Category: Inspiration

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Painting a Gentle Giant

Humpback whale and calf in The Broken Group Islands – Patrick LaMontagne

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been enamored with humpback whales, and I have no idea why this particular species of baleen whale holds my love and interest over any other marine mammal.  My wife and I saw these two (and a few more) on a tour of the Broken Group Islands out of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island this past summer, and although we only saw backs and tails, it was a thrilling experience.

A longtime dream I’ve had is to be in the water with one of these massive creatures.  Now before you think me a little nuts, I’m not oblivious to the danger.  I know that an animal can be as gentle as a kitten, but when it’s the size of a semi truck, you don’t want to be under it when it rolls over.  Despite that, the desire is very strong and I intend to make it happen.  I want to get my diving certification in the next year or two, and to swim with humpbacks in the next five.  It’s an expensive trip, but it’s one worth saving for.

From time to time over the years, I’ve had very vivid dreams featuring different animals.  One in particular, was the spark for my Animal Totem series.  Humpbacks have shown up a few times, most recently last week and it prompted me to start searching for reference.  When I found the right image (and there was no doubt, once I saw it), I started looking for the photographer who took it.

As I’ve mentioned before about photo reference, no photos are ever part of my paintings, but I still need to have great shots to work from in order to get the level of detail that I paint.  I can’t tell you from memory what the hair on a moose looks like as it transitions over the nose, or how a bighorn sheep’s horns curl around in relation to his other features.  So, I rely on the work of wildlife photographers to provide me with the reference I need.

Some photographer friends, of which I thankfully have many, have been very generous in allowing me the use of their work.  For others, I have traded my services as an illustrator for their own projects, or paid them outright for the license to use certain photos.   A few have asked for canvas prints of the finished painting in payment.  I’ve been agreeable to all of these terms, and grateful for their willingness to help me do what I love to do.

From time to time, a wildlife photographer will tell me they aren’t interested or their price will be too high for my budget.  In those cases, I’m usually disappointed, but I thank them for their time and look for other reference.  Even though my finished paintings look very little like the photos I use for reference, so many photographers have had their work stolen online and they’re extra cautious about allowing their work to be used.  It’s unfortunate, but a reality of the business, and as these photos are the product of their time and effort, they have every right to say No,  just as I’ve declined certain uses of my own work.  So I try to be hopeful but not too optimistic when I approach a photographer with whom I have no connection.

When I found the right humpback image, I was pleased.  All that was left was to get permission and the high resolution photo, and that’s how I found Scott Portelli.  Scott is a wildlife photographer out of Sydney,  Australia, and he specializes in taking photos of Humpback Whales.  Each year, for the past decade, he has taken small groups of people to Tonga to swim with these gentle giants.  From August to October, Humpbacks mate and give birth in these warm waters.  Scott is an active supporter of whale conservation and vocal opponent of the practice of whaling that sadly, still goes on today.

Having made ‘the ask,’  I set about to work on other things, as you never know how long the response will take.  Scott replied quickly, was very kind and we soon came to an agreement for the use of the photo.  Yesterday, I received the high-res image and I am very happy.  It’s a beautiful reference to work from, and I now have no doubt that I’ll be able to paint the image I’ve been imagining.  There are a few animals I’ve been waiting to paint until I had just the right reference, and this is one of them.  Thanks, Scott.

While I won’t post the image I’m using, please do look at Scott’s wonderful photos of these and other beautiful animals.  You can find his website and links to his Flickr account at www.scottportelli.com.

What I find especially thrilling is that this search led me not only to the photo, but to the means to fulfill my dream.  When I am ready to swim with Humpback Whales, I will know who to contact.  If you’d like to find out more about Scott’s excursions and tours to the beautiful waters around Tonga, you can find that information at www.swimmingwithgentlegiants.com

Somebody recently made a comment online that my specialty was obviously painting fur.  While it’s great to have that skill recognized, as it took me a long time to develop the techniques, I have no desire to be a one-trick-pony and only be able to paint furry animals, despite how much I enjoy it.  This whale will be a personal challenge as there’s not one hair to be painted in the whole image, but I think I’m up to it.  And I’m excited to get started.

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Portrait of Rocky Balboa

This painting, like many that I do these days, was an absolute pleasure to work on.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been focused on my Animal Totems, and although they are still where I plan to continue investing my creative energy, I realized that I hadn’t done a full painting of a person in quite awhile.  Yes, I’ve done a few on the iPad, but not a fully finished painting.  I think the last one I did was a caricature of Bert Monroy, and that was in June of 2010.  I figured it was time to do another one, and rather than a caricature, I wanted to paint a portrait.

Regular readers will know how much I love movies.  One of my favorites is Rocky Balboa, the sixth movie in the series.  I think the reason I like it is because it’s not so much about Rocky’s battle with an opponent, it’s his struggle with getting older, but still feeling he has left something undone.  Some critics panned it for being overly romanticized and unrealistic, but I disagree.  Very much like the tone and writing of the first Rocky movie, the movie that won and was nominated for a slew of Oscars in 1976.   Rocky Balboa inspired me, much like Sylvester Stallone’s own personal story does.  If you aren’t familiar with it, you might want to take the time to listen to how Tony Robbins tells it.

Rather than paint him as the fighter in the ring, I wanted to paint the real character.   His wife has passed on, his son is now a young man living on his own, and Rocky spends his evenings at his restaurant telling people old ‘war stories’ from his glory days.  But there’s still that hunger.  The movie reminds me that one of my own biggest fears is becoming an old man and regretting the things left undone.

This was started as a painting on the iPad, shown here.  I used the procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, and the Nomad mini brush.  As much as I enjoy painting on the iPad, and a number of my recent portrait paintings have stopped there, I brought this one into Photoshop and painted over it to get the look and texture I wanted.  While my animal paintings are very detailed, this one is intentionally rougher.  The tone of the piece, and the age of the subject called for a little less polish.  The finished painting was done in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos4 medium tablet, and the image size is 16″X20″ at 300ppi.

Even though I’ve never had any of my own work printed for myself, I think I will get this one printed on canvas and framed for my office.  Never hurts to be reminded that our time here is short.

Incidentally, one of my favorite onscreen speeches is from this movie, this one from Rocky to his son.

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The genius next door

Steve Jobs truly was a diamond in the rough.  You need only look at his extensive list of accomplishments, his patents and his rise from an average existence to his becoming the man whose life so many are reflecting on today.

Despite his faults, (no, he was not perfect) his legacy will be that of a genius and a tenacious innovator who not only took the path less travelled, but made a new one when even that proved too worn for his liking.

I’ll admit to being a little uncomfortable with some of the tributes I’ve seen today, and the almost deification of the man by so many people that didn’t know him, and yet are speaking of him as if they have lost a close family member.  I was even uncomfortable creating my own cartoon about it today, because even though I knew my newspapers would want one, I don’t like memorial tribute style editorial cartoons.  Often overly dramatic, they do seem to be widely published, however, which is why I keep doing them.

Our society has become addicted to celebrity worship and mass emotional displays on social media.  People have been talking about how Steve Jobs changed their lives, how Mac computers changed the world, how without him, they wouldn’t be who they are today.  Yes, it’s true that your life would be different had Steve Jobs not created Apple.   But if the invention of a newer, better computer hadn’t come to pass, would you somehow be less than you are today?

Now forgive this tangent, but I assure you it is relevant…

Earlier this week, I read the story of 70 year old Daniel Schechtman, a researcher at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.  Schechtman is this year’s Nobel Prize winner in the field of chemistry for his work in discovering quasicrystals.  Now, I won’t pretend for a second that I have any knowledge about his work.  I barely passed high school chemistry.

But reading about his story, I found it fascinating that Schechtman was openly ridiculed, actually vilified for his discovery when he first suggested it in 1982.  His colleagues in the science community called him a disgrace, laughed at him, and booted him out of a prestigious research group for “bringing disgrace on the team.”

It took years before his work was recognized and you don’t find much better vindication than the Nobel Prize.  But, I wonder how many of his colleagues that dismissed him as a lunatic are now telling their friends how they believed in him all along.

So, it’s not the products Steve Jobs created that I find myself thinking about today, but the person he was almost 40 years ago.

I wonder what the reaction would have been in the beginning, if a young dropout Steve Jobs had told somebody at the local Hare Krishna temple where he went for free meals, that he would one day design computers that would change the way the world works and communicates.  Somehow I don’t envision a long line of eager investors.

Makes me wonder what the neighbors and colleagues thought of the bicycle repairmen, Orville and Wilbur Wright or the apprentice printer, Ben Franklin, or a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein who had a hard time getting noticed by his boss.

Steve Jobs changed the world.  Of that, there is no doubt.  He deserves our respect and admiration for his vision and accomplisments.  But it is easy to support someone after they have achieved monumental success, because it’s a pretty comfortable bandwagon.

And no, buying a Mac in the 80’s doesn’t count.

I’d like to meet the two or three people that believed in him early on, because those people change the world, too.  They do so by encouraging the dreamers, the idealists, the ‘different thinkers,’ when everyone else dismisses them as lunatics.

What if your own neighbor, or better yet, your neighbor’s kid, told you he or she was working on an interstellar propulsion drive that would be cost effective, have no pollution, could achieve light speed travel and would run on a microscopic amount of sea water, and it’ll be ready in 20 years.    I guarantee that there are thousands of people in the world right now working on ideas and innovations that sound just that surrealistic, and you might even know one or two of them.    Would you even consider investing your savings in that idea?  Probably not, but we’d all like to go back in time and give a few thousand bucks to a couple of computer nerds toiling away in their garage, wouldn’t we?

Yes, many of those people are probably nuts, but I would wager that more than a few of them are on the cusp of greatness.

It might even be you, and if it is, I wish you luck.  Don’t give up, and don’t listen to the ridicule.  Hopefully your eventual success might inspire people to believe in their own possibilities, because we all have greatness within us.  And if you can’t find anybody to believe in you, don’t stop believing in yourself.  Because that’s what it takes to be somebody like Steve Jobs, believing in your own potential even when nobody else does.

Success is all around us, and it starts with that simple belief.  That’s the message we should take away from his passing.  And in the time between the world paying tribute to your achievements when you die, there will be years of working hard when everybody else is taking time off.  Yes, we did indeed lose a visionary in our time this week, but there are millions more all around us, maybe even a few that 20 or 30 years from now, we’ll pause a moment to pay tribute to when they pass.  It might even be you.

But of course, you won’t be around to see it.  So don’t do it for any applause or recognition.  Do it for the reason in the cartoon.

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Milestones

The past two months have been ones of reflection for me because it turns out that this is the 10th anniversary of two big events in my life.  First, my wife and I moved to Canmore from Banff in August of 2001 and we bought our first home.  And second, on September 20, 2001, The Rocky Mountain Outlook newspaper was born.  Were it not for that publication and Carol Picard, the editor and part owner, I wonder what I’d be doing today.

In 1997, I answered an ad in the Banff Crag and Canyon for an editorial cartoonist.  Figured it would be a fun weekly diversion, and for a few years, it was.  In 2001, I found out that a new upstart paper called The Rocky Mountain Outlook was in the works.  Cathy Ellis, a Crag and Canyon reporter told me quietly that she had been asked to join them and suggested they’d probably need a cartoonist.  Turns out that at that exact moment, I was having a heated disagreement with the publisher of ‘The Crag,’ so I was eager to jump ship.  After getting the gig at the Outlook, Carol asked me why I wasn’t syndicated.  Thinking I knew more than she did (which I did NOT), I said that it was pretty difficult to get signed on with a syndicate.  She waved that off and told me to do it myself, and then told me how.  The following month, I was a self-syndicated editorial cartoonist, even though I didn’t have any other newspapers yet.

Carol’s gotten a little tired of how often I’ve said ‘Thank You’ to her over the past decade.

The Outlook has been very good to me, and I’m proud to say that one of my cartoons has been in every issue since September 20, 2001.    The Outlook was started by Carol Picard, Bob Schott, and Larry Marshall and their blood, sweat and tears permeate the foundations.  Sadly, Bob and Larry passed away within months of each other in 2008, a devastating blow to everyone at the Outlook, and especially to Carol as they were all very close.  She retired from the Outlook in 2008.  Despite their absence, it is still very much the same paper, with the same staff, largely because Carol insisted upon it as a condition of the initial sale to Black Press.  It is now owned by Great West Publishing but still feels very much like the independent it once was.

The Outlook’s 10th Anniversary issue was published yesterday, along with a full colour magazine insert that reflected on the early life of this ‘little paper that could.’   The Outlook has eclipsed her competitors, who said it would fail in the first six months, and it is now the newspaper of record in the Bow Valley, while The Banff Crag and Canyon and The Canmore Leader struggle for relevance.  For you locals, read Carol’s article, “From Humble Beginnings…” in the magazine insert and you’ll realize just how much they went through to create the paper the entire valley reads every Thursday.

The magazine turned out really well.  When they were planning it, I was asked to do a large cartoon two page spread for the centerpiece, a timeline of major events over the last year.  While it looks like the whole thing is my creation, it was very much a collaborative effort.  From a number of people choosing which events to chronicle to the Outlook design team who put it all together, and most importantly to Natalie Talbot who took my cartoon scenery painting and collection of little cartoons I drew for the events, and turned it into the finished work you see here.  She did a fantastic job and in my opinion, her signature should be on it as well.

A few of the staff bugged me last night because I didn’t want to have a chronicling of my cartoons from the early days included in the magazine.  I can admit that my reasoning was purely motivated by ego.  I don’t like looking at my earlier work because I didn’t draw very well.  In retrospect, I probably should have allowed it, because showing the work I did then beside the work I do now only proves what I always say to students and fledgling artists.  If you practice and put the time in, you can’t help but get better.  Talent will only take you so far.  You only improve through hard work.

So here is the first cartoon I ever did for the Rocky Mountain Outlook on September 20, 2001, beside the one I did for the 10th anniversary issue this week, September 22, 2011.

There was a great party last night at The Cellar Door in Canmore, which then spilled over to the Iron Goat, attended by supporters, advertisers, as well as current and former staff.  A lot of laughs as we talked our way through the years.

The last ten years have been some of the best of my life, and I’m grateful for all of the opportunities that have been presented to me.  The person I was then would be pleased with where I am today, and through all of it, there was a weekly cartoon for the Outlook.

So Happy 10th Anniversary to the Rocky Mountain Outlook and I’m proud to have been a small part of her beginnings.  And because it can’t be said enough…Thanks, Carol.

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Tom Richmond

While there are many artists I admire, there are a select few whose artwork continues to inspire me and makes me want to be a better artist.  I’ll consistently tell people who ask me for career advice, to find and learn from artists whose work you like and who are better than you are.

The first part is important.  While it’s easy to find people who are better artists, if you don’t like their work, it just won’t make you want to be better by seeing it.  Consistently, I can go to artists like Drew Struzan, Neville Page, and Jason Seiler and know that I’ll find work I’m not able to do yet, but because I love their work, it inspires me to try.  Better artists will almost always have something to teach you, because hopefully by the time you’ve gotten better, so have they.

Another artist who consistently makes me green with envy (in a good way) is Tom Richmond, a very well known and popular MAD magazine and caricature artist.  I’ve been a fan of his for many years.  If you draw caricatures, and haven’t seen Tom’s work, you might want to take a look.  He’s got a great website and blog.  I especially enjoy his Sunday Mailbag posts where he answers reader questions.  Tom’s got a great reputation in the industry not only for his work, but he’s active in the community and always willing to offer helpful advice.

Recently, he mentioned that he had taken a bunch of limited edition prints of the one you see here to Comic-Con in San Diego and ended up coming back with some.  When I saw the print (shown here, with permission), I knew I was buying one.  It made me laugh out loud.  There’s just something in Tom’s style  of drawing that I’m missing in my own cartoons, some life and action I want to capture but am not quite there yet, and I knew this would inspire me to keep trying.  So it will be matted and framed and hang in my office where I can easily see it.  It’s a great print.  Still some available here, if you’re interested.

Incidentally, Tom’s long awaited book “The Mad Art of Caricature” (which I ordered this morning) is going to be released next month.  If you want to draw caricatures, there are a lot of great books out there, but without even having seen it yet, aside from sneak peeks on his blog, I have a feeling this will be at the top of the list.

Thanks, Tom!

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Second go ’round.

This is a work in progress.  Bailey is my parents’ dog, and the painting will be a late birthday present for my Mom.  This painting served as my rehearsal for the early stages of another DVD for PhotoshopCAFE, because in it, I’m painting another little dog.  At this stage, the rehearsal is over, because every painting is different and digital painting is not a step-by-step exercise.

Recorded a couple of sessions this morning, and I’m amazed at how easy it is this time around.   There are a few simple (and probably very obvious) reasons for this.

This is my second DVD.  I found the first one, Cartoon Illustration Techniques in Photoshop, to be incredibly stressful.  I’d never done a DVD before, I was learning the hardware, software, and was obsessed with making sure I included everything I possibly could for the beginner as well as keeping the experienced user interested.  That’s actually tougher than it sounds, because as in all things, once you’ve learned a skill, you often forget how to break it down to simple steps because it has become instinctual.

I took guitar lessons a couple of years ago.  My instructor is a very talented musician and excellent teacher, but every once in awhile after he showed me a particularly difficult finger picking song, he would go to break it down into a sequence and he’d have to take a few minutes to remember how he did it.  The playing of that song was so instinctual and set into sense memory that to break it down into individual chords and finger movements was tough for him to do.

That’s what it was like teaching all of steps I go through every single day when drawing editorial cartoons.  And while I’ve heard from a number of people that bought, enjoyed and learned a lot from that DVD, I’m glad I did that one first and saved the current one for second, because frankly, this one is a hell of a lot more fun.

This DVD is not for new-to-Photoshop beginners.  Anybody who wants to learn digital painting should already have a working knowledge of the software, at least for the techniques I’ll be teaching.  I don’t have to say, ‘this is how you open a document,’ or ‘this is how you create a layer.’  With the cartooning DVD, if I missed a step that I take for granted, it could really confuse someone who has never used Photoshop before.

With painting, there aren’t many ‘step by step’ lessons possible, because every painting is different and if I tried to do the same painting twice, the end result wouldn’t look the same.  With this DVD, I’m only doing one take for every session, and oddly enough, I’m fine with it.  The painting itself will take 15-20 hours.  I’m not going to redo two or three hours unless it’s absolutely required.

So this time around, I’m winging it, creating a painting from scratch, from the first brush stroke to the last.  Most of the stuff I’m talking about is whatever pops into my head based on what I’m seeing and thinking about the image in real time.  Listening to the playback of the sessions I recorded this morning, yes, I did notice a few uh’s and um’s.  Thankfully, not many as I do try to speak well on a daily basis, but nobody’s perfect.  With the last DVD, I would re-record the whole session to minimize that.  This time around, I’m leaving them in.  Because what’s also in there, which can’t be scripted, is animation in my voice, the excitement that I feel when I paint.  I love that!  Having that in there is worth a few um’s and uh’s, because I know that multiple takes would make that go away.

Recording the last DVD took a long time, kept me up nights, and was one of the most stressful things I’ve gone through in the past year.  This time around, I decided that I’m going having a good time with it.

So if you do decide to part with your hard-earned money and take a chance on hearing what I have to say and teach about digital painting, I hope it’ll be evident to you just how much I love this work, and that as a consequence, you’ll forgive a few uh’s and um’s.

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Happy Canada Day!

Coming up with new cartoons with Canadian themes each year is tough, as I’ve done a number of them.  The beaver, the flag, the food, the crowds, fireworks, troops overseas, the Parliament buildings…and while all of them are valid, iconic, or important, it’s difficult to keep it fresh each year.

When my wife and I were on vacation recently on Vancouver Island, we went on a great wildlife cruise through the Broken Islands Group out of Ucluelet.  As we were heading through the channel into open water, I spotted the CCGS Atlin Post coming up behind us.  Since we were slowly sightseeing and watching some eagles along the shore, she quickly overtook us and I was able to snap a bunch of photos, including this one.

It wasn’t until we got home that I thought this might make a good reference image for a Canada Day cartoon.  Here’s what I came up with.

A good friend of mine works as the Chief Engineer aboard the CCGS Samuel Risley which patrols the Great Lakes, an icebreaker in the winter and service vessel all year round.  He alternates between a month here at a home in the mountains and a month on the ship.  He told me he printed the cartoon and put it up around the ship, and that it was well received.  Here’s a photo he took of their MUCH bigger boat.

So, today on Canada Day, here’s to the Canadian Coast Guard and specifically to my buddy, Paul, and the crew of the Samuel Risley.  Happy Canada Day!

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West Coast Wildlife

Gray whale off of Vancouver Island – Patrick LaMontagne

My wife and I just came back from a wonderful week on Vancouver Island.  With visits to the Comox Valley, the city of Victoria, and other parts of the Island, the highlight was our trip ‘over the hump’ to Ucluelet and Tofino.

We booked a boat tour of the Broken Group Islands out of Ucluelet with Archipelago Wildlife Cruises in advance and had a great time.  I have long had a dream to see whales in the wild, specifically humpbacks, and while we didn’t get to see them breach, it was still a very thrilling experience.  Gray whales, bald eagles, seals, sea lions all made appearances, along with various water fowl.  This cruise was the best part of the whole vacation.  The owners of Archipelago are great hosts, and I wrote a lengthy 5 star review on Trip Advisor about them, which has yet to be posted.   But it’s easy to see why they’re rated the Number #1 tour on Vancouver Island.  A great couple to spend the day with, and after 5.5 hours on the boat, we definitely felt we got our money’s worth.

Humpback whale and calf in The Broken Group Islands – Patrick LaMontagne

One of the big reasons for this trip was to gather photo reference for my upcoming Totem painting series on West Coast wildlife.  Eventually I intend to paint a number of animals that call that area home, even though many of them aren’t exclusive to the west coast.  An otter, bald eagle, seal, sea lion, black bear, and a few whale species are all planned.  While it would be great to take my own photos for these, I often do better by finding photographers willing to sell or share their work for reference purposes, and I’ve been very lucky in that regard.

Bald Eagle in Tofino – Patrick LaMontagne

Even though I took many of my own photos, a few shown here, my Nikon D60 (while still a very good camera) doesn’t have the power I need to get the close-up shots I’m looking for.  One thing we found out quickly, we at least need to start looking at buying a zoom lens.  A realization I came to on this trip is that even though my skills are still limited to point-and-shoot, I’m really starting to enjoy taking photos, and I want to become a better photographer.

Bald Eagle taking off in Tofino – Patrick LaMontagne

I did come home with a couple of great sources for reference photos so the trip was a huge success, despite my own photos not measuring up for reference use.  I found that visiting the area left me feeling more inspired than ever to launch this series, and I’m eager to get painting.  I’ve got some commissions I’m currently working on, so I won’t put digital brush to canvas until October at the earliest on this series, but I’m really looking forward to it.

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And the winners are…

Ground Squirrel TotemOver the past month, I’ve been offering up a weekly prize on my Facebook page, a contest with the rather unimaginative name, Monty’s Month of May Giveaway. While there are almost 300 people who currently ‘Like’ that page, there were about 40-60 that entered the contest each week, including a number of friends and even a few family members.  This is why I had to have an impartial person make the draw each week.  I have to tell you, it was a lot of fun for me and I really want to thank those who participated.  I’ll definitely be doing this again.

The winners and their prize choices for each week were as follows…

Week 1: JAKE KODAK, small Grizzly print

Week 2: DANA McKAY, small Wolf print

Week 3: TONY DRUMM, large wolf print

Week 4: PAT WENDT, large ground squirrel print

BONUS: KEVIN LEBLANC, training dvd

Some of the comments over the month made me laugh out loud, as did the very feeble tongue-in-cheek attempts to bribe or coerce me.  My totem paintings are the most enjoyable work I’ve done to date and it’s flattering that so many of you wanted a print. In a perfect world, I would have given a print to everyone who entered, but I’m just not that wealthy…yet.

The questions I asked over the four weeks gave me food for thought.  Week 1 gave me a little insight into what you do to be creative, and as I said on the Facebook page, I agree that cooking is definitely a creative pursuit.  I’ve watched my wife experiment in the kitchen and she’s come up with some wonderful dishes with her own personal flair.  Cooking and baking is definitely NOT a skill or talent I possess, so I have a lot of respect for those who do.  I would encourage everyone to make time to be creative.  Try those artistic pursuits you might have been afraid to and just do it for the fun of it.  Nobody has to know but you.

In week 2, I wanted to know what your favorite cartoon character was, and I was surprised to see a few I’d never heard of, so I looked them up, and received a little education.  As for the rest of those listed, it was like a taking a walk through my Saturday morning childhood and I really enjoyed that.  Incidentally, Wile E. Coyote has always been my favorite.  You have to respect somebody who never gives up, no matter what life (or a Warner Brothers writer) throws at him.  I’m a big fan of Looney Tunes.

Week 3 asked you for your favorite movie character, and I love that so many of you seem to like movies as much as I do.  I must confess, however, to being shocked that nobody listed Carl Spackler from Caddyshack as their favorite movie character.  “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort?”

And finally, in Week 4, I asked which wild animal you’d like to me to paint.  Some of the animals you mentioned are already on my list, such as a beaver, sea otter, fox and cougar.  Others were welcome additions to my current list, especially the bison.  I even went as far as looking at some reference photos for that one after it was suggested, as I think that fur would be an interesting challenge.

One thing is clear, many of you want to see an African series, and I assure you, I’ll eventually get to it.  Lion, giraffe, cheetah, lemur, gorilla,…it’s a big list.  I agree with my friend Gudrun who suggested the hippo.  That leathery skin would be a challenge, and I’d like to give that a go.   Looks like I’ll be going on safari in the future, or spending more time at the Calgary Zoo.

Finally, I was able to give a DVD away to another cartoonist, and I hope that perhaps some of the things I’ve learned will contribute to his development,  just as other artists continue to contribute to my own.

Once again, thanks to all who participated.  I quite enjoyed giving these items away.  For those who didn’t win this month, thanks for being such good sports about it.  Hopefully you still had a little fun, and there’s always next time.

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A DVD in the hand

My DVD’s arrived in the mail this week, some of my promotional copies from PhotoshopCAFE.

While it seems like quite awhile ago that I finished the challenging task of recording my first training DVD, it really hasn’t been that long at all.  At the time I was working on this project, it felt like a monstrous undertaking.  In retrospect, I wouldn’t change the experience, because I can now look back on it with a great sense of accomplishment.  Holding the finished product in my hand is made all that much sweeter because of the difficulty and stress I went through recording it.  Many times during the process, I thought to myself, “there is no way I’m going to finish this, and if I do, it’s going to be an incoherent mess.”

I’m now working on my second DVD for PhotoshopCAFE, and while it will still be a challenge,  I find myself without any of the anxiety I felt while working on the first one.  Without challenges forcing you to step out of your routine, there is no growth.  Even though I already knew that, it would appear that I need to be reminded of it once in awhile.  This DVD did just that, and I’m grateful for the lesson.