April 2004 Archives

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I have been draughted to attend the big queen's day party tonight. I quite like having a drink with other Dutch people once a month, but as soon as they start dressing up in orange, I flee. Not this time. Somehow I agreed to do the face painting. To inspire people to maybe choose something more original than plain orange and red white and blue stripes, I made this sample card. Maybe I'll show you a photo tomorrow. Now I'm off to the hardware store for a can of spraypaint. And then I'll spray a broken crown on a black T-shirt.
I had my newspaper debut with a Beatrix portrait. I spraypainted her portrait on toiletpaper when she became queen in 1980. The toiletpaper was featured in an activist magazine. The Volkskrant noticed it and published the portrait, describing how much jail time I risked... Unfortunately I kept neither one publication, I would have loved to show it to you.

I wonder whether anyone will recognize her. If you know her, you will. I'll send her a print via snailmail. Or maybe I'll call her on the phone and tell her to look. Yeah, I'll do that. Shame she is not a geek, she could write the best food blog ever. Maybe I can brainwash her into doing that. I'd have to portrait the husband too then. Give them a ready to use movable typy. As if.

Update:
Here is a printable version for Wil to take to Terschelling.
(The woman is sensible. She fled Amsterdam because of koninginnedag)

Anneke put some lovely new pictures in her heading.

Some people think I am a sketch blog, so every now and again I have to show a sketch. This is going to be a portrait of my dearest friend, who will probably be insulted if she sees this. But she won't, because she doesn't love her computer much. I'll give her the finished one of course. I'll see tons of mistakes tomorrow, and the shading will do much too. But her soul is in it already, I can see it. And I don't have a picture, and I haven't seen her since last Summer. Interesting try, portrait from memory. Not such a bad memory after all, Mr. Wind.

Let's show some solidarity today. Also because it's a great picture, of course. I am an esthetic person. I had to explain to Otger what abortion is. I was so relieved, he never asks anything even slightly in the direction of sex, the prude. But this one caught him off guard, we were watching the news. He is fanatic about watching the news, he wants to know everything that goes on in the world. And what he doesn't understand we have to explain to him to the last detail. So he asked what abortion is. And Piffin and I explained. Piffin has classmates who are pregnant, for crying out loud.

For Harm:

Umberto Eco, the author and semiotician, called Peanuts the first comic strip to speak "in two different keys." "The world of Peanuts is a microcosm, a little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated," he wrote.

From a Toronto Star article by Murray Whyte.

Today's newspaper. As usual a thank you to Peter for the photo. Here's a louder and clearer version. I called this entry "first aid" because the newspaper headline says "first aid for tidying up". If I'd have known I could have drawn in a cute little white case with a red cross. But still, I for myself would rather have called it "the art of tidying up". But I have no say in that.
You may have missed the development of this drawing, in that case, go here and here.

Grow a brain mentions me on April 23. I think I'll take that advice.

This is the first Google hit when you type in "Toronto illustrators". The official Toronto kids library listing of Toronto based writers and illustrators. On the site you can't distinguish between writers and illustrators, so I went through each and every link. I listed the illustrators below. If you click on the link, you are extremely lucky if you find more than an ID photo. Are these people illustrators? For Pete's sake, they need a camera to do a self portrait... I stumbled on drawings only twice! I wish these people would join torontoillustrators.com. At least that would generate some pictures. Oh well, if their computerisation is in any way up to snuff, then maybe they will find this post and take action.

Veronika Martenova Charles Heather Collins Barbara Feldman Laszlo Gal Phoebe Gilman James Houston Maryann Kovalski Vladyana Krykorka Loris Lesynski Michael Martchenko Sheila McGraw Robin Muller Ruth Ohi Karen Patkau Eric Parker Dušan Petricic Barbara Reid Rina Singh Vlasta Van Kampen Andrea Wayne Von Konigslow Ian Wallace Paul Zwolak

You will probably say that I should never have played "shadow of a doubt" a thousand times while in childbirth. But she turned out the sweetest girl, really. Got her a new mp3 player for her birthday, her last one got stolen from her school locker. So she's happy.

Haha, Amy blogged some very confronting photographs...

More updates: I'm a weekly aortal. And so I've learned a new word, had to look that one up, thanks Anne!

New legs. This is much more typical for the way Martin plays.

I keep drawing Martin. Every time I am not satisfied with my drawing. Damn clarinet. But this might just be the final one. And then Martin will finally have his blog. But maybe I'll draw him a new pair of legs tomorrow. Michiel already figured out how to optimize the accessibility for the vision impaired. So funny, there's a program that reads out every website you want. But it's very disappointing, because more often than not, it reads: "this document is empty". And Martin will post losts of downloadable music. Very interesting for the blind.

It's my birthday today! Michiel bought me these books: the most Special day of my life, The Comics Journal, and New & Used Blab. And a CD and lots of wine from my friends. Eight people actually visited me today, which is almost unheard of. And my site was down too, apologies to everyone who tried to visit, I believe my provider was hit by lightning.

I found Hiroyuki through Glubibulga. I am absolutely delighted. His children's book "Soket in the forest" looks and feels like a true tribute to the Mumins. Snufkin must be really popular in Japan, loads and loads of Snufkin fan-art. But Hiroyuki is everything but fan-art, he takes the Mumins to the twenty-first century. I would love to show you a whole page from the book, but they are so detailed and tastefully balanced in composition, subtle in a way I will never ever be able to achieve myself, that it would be a shame to crop out a detail. What is it with Japanese artists? Why are they so much better than us?!

I must have the book somewhere, everybody has. Everybody back in highschool read it in French class. No doubt because it is the thinnest book überhaupt in French literature. It was never for me. I always blamed it on myself, thought I must miss a little prince antenna of some sort. But now Benjamin Ivry explains it to me. It turns out I was just as allergic to spirituality when I was sixteen as I am now. Pfew. Great quotations: "in giving you are throwing a bridge across the chasm of your solitude". And more.

Glubibulga celebrates his? her? their? first anniversary. Congratulations! I wouldn't mind turning up on their very inspirational site myself, but I must admit my Italian is a bit rusty. So I am unable to figure out how they work. Maybe somebody can explain it to me. In Germany they call something like Glubibulga a "Fundgrube". One of the nicer German words, I think.

My computer gave up. Luckily, I was offered to work in a friend's appartment. A yummie fast computer, but... two cats. I feel like I have smoked two packets of cigarettes. My eyes are swollen, my throat hurts and my nose runs. But I did make the deadline. And as I was waiting for my friend to come home from work and help me upload my files, I checked my e-mail. The newspaper. They postponed the article to next week. I could cry, if it wasn't so funny.

The Toronto illustrators site is up! Thanks to Amy, our fabulous webmaster. A while ago, I started a Yahoo mailinglist for Torontonian illustrators. Because I liked the Dutch list I subscribe to so much, I figured I could do the same here. Connect to colleagues. We have 40 members now, most of them lurkers, but that's okay. Even though I believe in open communication myself, others have a right to be shy. Now we followed a second Dutch example. The Dutch mailinglisters share a portfoliosite. And they actually get work through it. So we imitated, I told them so of course. Got a lot of good advice too. We launch our site this week with nine members. But we want to grow. All illustrators from Toronto (greater Toronto, as great as you want) can join. We want to run the website as non profit as possible. Which is a lot cheeper than the fortunes we have to spend on the big portfoliosites. So join. JOIN.

Despite huge computer problems I have gotten this far. Everything is slow as melasses and the whole thing crashes consantly. I'm going to throw everything on a CD now, just in case I have to finish the drawing on a different computer. Not that I have one.

This is the sketch for an illustration I can already clearly imagine finished. Which it is obviously not yet. Still, it will be in next week's newspaper. Article about my favourite pass time. Michiel did the Maya bit of course, thank you, Michiel. While I was commiting adultery, imagine that. Toinerz has mated me.
4 eggs were produced. Who wants to adopt them?

This is Michiel, working at the scaling problem. He can look like this for hours, motionless. Today everybody had a day off because of good friday. The weather was unbelievable so I kicked Otger out to play hockey with the kids on the street. Now he only spent -almost- his whole day in front of the laptop writing in not-quite-C. As I watched him playing hockey I realised he knew nothing about the apparently (lots of cars with flags) big game last night, since we don't have a tv and are not interested in any sports. Those other kids probably find him a total nerd. I asked Otger afterwards whether the kids had been talking about the game. No they hadn't, because they all knew, and they didn't know that he didn't know, so everything was all right. Weird. I can't imagine kids on Dutch streets playing soccer with a boy that doesn't know the first thing about champion's leage games.

Breaking news: I have been blogpublished in Brazil! Thank you Neurastenia!

See what people do to your work when you put it online! They download it, steal it, even doodle on it! Nobody has ever doodled on me before. But alas, there were good intentions here. The scaling problem again. Thanks Lex, for pointing out there are problems when you look at the site full screen. I never do that myself, I want to see three applications simultaniously, at least. Poor Michiel has been working himself sick on it this afternoon, and it's his BIRTHDAY. Which I forgot, he had to remind me. So do him a favour, visit his blog. Something really odd happened there yesterday. I had a creepy hunch I knew who he wrote about. And I was right. And I never even met the guy.

An old friend (picture above, 1978) snail mailed me four pages of pictures. Every single student in our first year. He crossed out the ones that didn't make it through the first year, kind of mean really. I guess I am reveiling my alias now. My maiden name haunts me. If you look at the pages 1 2 3 4 and you are familiar with Dutch art and design, you will recognize some Names. It wasn't such a bad year.

I can't stand it that I can't show you what I'm drawing. So I cheat, with a few tiny details. The poem is Otger's. Not that he is such a poet, it was homework, and he figured haikus were the fastest way to get around it. We did some experiments with artistic printing. So you could call this serendipitic art, I guess.
I've been watching the live traffic monitor of my stats program. And I discovered that most people, when they visit my website, start with picture 1, then 2-3-4 something, then click on "last", to see where it ends, then surf back to 29-28-27, and then give up. So they miss out on the middle part, which is where the children's book illustrations are. And they don't know that. I will have to think of something here.
I proclaim this website of the day.
Cockie is worried about the English speaking visitors coming from me to her, because of the connotation of her name. But I have assured her I get only descent visitors.

Cockie commented her wish to look inside the book. A very convinient wish, because today I am working on a project I am not allowed to blog. I just chose some pages I like, from the 143 pages there are to choose from. A lot of them with typographical Spielerei like these. The buildings are suffocating, it sais. The characters too.
F.Ellingman has written an entry about me today, I am so honoured! I noticed because I suddenly saw so many refers in the stats that Michiel installed for me yesterday.

Looking for beautiful websites to put on my links page, I found one about Stefan and Franciszka Themerson! I took Piffins name from a novel by Stefan Themerson, "Euclid was an ass". I read it when I was pregnant with her. It was a great book, after Euclid Michiel and I read everything by Themerson we could find. And we also found a little children's book "meneer Bruis bouwt zijn huis", illustrated by Franciszka. Picture above is true size. Otger wants to become an architect ever since we read this little book a zillion times to him when he was 2.

I once read about an illustrator who secretly made sketches in her coat pocket, I wish I would remember which illustrator that was, but I honestly don't. For a long time I have been wanting to try it out myself, and today I finally did. In the subway, a little sketchbook in my pocket and a 3 cm pencil. I think some people noticed something odd about me, but most didn't. It was fun, I am going to do it again. So many interesting faces here in Toronto. With some practice, maybe the people in my drawings will become a bit more multicultural. I think I am going to take on the Spadina streetcar, LOL.
Oh yes, check out the new links on this blog, and also on my site.
And jeez, 40 women in illustration, and I only like one. Am I picky, or what?

Just thinking on paper. I was trying things with colour, but the program crashed three times in a row, so now I am fed up. And going for drinks. Networking, hahahaha. No. Just drinks.