Happy Halloween!

In honor of Halloween, here's an indignant devil.

Clock Creatures: 3

Clock Creatures: 2

Clock Creatures: 1

Sean and I were talking about what to do with our ugly old Ikea clock. We've been talking about taking it apart and making our own clock face for years. I thought it would be a cute idea to have monsters interacting with the numbers. Over the next few days, I'll post some ideas I had.

Row of Houses

Here's a little sketch of a row of Toronto-style houses.

Guy in a Suit

Here's a sketch I drew while watching Mad Men with commentary.

Man's Profile

I drew this tonight while "watching" Once on my iPod. As I have no tolerance for handheld camerawork, I really couldn't watch more than a couple minutes of the movie, but absorbed it out of the corner of my eye. Anyway, the basis for this image came from Wired.

Inuit-Inspired Spirit Creature

When Sean and I went to Quebec City, we spent a few hours at the Musée national des Beaux-arts du Québec. One of my favorite exhibits was their Inuit art collection. It had a nice mix of old and contemporary art, and the pieces were so expressive. Many made me laugh, others made me sad, some did both. After we'd explored the museum, we sat down for a bit and drew. The creature I sketched was inspired largely by the art of Judas Ullulaq and Toonoo Sharky, whose styles I particularly liked.

200th Post!

This is my 200th post on the Blonderland blog!

Endomorph

I always forget which body type is which. Endomorph is typically pear-shaped. When I was trying to figure out what to draw, I started with a scribbled pear shape and it ended up turning into a person.

Hi

Here's another part of yesterday's sketch.

Hey there!

This is half of a sketch I did today in preparation for a possible online portfolio header.

Expression

This is a quick sketch of an expression that flashes across Seth MacFarlane's face on a Hulu commercial. I thought it was interesting, and it's kind of fun trying to draw unusual or extreme facial expressions.

Mildly Suspicious Creature

Man in a Sweater Vest

Dinner

Tonight I made more ravioli. This time, I used some farmer's market spinach (with cashew ricotta) for the filling and made a creamy tomato sauce for the topping. I added some more chopped tomatoes and sauteed spinach for good measure. Apologies for the poor photo - my camera battery is dead so this is an iPhone photo, courtesy of Sean.

Musing

Holding a Tree

Squirrel

Dancing Girl

We're back from Quebec! Here are some make-up posts.

Headphones

Here's another sketch from 2004.

Sad boy

Here's another old creation. I found this in a sketchbook that I filled up back in 2004.

Dog

Here's a dog I drew in Prismacolor pencils (just like my previous elephant post).

We're heading out to Montreal and Quebec City for a few days, so I'll schedule a few posts, but it might be a little bit spotty. If I miss any days, I'll put up make-up posts when I get back!

Apple

Sometimes I draw or paint things, think they're terrible, and shove them away somewhere. Then later, as I'm going through old papers, I come across the various drawings and think they're not that bad. This is an example of that. It ain't perfect, but I figured I'd share it anyway.

Elephant

Pink applesauce

I made applesauce by hand for the first time! There's a great apple vendor at our local farmer's market, so I decided to use some of the haul from my last trip there to make some applesauce.

The process was fairly easy. I just washed and cut up the apples into about 1" chunks, leaving the skins on but discarding the cores. (If you want to tackle this recipe but don't have a food mill, you'll want to peel the apples). I cooked the chunks down over medium heat, constantly stirring and adding just a little bit of water and fresh squeezed lemon juice. The chunks gradually became mushy, and once I felt they were soft enough to be run through the food mill, I turned off the heat and processed them through it until all that was left were the skins. I didn't want the skins in the sauce itself, but they were so tender and flavorful that I just ate them up. The beautiful pink color came only from the apple skins themselves - I didn't add anything else to the pot. If you want to try this yourself and don't have a food mill, peel the apples at the beginning of the process, then just use a potato masher to mash them after they've been cooked down.

Here are some photos of the process, if you're curious. As you can see, the apples cooked down a lot. Six apples didn't even end up filling up the applesauce jar I reused.

Furniture makeover

When Sean had just moved into our new place and had no furniture aside from an air mattress, a very generous neighbor of ours gave him a couple of chairs, which she told him he could just keep. (She's since been kind enough to give us things like tickets to sporting events and fresh herbs and tomatoes from her garden - thanks, CJ!)

Anyway, the chairs aren't really our style, but it's always nice to have a little extra seating around, so I decided to paint and re-cover them. I love the before and afters on Design*Sponge - without looking at them I don't know that it would ever have occurred to me to do this in the first place. This one is pretty small scale compared to the other furniture on their site, but I thought it was a good beginner's project. I got the seat fabric from Pink Panda Fabrics, which has a lot of really fun designs (this one is "natureology - blowing leaves).

Here are a couple of process photos:

Nuit Blanche Monster Revisited

Here's a more fleshed out version of my silly Nuit Blanche monster.

Nuit Blanche Toronto, 2009

Last night, after attending the Toronto Vegetarian Association's second annual Totally Fabulous Vegan Bakeoff, Sean and I spent seven and a half hours exploring the "free contemporary art thing" that is Nuit Blanche. It was interesting, inspiring, and a fun exploration of our new city. One of the exhibits we saw was at the Gladstone Hotel. Different artists or groups of artists each took over rooms and created designs that covered the walls. One group, Art Fuzion, had a large piece of paper taped to the and encouraged attendees to make their marks with the provided chalk pastels. I jotted this monster creature in the lower right corner. The other marks you see on the page were made by other attendees.

This was Toronto's fourth annual Nuit Blanche. In reading up on it, I just learned that nuits blanches have been happening for a a few years in cities all over the world, starting in Europe and slowly spreading elsewhere. They're new to me, but I hope to experience more in the future. Thoursands of people come out, and was such a spirit of fun and creativity in the air. We didn't even get to see a couple of the things we wanted to because the lines were way too long even at 1:30 am.

One of my favorite exhibits was called Nite Lites. It was a gigantic Lite Brite (created by Alexandra (Alita) Gonzales) that used colored water bottles as the bulbs. The event went on until 7:00am, but we only made it until about 3:00, largely due to Sean's uncomfortable new shoes. We saw such a small fraction of the goings on.

It's raining, it's pouring

Thunder and lightning in Toronto tonight.

I'm looking forward to the Vegan Bake-off and Nuit Blanche tomorrow!

Angry pickle

Sean's assessment of this creature was "it's like an angry pickle." I didn't really have that in mind, but I'd asked him for an inspiration shape and he said "long and cylindrical." So here you have it.