The Queen of Coffee

This weekend is Mother's Day Weekend and Trader Joe's offers ways to be nice to Mother. An American tradition is "breakfast in bed," where the family brings Mom a lavish breakfast while she lies in her bed in queenly repose. Now I don't know how this tradition evolved but I think it's a bad idea. You have to get out of bed to pee and brush your teeth, after all, and then get back into bed while sticky crumby food is placed right on your sleeping area. You're bound to spill that precious Hawaiian coffee since everything is placed on unstable cushions and a tray board over your legs. However this doesn't mean that on Mother's Day you should not treat your Mom like a queen. You should because she deserves it for bringing you up, if she really did that. The rare Kona coffee, Danish pastries, fresh squeezed orange juice, and tiny roses should be served on a beautifully arranged, stable surface at which the Queen Mother should sit in courtly splendor. 

I don't often do outright cartoons but this ad for Trader Joe's is one of them. Slightly frowzy Mom looks like many of the ladies who shop at my workplace. I also did an ad for TJ's fancy Hawaiian Kona coffee on the other side of the ad placard, which goes in the pastry and coffee section, naturally. Kona is rare and prized; it's the only coffee commercially grown in the United States, and the price reflects that. But your Mother is worth it.

I will be going up to my home place near Boston for Mother's Day. But it is a somber situation because my father is dying, and may expire during my visit. He is 93, and basically succumbing to old age after suffering with many long-term health problems. He has been declining in the last few years and things really started to deteriorate after he took ill with pneumonia in late November. You may remember that I was not able to post here for three weeks while I was stuck at my parents' house during that crisis.

Now it is just a matter of time and I will be there for my mother as long as I can. I probably won't be blogging here, at least on a regular basis, for a week or two. Before you send me messages of condolence, please note that my relationship with my father was difficult and that I have mixed feelings about his demise. More than that I don't want to say in any public place. But thanks for your good thoughts.

Trader Joe's cartoon ads are markers on cardstock, first one about 9" x 7", second one about 7" x 7", May 7, 2013.

Alien Hedge

On an alien world, the semi-sentient vegetation whispers at you and wriggles its sprout tentacles. A hedge on this world really does offer protection. I am not referring to hedge funds, which are also alien. There are animals and people on this world, too, all of them derived from this vegetable evolution. I'm not sure this place is safe to visit, unless you are a purely mechanical robot, and maybe not even then. The atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide and chlorine, exhalations and inhalations of this non-Earthly vegetation. Hedge your bets if you explore this place. This picture was not done on-site.

Photoshop, about an hour's toil, about 10" x 4" print size, May 7, 2013. 

Never Enough Azaleas

This house is about a mile from mine, in an older neighborhood behind a large shopping center. In mid-spring the entire neighborhood is swamped with brilliant azalea blossoms, and this household leads the way with more azaleas than anyone else. They tend them and prune them for maximum blossom density. I guess their sentiment is, you can never have enough azaleas. 

I drew this sketch on site many years ago. I was enjoying a big new set of colored pencils. Most sets of colored pencils come with all sorts of brilliant colors, especially pinks and reds, and usually I never have the opportunity to use all the bright colors. (I would love to have a colored pencil set composed entirely of earth tones; I created one by buying individual pencils and stashing them in a separate pencil holder.) But this time I got to use all those pink colors in a "reality" drawing. 

This year, 15 years after the drawing, the azaleas at this house are still going strong. Here's a photograph I took just a few days ago.

Azalea drawing is ink and colored pencil on sketchbook page, about 7 1/2" x 5", May 1998.

The Vampire Lestat

The mid to late 1980s was a time of questionable taste and blonde-haired rock idols. People voluntarily listened to songs and went to concerts of "hair bands," showy acts featuring lots of bushy hairdos and tacky costumes. Anne Rice's famous "Vampire Lestat" series ("The Vampire Lestat" book was published in 1985) featured her beloved blonde vampire boy becoming a 1980s rock star. So when I did some character portraits from the Anne Rice vampire series, I borrowed the image of a then-well-known rock performer whose stage name was the musically blasphemous "Sebastian Bach." This very pretty youth was the lead singer for a band named "Skid Row." I gave him a black vampire cape embellished with a moon with eyes, which was a reference to the Grateful Dead's "Picasso Moon," a brilliant song first performed in 1989. 

Fast forward to 2013, where hairy rock is relegated to nostalgia acts and grainy old videos. My Grateful Dead cassettes and Anne Rice books gather a layer of dust in my cyber-cave. Vampires live forever, but styles don't. Even so, "Sebastian Bach" is still performing, living the cultural equivalent of the vampire life.

"Vampire Lestat, Superstar" is watercolor and acrylic on illustration board, 7" x 10", March 1991.

Owl Griffin

There are owls in my backyard. I hear them at night, since I keep their schedule. They are Barred Owls and they make a lot of noise in the spring when they are nesting and raising young. I never see them, since it's, uh, dark when they are out. 

A Griffin is usually a combination of an Eagle and a Lion, but what if it were an Owl Griffin instead? An "Owliffin" or a "Griffinowl" would prowl by night on noiseless fuzzy wings. My kind of creature indeed.

"Owl Griffin" is ink on sketchbook page with a bit of digital inking, 4 1/2" x 4", May 4, 2013.

Pin-up Amazon

Finally...! I finished my latest attempt at a pin-up Amazon, that persistent cliche of fantasy illustration that depicts girl warriors in tiny bikinis with improbable, un-liftable weapons. This ain't perfect, but it's a lot better than my previous attempts at this type of thing. The hands aren't quite right, and I could have given her more substantial stairsteps to pose on. The proportions are not "real girl" proportions, they are elongated fashion drawing proportions. Of course the bikini strips could not actually be worn without a lot of glue to stick to skin, but this is fantasy. The face, though, is that of a real girl who works at my workplace. 

It's all done in Photoshop from an original pencil scribble that I posted here last year. I warn you that I am not going to stop making these digital character portraits, whether they are cliche's or not. Click on the pic for a larger view.

Photoshop, a lot of work over a long time, finished May 3, 2013.

Marvel's Black Knight

The character didn't interest me much, but the costume was kind of spiffy for its time, a mixture of medieval with modern. There isn't a lot of black on the Knight's outfit at all, just the boots, gloves, and surcoat. The blue cape doesn't match, but a cape is always good for a swashbuckling hero. Or a swashbuckling villain, as some of the versions of this character are evil. The one portrayed here is the good guy, who rode a winged horse and even was a member of the mighty Avengers for a while. His magical black sword is a tame version of Michael Moorcock's "Stormbringer," the soul-eating black demon-blade that later makes an appearance in the epic "Conan the Barbarian Meets Elric" series of the early 1970s. Elric, the albino king/adventurer created by British author Michael Moorcock, was the ultimate Black Knight. I am planning to re-visit Elric at some point. But not at the point of the Black Sword.

"Black Knight" is acrylic on illustration board, 3" x 7", fall 1985.