom was my little sister's age, 9. Michael, Suzanne and Alison.
That first gig went beautifully until I was putting them to bed and then it turned into an unmitigated disaster.
You see, while we had a dog when I was growing up, she was banished to the backyard. If I played tug with her or ran around with her too much, Mom would insist that I was "going to make her mean." So I didn't have a whole lot of experience with dogs.
The last thing the parents said before they left was to be careful around Honey-Dog the dachshund. The big, fat, cranky dachshund.
To my overprotective and inexperienced mind, this meant I had to protect the children FROM Honey-Dog, not that Honey-Dog would be attempting to protect the children from me. So, we'd all gotten along swimmingly that evening and I went to put the kids to bed. Michael wanted Honey-Dog to come to bed with him and I thought if anyone should pick up the dog, it should be me.
Inexperienced.
With no warning (even in retrospect, there was no clear warning), she leapt at my face and bonked my nose, making it bleed. I shoved an ever-present Kleenex at my face, finished putting the kids to bed and went into the bathroom to figure out why the heck this bloody nose wasn't really slowing down.
Yeah. Umm.
There were a couple of claw marks or possibly very slight punctures on my nose, but Honey-Dog had actually managed to open my upper lip, nearly all the way through. Well crap.
All I could think was that I'd failed. I'd messed up. I'd done it wrong. My first babysitting gig and I royally screwed up.
I called home and told Mom, "I think Honey-Dog got me."
She came over with a band-aid and some Neosporin ... since I was not particularly specific. When she saw my face, she did a good job of not totally flipping out, but she was obviously taken by surprise. She called Dad, made him come over with my little sister to watch the kids and then she took me to the E.R. - my only E.R. experience of childhood. I got one stitch and the doctor was ridiculously nervous about getting it just right since it was on my face. I was not all that concerned. I mean, I didn't want a huge white scar, but whatever.
We got back to the house, I made Mom and Dad go home and I waited for the Wortmans to return. I 'fessed up that the dog had bit me, got my whopping $6 and walked across the street, expecting never to be asked back.
As it turns out, I babysat for them a lot over the years. Michael, in a lot of ways, became like a little brother to me. So much so, that I often felt guilty for the fact that I wasn't as close to the girls. I would try hard to make an effort to do what they wanted some days and I was pretty sure they appreciated that, but it was obvious that Michael and I simply clicked. We had a lot of the same interests, whereas the girls and I didn't have quite as much in common.
It got to the point where Michael begged and begged and begged me to come over and run a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for him and a couple of his buddies. And he was crushed when one of the boys (I think they were about 13 by then) thought he'd "game" the girl. Michael pleaded with the boy to "behave."
You can't "game" a DungeonMaster. I mean, come on. After letting him get away with a little bit of bullshit, I confirmed that he moved through a doorway before the rest of the group. Of course, he was mr. leader-boy.
I rolled a die. Came up the way I'd hoped. "Before the others can go through, you are whisked away into a jungle. The doorway through which you came is nowhere to be seen. And men dressed in green, carrying strange metallic sticks are approaching you."
Yeah. I threw him in the middle of the Viet Nam war. (What? Every doorway in that campaign was a portal to somewhere else rather than a regular doorway. I just tweaked the campaign a little ....)
Then there was the day Michael wanted to race me on my bike. He'd gotten a 10 speed from somewhere and it was far too big for him, but he insisted he could beat me to the end of the block.
I turned around in time to see him go skidding down the street on his chin. I felt horrible. I tried to warn him that the bike was too big for him, that he was going to fall ... but geez. He was trying so hard at first not to cry, but it was a hell of a fall and a lot of road rash. But I think the real pain was he was crushed to have done that in front of me. And in front of his dad. He always tried to be such the macho man for his dad. And don't get me wrong, he was a tough kid ... but he was also sensitive, kind, caring. He wanted to please everybody.
When I moved out of the house, I didn't really go back to that house again. There was so much going on in my life at that time, I just wasn't thinking. And, to be honest, Michael was starting high school ... he was hanging out with his friends more and more, as it should be.
I was in my first "real" relationship (whatever that means - in my case it meant 10 years together). I was in my second year of college and had started working full time. I barely had time to breathe, much less check up on the boy across the street.
It was my loss.I was running a web search for a family member only to discover an article about Michael. Well, not exactly an article. More accurately, his obituary. He was just 37 years old. The obituary says nothing about what happened. I know nothing about his life after I moved.
It's my loss.
Sometimes the amount of information available on the internet just sucks.
Posted by Red Monkey at 1:04 PM | Comments (2) | Struggles
