Teh awesoem radio show, This American Life, posted a t-shirt contest a few weeks ago, and last night the muse visited, so I drew up this entry. See it on cream as well, below.

Back to basics comic meme

Draw a ten panel comic about what you were doing ten years ago. Put pen straight to paper – no pencil, no computer, no planning, no starting again if you make a mistake. Simply draw, scan, publish. Tag some people who you’d like to see do the meme too. Oh and if you want to do it even if you haven’t been tagged you are most welcome!

So, here’s me 10 years ago:

(Click for larger/legible version)

If you’re listening, I tag John, Adam, Elio, and Meg to do their version. And don’t feel the need to wait to be tagged (I wasn’t after all.) Anyone else going to bring it?

This is just a quick note to my brothers (and sisters, real and in solidarity) out there who loved Legos growing up in the 80’s. There is a tantalizing sequence of Lego sets starting around the one-third mark of the movie– beginning with the space sets and moving through the castle and pirate sets. That era pretty much covers my childhood obsession with Legos.

Pictured above is (one of?) the first space sets we had around the house, from which the coveted “LL928″ brick arrived. My brothers and I would always find a place of prominence for the “license plate” on the space ships we built. The back of the ship, when you built the set from the instructions, opened to release a small moon buggy. There are other gems and triggers for the memory in the photo gallery as well. I can smell the musty basement and feel the rug burns on my knuckles from swooping our creations around.

Nostalgia is such an insidious elixir! I will not buy more Legos until after my daughter (due any day now) is born!

(at Gizmodo, via BoingBoing)

Anyway, birthdays are good for a lot of things, but especially for getting things that you are not buying for yourself. I keep my Amazon wishlist(s) pretty full, though mostly as a reminder to myself of what I really want to buy or check out the next time I am at a bookstore. However, for my birthday last month I got a gift certificate to Amazon, and I could no longer hold myself back:

Not pictured is the copy of Graphic Design by Milton Glaser (which arrived earlier and has gotten its due lovin’), but in the photo are the contents of my big box of goodies:the latest edition of the Graphic Arts Guild Handbook, a contemporary drawing collection called Vitamin D, Charlie Harper’s Beguiled by the Wild, and Dave Cooper’s (aliased here as Hector Mumbly) Bagel’s Lucky Hat.

• Milton Glaser is an icon in the graphic design world. This book is a must-have for my library, and I love to see the mix of illustration-y with the design-y.
• Similarly, I’ve well-abused my old GAG Handbook, and it was time for the upgrade to this 2007 updated version. A must-have for the illustration professional.
• I’ve perused the Vitamin D book a couple times while I was in grad school, but I had to have my own copy. It’s really a great collection of where things have been going in the contemporary capital-A “Art World” drawing field. And it’s a beautifully-designed book, as you would expect from Phaidon.
• Beguiled by the Wild is even better than I expected. I fell in love with Harper’s beautifully designed creatures and illustrations a while ago after he started getting linked up around the web, but I didn’t realize the illustrations’ titles were going to tickle my inner word-nerd: “Jumbrella” shows the big elephants sheltering the baby elephant from the rain; “Owltercation” shows a murder of crows chasing an owl away. LOVE!
• And last but certainly not least: Bagel’s Lucky Hat is so beautifully illustrated, with lush colors, inventive perspectives and compositions, and lovely details embellishing the periphery. It is a high-caliber production, as we have grown to expect from Chronicle Books. I haven’t read the story yet, and while I would guess it is a great story, I wouldn’t care if it was lamer than Howard the Duck: the illustrations already make up for it.

While I’m sorry for the movers who will eventually have to move yet more books the next time we relocate, I’m not sorry to have these in my collection. The internet is great and all, but sometimes you just need more than 72 dots per inch to view the art.

Seeing the art in-person is better yet, but as we all know, money doesn’t grow on trees. At least not in Minnesota.

No, actually it is more abstract than that. Calling it a build-up suggests that there is an end goal. Really what we are trying to convey is that working as an artist or designer or in pretty much any other creative realm means just that: work. It is a steady perseverance that means generating a lot of bad ideas and bad drawings and bad work that will likely never see the light of day. You must keep at it in order to stumble over the really good ideas, the gems that end up at the front of your portfolio.

As a side benefit, while you are generating piles of ideas that don’t necessarily make sense in the current context of the work you are immediately focussed on, you inevitably spill a few unpolished thoughts that will seep into the back of your mind or get scribbled into your sketchbook or stashed in your web browser bookmarks, and you never know when they will leap forth again.

I’ve never taken a class that focuses exclusively on these types of ideas, but I’ve taken plenty of classes that suggest techniques or philosophies orbiting the concepts. I’m exited to compile and experiment and teach and learn from and along with my students. It is all about taking you out of your comfort zone so you can make some good mistakes and generate new experiences and create some new synapses in your crusty little brain. I am definitely out of my comfort zone, which by definition makes me uncomfortable. But the potential for discovery is huge, and much more than worth the discomfort.

Despite the fact that it is a pile of work and it takes discipline to come back to something day after day where you may not see the benefit for some time, I have a great job. I have a great teaching job that gives me access to other professors teaching these same ideas in their own ways, and I have the great job of putting these principles to work in my own studio.

And I pretty much get to draw every day. What job could be better?

“Pitagora suicchi” = “Pythagoras Switch.” Apparently this is a children’s TV show in Japan.

My brothers and I used to make some complicated dominoes/playing cards/lego contraptions, but these thing blow me away! So amazing! The inherent creativity in figuring out and then engineering these flips and flops and rolls and turns is just brilliant!

(via BoingBoing)

Ed. — Up till 3:33am, and totally worth it.

Basically New Orleans is built on sediment. LOTS of sediment. And the deeper layers of the sediment are compacting and eroding as groundwater flows through it over time. They said that over the past century, New Orleans has sunken about two feet, but that the rate of the erosion has been accellerating, and the city may sink as much as a yard or a meter over the next century. Obviously that’s not good, since much of the city is already below sea level.

The natural course of things, had people not interfered and dammed and leveed the river, is that the Mighty Miss would overflow its banks, bringing with it a huge slug of sediment to replenish the deeper layers that are constantly eroding. The sand and soil would get layed over the top of the land, the relative height of the land would stay about the same, and, most importantly, it would stay above sea level. But once we began to build on top of this land, we didn’t want it to flood, so we protected our property with the levees and dams. And now we are witnessing why that isn’t sustainable in the long-term.

Now this isn’t new information. People have known this was happening for a long time, and some people even wrote about it a year ago in this little magazine, called National Geographic. In fact the opening paragraphs of this story are so eery, they may as well have been written by Nostradamus.

But the truth is that the story was written by well-informed scientists who have been studying the problem for years. After the hubbub about who knew what and when regarding the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center it will be interesting to watch the finger-pointing and the “special investigations” (Ooooo!) and see who ends up the scapegoat for this horrible natural and unnatural disaster.

Personally, I don’t think it matters much why or how it happened that “better” plans weren’t made for this hurricane, or more proactive steps weren’t taken to stop the hijackers four years ago. What matters to me is what plans we are going to make for the next potential hurricane or for whatever psychopaths might decide to do in the future.

To (roughly) quote a good movie I saw recently, “We can’t change the past, and we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. All we have is now.”

However, as I am moving forward into the period of less certain cash flow known as graduate school, I needed to find a less expensive alternative. My internet-friend, John Martz (host of the always excellent Drawn!), recommended Dreamhost, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a little early for me to hand out recommendations, but if you are looking for a host, and you decide on Dreamhost, tell them “huyckd” sent you. Consider it a free contribution to EnchantedCeiling.

*waggles shoulders* This new server is so roomy!

P.S. Speaking of EnchantedCeiling, that’s the last site I need to move over here. I am going to have to close down submissions for the move, but the interruption shouldn’t be too long. It will happen in the next week or so.

After an upgrade to my blogging software, I changed a setting to hold new comments for moderation before they end up on the site (to combat spammy comments). However I neglected to check the box that would have let me know when there was a comment waiting for me to look at it. I’m sorry I held your comments in the cue for so dang long– it shouldn’t happen again.

And now back to our regularly intermittent posts…

I’m a fan of backpacks in general, and I even still have my backpack from high school (I’ve patched it). I used it all through college, and I still use it today. It is worn and smelly (smelly because I use it to tote my Frisbee gear to and from games) but it carries everything I need. The shoulder bag I carry to work nowadays is full of pay stubs, notes to myself, my seldom-used-PDA, pens, sketchbook, doodles, etc. Lots of useful stuff all in one place. It’s a decent metaphor for this application.

Backpack is great for me. It synthesises all the randomness of my life (especially these most recent few days, weeks, months), and gives me a way to not lose track of things. For example, I can set a reminder for “tomorrow afternoon” to call and make the car appointment I’ve been meaning to make for the past few weeks. You can even “snooze” a reminder: if I am in the middle of something, I can reset the remider time, and it will get back to me later.

Or, I can create a whole page devoted to EnchantedCeiling, where I can make notes about all the different things I want to do for the site. Pages can have notes, checklists (like Tada Lists), and for paid accounts, files and images. I can see this EnchantedCeiling page being especially helpful because I don’t get time to work on it very often, and there can LONG gaps between when I think of something and when I have time to implement it. Now I just jot it down in my Backpack, and I can work on it when I have the time: eventually.

I can see my use of this tool as being very organic. I’ll make a page about something I am going to do, and keep all the notes in that one place, and then when I am done: poof! I can delete it. Very Zen.

With all my new life changes coming right around the corner, I can use a little more Zen.