Sunday afternoon notes

I have several things to catch up on.

First of all, the bicycling: the terrain between my house and the Red Cup is mostly flat, and I've made that trip rather easily.

Today, I ventured farther east. The terrain is more rolling when you get east of Western. I went by Galileo where I received a round of applause from the patrons astonished to see The Inert Mass of Neither Being Nor Not-Being actually in self-propelled motion. From there it was down to Sauced! (where were you, JohnX?), and after that home, going down Dewey into Mesta Park and then going west on NW 18. That was harder. I am in horrible shape, especially when you consider I'm a non-smoker and not much of a drinker. These aren't even really hills... more like bumps. But they're wearing me out.

In my previous adult biking experience, I've ridden around Lake Hefner or on the River Trails, which offer a more controlled biking experience. I haven't used a bike as basic transportation since I was a teenager. I'm refreshing skills I haven't used in forty-five years: remembering where the steep grades are... the safest places to cross busy streets... where the potholes and badly-patched stretches of pavement are... where I'm likely to encounter unfriendly dogs... watching parked cars to make sure there's no one in them who might suddenly open a door in my path...

This afternoon, my legs are okay but my upper arms are burning like they have muscle strain.

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Several weeks ago, I mentioned that Amanda Joy, whose blog Amanda Joy's Random Musings is linked at the right, doesn't update as frequently as I thought she would. Previously unknown to me, however, was the fact she has several blogs covering a variety of subjects. You can find a list of them at the bottom of this page.

And if you scroll down on this page, you'll see the the sunflower drawing I mentioned in a previous post.

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Last spring, I was given the job of coming up with a cover for a presentation to be used by a city trust seeking a corporate sponsor for the new water taxi service on the 'Oklahoma River'. The trust wanted an illustration to show the potential sponsor how its corporate logo would appear on the taxis.

I've been meaning to post it since about May.

All the raw materials the trust had for reference were some archive shots of the river and, from the boatbuilder in New England, a rudimentary CAD rendering of a boat, shown from a fairly generic three-quarters overhead view with flat light, computer-generated water and some placeholder 'passengers' who looked like large wooden clothespins.

In other words, the finished piece is about ninety percent freehand.

My job was to make the boat and the view more romantic, more dramatic and more appealing. And include the potential sponsor's logo.

I'd consider this a pretty typical commercial art/illustration assignment. I spent about three days on it.



There's a lot of dead space around the boat to allow room for copy. I think the headline was 'Join the Land Run Along the Oklahoma River,' which struck me as kind of odd for a boat project... but what the hell, I'm just the artist.

Although this was done entirely digitally, its 'canvas size' is about 28 x 20 inches. In other words, if you put it in a giclee printer, you'd get a 28 x 20 print. The piece actually ran at 8 x 10 or something similar.

Here are some details:









Some artistic license was taken. There is no angle, for example, from which downtown appears to be that close to the riverfront. And I don't think they'll actually allow people to get up and walk around on the taxis as they do here - but I might be wrong about that. All the lighting on the boat is just made up, too. They may or may not have running lights of some sort.