Creative

The fake chipmunk I drew when I was 15

I’ve been going through some of my school sketchbooks of late and what I’ve found is that I was a fairly consistent and mediocre visual artist, with occasional flashes of talent/skill/luck beyond my usual stuff. The following is not an example of that. Sorry!

Instead it’s a drawing I made of a fake chipmunk I did while our art class was touring the provincial museum (now the Royal British Columbia Museum) in Victoria in October of 1979. The museum was absolutely wondrous to me. It had the usual exhibits, mainly focused on local native art, totem poles and such, but it also had life-size or nearly life-size dioramas depicting scenes both past and present from around the province. The highlight was probably the mining town that was modeled in loving detail, complete with a fishy-smelling cannery, a street filled with shops, a movie theater and a bakery that always had the aroma of cinnamon wafting from it.

The chipmunk was part of the one of the nature dioramas. I don’t remember the exact scene it was in but judging from its stance it was probably not about to be eaten by a moose.

It’s not a bad little drawing but there’s nothing especially remarkable about it, either. I think I’m most proud that I got the proportions right and didn’t give it some weird mega-head or something. Maybe I’ll go over the digital copy and see how I’d improve on it today with 30 more years of life experience and 0 more years of useful art talent. The teacher gave me a B for it. I can’t really argue with that.

The Chipmunk Eats

Next: Something the teacher gave me an A for!

UPDATE:

Here’s what I would have done to the image if I’d had a PC with Photoshop in 1979 instead of an Atari 2600 with a Canyon Bomber cartridge:

Crosshatched chipmunk

(apply the crosshatch image effect and adjust the level to give it better contrast)

The Unfinished Tree: A masterpiece (except for the masterpiece part)

Occasionally I get the urge to indulge the drawing ‘n painting artistic side of me and the results are usually halting, uninspired and incomplete. And here’s one of them!

The Unfinished Tree
The Unfinished Tree (rejected U2 album, 1987)

This is based on a photograph I found by cleverly doing an image search on the phrase ‘spooky tree’ in Google. The original:

As you can see my early rendering has captured none of the original spookiness and the tree exists in an existential white void, without bound, without limit, without me being arsed to finish the dang thing. Mostly it was an excuse to break out my digital tools and see how I fared with them. I used the Bamboo Fun tablet and Corel’s Painter Essentials 4, a cut-down version of their pricey Painter program. I could see myself getting some traction with this combo if I devoted enough time to it but the chances of me carving out that sort of time is pretty small these days.

Still, I was at least inspired to create a new category of post for this (Creative) so that’s something. I promise to maybe finish you someday, would-be spooky tree.