Thursday, February 23, 2006

Illustration Friday - "Song"

© 2006, bafu-blog
V7 Pen sketches > digicam imports > Photoshop. Three of the rough instrument sketches were in my sketchbook for a little while now, when Illustration Friday's theme was "Jazz". If you look around for jazz-inspired artwork, you'll run across some pretty spiffy stuff. Justin Bua is one good example. Anyway, I've got the blog now so this week's theme was the chance to do something with those rough doodles.

Yes, the singer is based off of an Elvis pose. And yes, I know Elvis didn't sing jazz. But you forget, Song is the theme, not Jazz. I could have based it off of Sam Kinison and you would have been none the wiser.

Monday, February 20, 2006

Dan Brown would have us Believe...

Jeez Louise, I slept in. I still must not have shaken off the laissez-faire sleep economics of reading week. At least I can still make it to the class that starts in a couple hours and swing by the library. To assail a little time until then, here are my thoughts on the last book I read. (visual spoiler alert below)


The Da Vinci Code has recently made its way into my hands, and I must say it was a hard book to put down. Having a few Art History classes under my sordid academic belt has helped to enrich the story (finally it counts for something!). As well, I have been exposed to a lot of the novel's themes, supposed truths and shadowy societies through the net, movies and even videogames. So unlike say the average Oprah's Book Club reader, I haven't needed to google or Wikipedia anything for comprehension's sake. On a parallel, I wonder if a teary-eyed Oprah will have Dan Brown on her show to chastise him: "You LIED to us Dan Brown! It says on page..." Yeesh. Lighten up, it's in the fiction section, people. Some novels contain loose facts based on research, but the prime motive is always to tell a good story. If Brown had meant to confront head-on the subsequent flurry of Exposing Brown's Fraud documentaries and angry prayers for his damned soul by the church - he would have done away with a plotline and wrote a non-fiction book. All in all, it has been a smart and engrossing story, and I can see it further being a conduit for discussion and research. I'm looking forward to the movie. However, if Tom Hanks as Langdon makes a comment about how opening the cryptex is "like a box of chocolates", I'm out of there.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Inaugural Post

Succumbing to the awesome force of peer pressure, I’ve started a blog on blogspot. Just think: you’re sitting at your Tele-Type Machine as radio waves relay my packaged Morse Coded text message to your viewing tube – a process that takes merely 7 hours! The ramifications of this are immense, as exciting as the recent emergence of Talkies in theaters worldwide.

Really though, I’ll be using this blog to dually converse with those of you that I know and to retake the reins on the wild beast called creativity. Consider yourself warned. There will be aimless musings, pedantic language (with infinite run-on sentences) and shovelfuls of oddball humor. In addition, I hope to display a forthcoming body of illustrations & cartoons that may make their way to a website I should have made long ago. So there it is. Welcome and enjoy, or run screaming.