The current Monday Artday challenge word is “samurai”.
John Belushi a more fearsome samurai there never was.
IF: swarm
This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “swarm”.
Sure, there’s the large salary and great benefits, but being the CEO of a honey processing company has its drawbacks.
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from my sketchbook: wilbur brink
On Memorial Day 1931, 24 year-old driver Billy Arnold was the defending champion of the Indianapolis 500. Having competed in the annual event two previous times, Billy won the 1930 race after leading all but first two laps, the most ever by a winner.
On lap 162 of the 1931 Indianapolis 500, leader Billy Arnold broke his rear axle as he negotiated the fourth turn. He lost control and his car tumbled over the wall. In the process, the car lost a wheel which sailed over the fence and through the air striking and killing eleven year-old Wilbur Brink, who was playing in his yard at 2316 Georgetown Road, across from the Speedway.
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IF: layer
The new challenge word on the Illustration Friday website is “layer”.
Tyler Durden explains the art of making… um… soap :
The clear layer is glycerin. You can mix glycerin back in when you make soap. Or You can skim the glycerin off. You can mix the glycerin with nitric acid to make nitroglycerin. You can mix nitroglycerin with sodium nitrate and sawdust to make dynamite. You can blow up bridges. You can mix nitroglycerin with more nitric acid and paraffin and make gelatin explosives. You can blow up a building, easy. With enough soap, you can blow up the whole world.”
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Monday Artday: redo a famous painting (part 2)
The art and illustration website Monday Artday‘s challenge this week is to redo a famous painting. This is my second illustration for this challenge. (HERE is the first.) Mrs. Pincus made the suggestion for this version and I thought it was a good idea despite my dislike for Norman Rockwell’s work.
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Monday Artday: redo a famous painting (part 1)
The new Monday Artday challenge is to redo a famous painting. I did this for another illustration website a little over a year ago. My version of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by French Neoclassical artist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres can be seen here. For the current challenge I chose two paintings that are linked, but for a ridiculous reason.
Pinkie by Thomas Lawrence, a delicate portrait of eleven-year old Sarah Barrett Moulton and Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough, a portrait of a young man believed to be Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, were purchased by American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington and displayed opposite each other in his private collection at, what is now, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Since their chance pairing in the early 1920s, many gallery visitors have mistakenly attributed the two paintings to the same artist. In reality, Blue Boy depicts a young man in period costume from one hundred and fifty years earlier and Pinkie is a contemporary painting (for 1794) of a young girl dressed appropriately for the late eighteenth century. In addition, the paintings were completed twenty-five years apart. The actual identity of Blue Boy remains a mystery, but years of research points to young Buttall as the most likely model. Pinkie was commissioned by the grandmother of Sarah Barrett Moulton, aunt of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although young Sarah passed away just a year after the painting’s completion.
William Wilson, author of The Los Angeles Times Book of California Museums, calls them “the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture”.
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IF: sweater
The current Illustration Friday challenge word is “sweater”.
“Hey Grandma, how’s that sweater coming along?”
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Monday Artday: horse with hands riding a bike
This week’s Monday Artday challenge is an unusual (and specific) suggestion. It’s a “horse with hands riding a bike”. Supposedly, horses are difficult to draw, hands are difficult to draw and bicycles are difficult to draw. So, putting them all together presents a particularly difficult challenge. And artists seem to always be looking for a challenge.
Well, here is a horse and some hands and a bicycle each with its own easy-to-follow dotted line for cutting.
Put ’em together yourself.
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from my sketchbook: stanley fafara and sue randall
Poor Beaver Cleaver. He was a pretty nice kid, if only he didn’t give in to the misguided persuasion of idiotic Larry Mondello and two-faced liar Gilbert Bates. The antics got Beaver into a certain amount of trouble, though he usually walked away with nothing worse than a torn pair of pants or some lost lunch money. After a stern talking to from Dad (or sometimes a sentence of no dessert and a couple of hours in his room), Beaver forgave his pals and moved on. Lucky for The Beav he never followed in the real-life footsteps of Stanley Fafara who portrayed classmate Whitey Whitney.
After the cancellation of Leave It to Beaver in 1963, teenage Stanley began drinking and dabbling in drugs. By 22, he was dealing drugs regularly. In the early 1980s, Stanley was breaking into pharmacies until he was arrested. He served a year in jail for burglary and, upon his release, began dealing drugs again. In the 90s, he spiraled into heavier drug addiction, living on Portland, Oregon’s Skid Row and survivng on a small Social Security check. In 2003, during routine hernia surgery, Stanley lapsed into a coma due the the weakened state of his body from years of drug abuse. He was removed from life support and died on his 54th birthday.
Beaver was enamoured with his elementary school teacher, the pretty Miss Landers, played by Sue Randall. After a supporting role in the 1957 film The Desk Set with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, Sue focused on episodic television. She was regularly cast in a host of Westerns and dramas before landing her twenty-nine episode run in the later seasons of Leave It to Beaver. She continued in various guest spots through 1967 until she left Hollywood and returned to her native Philadelphia. Sue became very active in many charitable causes like the Multiple Sclerosis Telethon, Reading for the Blind and Project Headstart. Sue was a heavy smoker for most her life and a 1982 cancer diagnosis forced the removal of her larynx. Her health declined from the effects of lung cancer and Sue passed away at the age of 49. Her body was donated to the Humanity Gifts Registry at the University of Pennsylvania.
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IF: reverse
This week’s Illustration Friday challenge word is “reverse”.
“I am a kind of paranoid in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.”
J. D. Salinger
In early 2010, the longtime reclusive author passed away at his home in New Hampshire. He was 91.