Love Joy Peace Hope

Wild

Elephants; wild and civilised. Natural or anthromorphasized...

Magpies

Magpie season is well and truly under way, and as a service to Honzablog readers, I have produced this handy guide to Magpie safety for you to print out, laminate and print. May it serve ye well!


Here is a video of an actual Magpie attack. Keep safe on those streets, dear reader!

Seasons

I used  to live in a town that was famous for having four seasons in one day. But now I live in a town that every day seems to be warm and sunny. But summer's coming, then the weather gets interesting!

Drawvember 1 - HOPE

What does hope look like? It is not mere wishful thinking, but the sure expectation of something better, unseen as yet, but coming. The bird sings in the pre-dawn dark in the certain hope that the sun will hear her singing and arise. Hope does not disapoint.

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 

 I have a little challenge happening on Facebook where for the month of November, or Drawvember as I have rather cleverly (in my own mind at least) renamed it, I will attempt a drawing a day based on one word suggestions of facebook friends. The first word suggested, and indeed chosen is 'hope'.   At the end of the month, I might get the image with the most 'likes' and develop it further into a painting or other more substantial artwork. Perhaps then I could auction it off as a fundraiser for some worthy cause. Use my art to bring real hope, not just a drawing of it!

work in progress

And, in a continuing theme of 'things with wings', here's something else I've been working on in the last little bit. Pencil, Canson coloured paper, lots of cutting out of shapes, and some balsa for spacing and mounting. Nearly finished!

The Sky Shall Not Defeat Me!

The Sky Shall Not Defeat Me!

Last Thursday, my local library hosted illustrator and writer Gus Gordon as he talked about producing picture books. Mostly he showed us his new book, 'Herman and Rosie' and gave us a very interesting talk into what made up that book. It's a great book about music and being alone in a big city, and very evocative of New York. He made a lot of use of collage to enhance his crayon and wash illustrations, and so I thought I'd play around with adding textures to a drawing.

This is a recent sketch I've being working on, so I thought it would be ideal, as this week's challenge for Illustration Friday is 'Sky'. Our intrepid Aviator is ready to take on the sky on his own terms, determined and resolute, the Sky shall not defeat him this time...

Contraption v

Way back here I posted a sketch of a mechanical butterfly. And now, here are pictures of a prototype model of it!

Suspend - Contraption iv

Suspended Seventeen Stories above the Street, the Spider man serenades his sweetheart with his Sack-but.

Illustration Friday old-timers may remember the contraptions topic of last year. I submitted two illo's for that, firstly of a mechanical butterfly , still my most visited post, followed by some sketches for this idea, including the background story of a man and his Arachnoflyvver. In that post I mentioned I had actually made a model at some point of the device, an eight legged mechanical abseiling device which actually worked, but had got lost somewhere along the the line.

Well, a month or so back I found that model, fixed it up a bit, made some scenery, and then photographed it and videoed it in action. You may find it here! Check it out, it's a bit of fun! In fact it was the last post I did. Been a bit slack lately (although I have been making a model of the mechanical butterfly mentioned above. Wait for that one!)

But now, this week's Illustration Friday topic is Suspend, and as the Arachnoflyvver is vehicle that relies on being suspended to work, it seemed imperative that I do an illustration of it. But yes, please check out my last post to see it in action.

Contraptions iii

Back in October 2011 I posted about contraptions and discussed this idea I had for a mechanical eight-legged abseiling device which I named the Arachnoflyvver. A few years ago I had built a working model of the device, but it had gone missing on my travels. However, not long ago, I found most of it, and decided to do a quick tidy up of it and present it here to to the loyal readers of Honzablog.

Note the streamlined teardrop, or egg shape, and the three stylish chrome strips on the side. The pilot, and his trombone, is probably in another state, so the e-plus wooden block bloke was pushed into service as a stand-in pilot. Slightly out of scale, but you get the idea. 

The cityscape is made up of photos of sections of old buildings from around Rockhampton which were printed out and tiled together to make tallish buildings. We don't have that many of your actual Artdeco Skyscrapers here in Rocky, its not New York, y'know!

Also, check out the video to see how it all actually works! And it Does! Sort of... Something had gone wrong with the electrics, so the device had to be manually lifted, unfortunately its on-board winch was not working. 

The feet are made from pencil erasers, but I think next time I would make proper articulated and sprung, self leveling mechanical feet, maybe a bit like the prosthetic feet used by amputee runners. Even so, the rubber feet weren't quite gripping on my printed building facade, so, just for the video, I had to put a towel on the surface to give it some traction. Funny, I'm sure it used to work okay just on the bare wooden legs. Perhaps because they were linked and not independently rotating as they are now...   

 The device would be transfer to the climbing site on the back of a truck, the grappling hook launched from a harpoon gun mounted on the truck's roof.

And, of course, as well as our romantic hero's use of this machine to facilitate his trombone serenading to his girl in the penthouse suite, it may also be used for window washing, and removing stray kittens precariously perched on high ledges.

Jump

I haven't put anything up for Illustration Friday for a few weeks, so here is Lollipop the cat and his kangaroo friend springing into action and having a bit of a jump. Ideal for this week's topic. I painted these two on a wall in one of the party rooms at Lollipops play centre in Narre Warren using acrylic house paint, mostly applied flat, but with some airbrushed details and highlights. Hmm, I must pull out my old air brush again some time! 

Vocalise

I've never had formal vocal training, but I do know that the secret to good singing is using your diaphragm to support the air. The diaphragm is a muscle (apparently) beneath the lungs, which is used by singers, and players of wind instruments to get full value for the air in their lungs. If your tummy goes IN when you breath in, you're doing it wrong. Make sense, if you thing about it. When you breath in a full load of air, your tummy, should, by rights, expand. And then when you breath out, you'll find you can breath out longer by squeezing your tummy in, forcing the diaphragm to push much more air out of your lungs. This will result in longer notes that sound less strained. The tenor in this illustration is demonstrating an artificial means of enhancing the diaphragm and producing beautiful, sustained notes by using my latest invention, the hand-operated Diaphragm Augmenter.

Please be in touch if you would be interested in beta-testing this device, once I make up a working prototype!