I made a poster...
Wow, how long has it been since I posted anything here...
Anyway, CHIRP is getting close to being ready to broadcast — we are building the station this month, getting set up next month, and hope to start broadcasting in July. Wooo! (I can't quite believe it's really happening!)
In the meantime, we have a new monthly DJ night with a rotating cast of DJs (of which I hope to be one some time). So I made a poster:
I can't take credit for the name or the subtitle. But the rest is me. (There's stuff I'd like to have done differently.)
Labels: chirp, drawings
posted by Tony at 10:54 PM
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This American Life: Tinkerbell
This American Life has announced
the winner and honorable mentions for their t-shirt contest. I did not place. So the only place you will see my entry is right here:
The t-shirt is a reference to the early TAL show "
Fiasco!"
I do like the t-shirt they chose as a winner. It's nice, when you don't win, if they clearly chose a better t-shirt. Though I do like mine, too.
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 10:03 PM
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A comic
I've recently had the urge to draw a comic that's sillier and darker than Finn and Charlie. So here it is. Maybe there will be another some day.
Labels: comic, drawings
posted by Tony at 12:53 AM
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Talking to myself
Kate Beaton, the latest webcomic phenom, on account of she's damn funny, has written
a series of comics in which she's talking to her younger self.
I've been wanting to write one, and then yesterday, on her livejournal, she challenged people to create their own.
So I did it... not bad for a first try. But not exactly... deep.
2 or 3 years in a row in junior high I tried to write a novel over the summer. Those notebooks are probably still somewhere.
Labels: comic, drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 4:04 PM
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Key West T-Shirt Shops
Key West is a tropical paradise, with fresh fish, beaches, and good cultural events at ones fingertips. It's also a tourist destination with numerous t-shirt shops selling the most bizarrely obnoxious t-shirts you can imagine. Some are offensive and others are just stupid, but all of them make me wonder, who is it who buys these t-shirts?
This was my comment to Eric:
T-shirts aside, it was a good trip. I really needed that trip. It makes it easier to deal with tonight's winter storm. (As winter storms go, it's no so bad so far.)
It's been a while since last I drew a picture for my blog... enjoy! Oh, and if anyone reading this
would buy this t-shirt, please let me know in the comments. I'll make it. You bet.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 9:16 PM
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Driving around Spain
I drew this picture — two pictures, really — to illustrate a lot of what it was like driving around in Spain. This is the interactive image I promised: mouse-over it to see what Eric and Mila are up to in the back seat:
Yeah... so while Eli and I were desperately trying to follow signs and not get lost, Eric and Mila were working on keeping Yelena amused in the back seat. Sure it wasn't like this every time we got in the car... but somehow, this is the way I remember it (fondly).
Labels: drawings, journal, personal, spain
posted by Tony at 6:31 PM
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More drawings
I've been working on the program guide for WLUW and I did some illustrations for them. I'm doing a "headphones" theme... one picture is the back of Eric's head, wearing our Bose noise-cancelling headphones (but edited: I drew him with a shaven head), and the other is the headphones themselves, sitting out.
I'll post pictures of the program guide itself when it's finished, which should be soon.
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 7:03 PM
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Record fair
I'm working on the program guide for WLUW, and we were going to put a little mention of the WLUW record fair on it. In the end, though, there won't be space — which means I don't have anything to do with this drawing I made of some of my records. Oh well. It was fun to draw, and there's a good chance I'll find a use for it some day.
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 9:39 PM
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Pinecone
I drew this pinecone at Eric's Mother's house. I felt like drawing something, and she had these pinecones on the kitchen table. I thought, a picture of a pinecone could be useful... you never know when you might need one. So anyway here it is for your viewing pleasure.
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 9:46 PM
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I like to draw pictures of odd-looking people
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 11:10 PM
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A Poster for Amram
My first real poster for WLUW has just been complete. And by "real" I mean "not real", because it's really just an 8 1/2" x 11" flyer that'll be photocopied and distributed. So it's black and white instead of 2-, 3-, or 4-color, and smaller than a real poster... but the feedback has been good and I'm quite happy with it.
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 3:10 PM
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Think Pink Poster
I volunteered at WLUW, a local community radio station that's pretty cool. I expect the thrust of my volunteering for them to be in design, at least for the time being.
I've been to one meeting, after which I spoke with the woman in charge of marketing. She said they wanted to make posters for two shows, Think Pink and the Woman on Woman Music Hour, and put posters up in Boystown and similar locals. (Think Pink is a show that describes itself sometimes as "LGBT Music" and sometimes as "Queer Music"; neither are terms I especially like, but it's not up to me. In any event it's generally a good show. The Woman on Woman Music Hour is I thnk intended as a Feminist music show more than a Lesbian music show, but it's kind of both.)
So I took it upon myself to brainstorm and put something together to propose, mainly to demonstrate my interest and commitment. I had an idea for Think Pink which uses a cartoon of my characters
Finn and
Charlie from
Hitched (who now sport large saucer-like eyes for better conveyance of emotion). So anyway, here's my poster, we'll see how it goes:
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 9:25 PM
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A neatly folded flag
Friday morning I was walking past the small post-war modern townhouses down the street from us. They all have big picture windows on the street, and as I walked past one I noticed that had no curtains. I was dark inside, and all I could see was that right in front of the window, in the middle, was a neatly fold American flag on a small wooden chest. The flag was folded in the traditional triangle fashion. I thought, this is probably the home of someone who's lost someone in the war in Iraq, or possibly Afghanistan, and this is the flag that had been draped over the coffin.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 11:14 PM
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Our insect friends
Earlier this week, on my way to work, I passed under the el tracks at Broadway and saw, there, in the grayest, urbanest, cement-and-asphalt-est stretch of sidewalk on the whole north side, a bright green katydid. It was a tiny thing in a livid shade of spring green, sitting there casually in the middle of the sidewalk as if I wouldn't see it because of its camoflage. And certainly, had I been in the park, or the garden, I wouldn't have seen it — but this stretch of sidewalk is greenless, without even weeds growing in the cracks.
The very next day I was approaching the same train station in a bit of a hurry. Approaching the door in a bit of a hurry, I very nearly missed the praying mantis perched on the window, facing downward, stuck to that smooth vertical glass as though glued there. This praying mantis was unlike others I've seen in that it had a reddish brown tone to its back, fading to green at the edges, as opposed to being all leaf green like the katydid. Generally, large insects give me the heebie-jeebiees... but a praying mantis is such a rare and special sighting, I can't help but take it as a good omen.
It feels good to see such signs of nature in the midst of the city. On the other had, my house is about half a mile from the el station, and we are overrun with rabbits, not to mention squirrels, sparrows, and billions of gnats and fruitflies.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 11:49 PM
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Bambina
Thursday morning at 3am Mila gave birth to a beautiful 6-and-change-pound baby girl. I stopped by the house on Friday evening about 5 minutes after they'd gotten home themselves. They both looked tired but happy. Feeling a need to be useful (you can't just decend on the home of people with a newborn and not make yourself useful) I helped Eli assemble the crib, a complicated adjustable co-sleeper dealie.
The baby, whose name we will learn in a couple of weeks at a naming ceremony called a Brit Bat, is lovely and sweet-tempered, with a full head of black hair. Who does she resemble most? If you'll forgive the unsentimental response, I think newborn babies more closely resemble each other than anyone else. But she's still a cutie.
However I think I'll make up for an unsentimental response with this rather sentimental picture. Is the composition a little trite? Let's just say that there's something about a day-old baby that makes you think of the classics. On the other hand, I have no good excuse for why the people in the drawing only passingly resemble Mila and Eli. I really wanted this to be a better picture than it is. But things don't always go the way that I plan.
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 9:23 PM
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I went for a swim...
After living across from Chase Park for a year and a half, it occurred to me that they might have a lap swim in their pool, and I might like to do that there, rather than driving to my gym in Evanston or biking to the lake. So I checked their schedule, and indeed there are about 8 lap swims every week, each one 1 1/2 to 2 hours longs. So I went at 7pm last Thursday, just me with my bathing suit, towel, and sandles, crossing the street. I felt a bit naked.
The pool itself is not terribly long — 15 to 20 yards. It's about wide enough for 4 lanes, but instead it's divided into 3 rather wide lanes. This is just as well, since the people swimming there seemed to have very little idea of pool etiquette: one at a time, swim on the right side, etc. At one point in my swim, I took off across the pool and saw that all three of the guys sharing the lane with me (my lane happened to be all-male at the beginning) had taken off from the opposite side and were swimming more or less abreast. I managed to squeeze through, however.
A number of people, who seemed to congregate in the farthest lane, weren't swimming at all, but more or less lounging along the wall. Perhaps they were left over from the earlier "Adult Swim" period. It was a hot evening (the last night of the heat wave) and so I figured they didn't want to get out just yet. The water was cooler than the air, after all, if not especially cool for lap swimming.
When I got home my eyes were burning from the heavy dose of chlorine. I will need to haul out the goggles next time.
(I experimented with color here, two show what's above water and what's below. I'm pleased with the result; I think it creates a nice feeling of depth.)
Labels: drawings, journal, personal
posted by Tony at 6:44 AM
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Rabbit update
We are now on our third generation of rabbits living in our yard this year. Some of the magic wore off when I saw what they'd done to the pea shoots, but even so the baby rabbits are impossibly cute.
When it was just the first rabbit, the big rabbit, I sat down and sketched it as it hopped about the lawn munching.
So I put up a rabbit-proof fence, which I was assured is the only real way to keep them away. I bought it at Home Depot, and it is basically a metal grid that is larger near the top, and much closer at the bottom -- the gaps are about 1" tall and 5" wide. It seemed to be ding the trick until we began to see a baby bunny (third generation) hopping about back there. It must be going under the fence, or around it, I thought, since it certainly can't go through it.
Today Eric was in back, gardening, when he noticed the baby bunny hopping around in the peas. Hoping to dissuade it from this sort of behavior, he turned the hose on it. The little guy panicked and ran toward Eric, past him, and then squeezed through that 1" gap in the fence, and out into the yard to run away. Eric was nonplussed, and chased after him with the hose till he disappeared from the yard, all the while thinking, how irritating, how cute, how irritating, how cute. Really, the little bugger is so cute you can't even imagine, your heart just turns to mush.
I wasn't there, but this is how I imagine it happening:
Eventually the baby bunny will get bigger and won't be able to go through the fence anymore. He (or she) won't be so cute anymore, but he'll spend more time on the lawn than in the garden, and do less damage. Rabbits in the lawn are really pretty charming.
Labels: drawings, personal
posted by Tony at 10:47 PM
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Drawings of France
Everywhere we went, we started the day with coffee in a café
In Paris we saw my friend Graziella every day, sometimes for drinks, sometimes for dinner. One time we had cocktails at happy hour in a bar called "Indiana," which is a sort of Parisian take on an American bar, with a sidewalk-café setup. Not that we go to France for American-style bars, but it was fun.
From Paris we went to Brittany, which is really beautiful terrain. Along the coast we stopped and hiked along various rocky headlands.
Brittany is the home of those famous striped mariner's shirts that your typical cartoon Frenchman wears. I was coveting them everywhere I saw them, but felt afraid to look like a tourist. Then I noticed that even locals were wearing them, albeit usually women. Finally I tried one on... the sleeves were to short and the body too loose for my taste, so I went without.
Brittany is also famous for seafood and dairy. I insisted on having a kouign amann every day, which is a Breton pastry that is made with copious amounts of butter (pronounced "queen ah-MAHN"). They can be unbelievably delicious, but recipes vary from place to place, and a mediocre one is an enormous disappointment. I must learn to make these myself.
We both ate a lot of seafood, especially Eric, who ate
creuses oysters almost every day.
Creuses have one flat shell and one deeply cupped shell that holds a lot of salty oyster juice. I liked them a great deal more than the more expensive, harder to find
plats oysters, which have very shallow cups and a somewhat metallic aftertaste. (The taste of
creuses is more like American oysters.)
Labels: drawings, personal
posted by Tony at 11:52 AM
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A very content-looking cat
Labels: drawings
posted by Tony at 10:45 PM
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Big drill
I pass by a construction site every day on my way to work. It's an apartment building that's been getting a gut rehab for quite a while now. I don't think it's going condo, though, I think it's going to remain low income housing or something similar. Anyway, as I passed this morning, one of the construction workers picked up a drill with a bit that was at east 2 inches thick and three feet long, and said, "I'm going in," and then disappeared into the building.
Labels: drawings, personal
posted by Tony at 10:37 AM
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