February - The Photo Sabbatical

Hey people...I will try not to make this post 10 pages long but we'll see how it goes.

From February to March is always my least favorite time of the year. The weather is awful, bleak and cold... nobody's outside unless we have a freak heat wave and it goes up to 60... it rains and snows a lot...but not enough to really do anything fun and wintery.

And to top all that off...no reenacting for another 2 months. Ugh. I might just die.

I think they named March for a reason. To me it always felt like a long, grueling death march through the mud. After a shortened month like February, March seems to go on forever until I just can't take it anymore.

Well... if you know anything about me, I don't like just sitting on my butt indoors. There are some people who work forty hours a week, come home at the end of a 9 hour shift, smoke a pack of cigs and fall asleep in front of the TV, and that's their entire life for 40 or 50 years until they die or retire, whichever comes first. I couldn't live like that.

I am constantly in motion. I feel like a sinner being inside on a warm sunny day. There is a freaking ginormous world out there, and most of us have seen close to zero percent of it.

In fact, there is so much history, neat-o Victorian architecture and lovely parks packed into this tiny state of Delaware that I wouldn't ever want to live anywhere else.

Those out-of-staters who are all like "Yawn...Delaware is boring" or "What's in Delaware?" are like people who say they hate something without ever experiencing it. Like people who hate Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Have you ever seen the movies or read the books? No? Not even the trailers? ...I thought so. Anyway...

The surest sign you have never visited my state is if you think it's a boring state. Here's the proof.

All these amazing pictures I am about to post are taken in New Castle County. Every so often, I get overwhelmed by my surroundings at home and I need to get away, go on a "holiday" like Bilbo Baggins. I wander off into the woods alone, try to stay out as long as possible and leave my cell phone in the car or turned off in my pocket. This month was chiefly a "plugs out" month. So, sorry if I have been incommunicado.

I have a tremendous backlog of art projects to create inside my head (going back at least 4 or 5 years--no joke) and the hardest thing for me to do is slow down, and try to push them out one at a time. My ADHD brain seems to want to work on all of them at once. I am crazy at multitasking. Like right now, I am watching a movie, reading snatches of a book, trying to write a short story and listen to music, all while writing this blog post. I need to keep busy all the time, or I feel like I'm dying. I know, it's terrible.

So...without further ado...here are the highlights from my February adventure.

Outing #1: Brandywine City Park

The beginning part of February was very damp, rainy and foggy. I spent an entire day outside taking pictures of how creepy looking everything was. Some of these scenes look they are straight out of Silent Hill. This is Brandywine Park, a nice place to go in the city of Wilmington. It dates from around the 1880s-1890s, and the place is literally so huge and interesting, you can go there fifty times a year and wander around for 3 or 4 hours and not see everything. Even the tiniest details are really awesome, and there are all sorts of hidden nooks and secret areas to explore off the beaten path.

This old fountain looks super creepy sometimes when you get up close to it. It was once made of marble, and it's been so weathered by pollution and the elements that the people have no faces. Still, it has a sort of decayed and crumbling elegance to it...an ugly beauty. This part of the park makes me feel like I am in Paris around the turn of the last century.

A carved inscription all around the base of this fountain says the following anonymous quote that I really like:

"Art builds on sand, the works of pride and human passion change and fall but that which lives the life of God with Him surviveth all"

  This park has so many different things in it.  It's got an old mill race from a grist mill that was here all the way back in 1640 and long since vanished. There are railroad tracks in this park that start nowhere and lead nowhere. There's a fountain and a willow tree promenade. There are spots with markers that show what the site looked like 120 years ago.  There are trees so huge they look like they're from the Colonial times, covered with carved names and initials that go back to before the Civil War.  There's an abandoned cabin deep in the woods. There is even a zoo in the park with llamas. Yes, you heard me...llamas.

The ghost railroad.  I think this was originally linked to the Wilmington & Western,
or the Frenchtown railroad in New Castle. Now it starts and ends nowhere.

The Bridge to Terabithia.

Interstate 95 goes over part of this park. You can walk underneath it. The flyover is so wide that it's like a desert beneath; it never rains or snows and there's no life under there.  You can walk really far back off the path and take this view under it.

I think every photographer in Delaware has taken this picture at least once.

Here is a French style rose garden. It's all cut down and dead now, but in the summer it makes a nice romantic
spot to go for a stroll or have a picnic with somebody special.  It was planted in tribute to Delaware's Dutch (real Dutch from Holland, not hillbilly Germans) and Swedish and English Quakers who settled here.

It was at this park that I took amazing photos of a Great Blue Heron in 2011.  The Blue Heron is a very large, crane like bird with really long legs, a long neck and a needle sharp beak that frequents the marshy areas of northern Delaware. He still fishes in the river, I do catch a glimpse of him occasionally. He's tricky to photograph, he sees you from like 150 yards away and won't let you get close. As long as there is water still moving and the Brandywine isn't iced over, you'll see him gliding up and down it like he owns the place. I have never seen a female heron before, he seems to be a loner... like me.

Okay, so leaving Brandywine Park after a rainstorm and it's time to head home. On the way when I was near the Blue Ball Barn (now a State Parks headquarters) I took this amazing sunset.



Outing #2: Lums Pond State Park (Bear DE)

The next time I went out, I drove 25 miles downstate to Lums Pond, outside a town halfway between Wilmington and Dover called Bear.  There are no bears in Delaware.

Lums Pond is a very large wildlife preserve area and state park where you can do lots of things in the tourism season.  You can ride your bike, go hiking, rent a canoe, rowboat or paddleboat for like 6 dollars or run the Life Course (a fitness trail with different stops where you can climb on monkey bars or do pull-ups or sit-ups, etc.)

Tranquility.

And...you can apparently go zip lining now. They built stuff in the trees and you can slide down a long cable across the river. It looks like loads of fun but it's closed until spring. Sigh...

Haha. Yeah right.

You mean no ice fishing.

I didn't see a soul out there. I had the whole damn place to myself that day, but there wasn't much to do. But I did get some other neat little things I bet anyone else would just walk by and not even look at.  I am also fascinated by the world of the very small, like this tiny bird's nest that would barely hold a chickadee.

Oh hello there. 

Lums Pond was mostly dead.  So from there I drove a little ways further into Elkton, Maryland, and then to Fair Hill NRMA (national resource management area).  This is another very big place and it reminds me a lot of Ridley Creek where Stephanie lives.  I couldn't remember where the entrance to this place was, I drove around aimlessly until I found it, and my GPS was no help. It kept telling me to go off road. Sorry I don't have a Jeep.

Fair Hill Trails, Elkton MD

A covered bridge near the parking area.

A swiftly flowing creek. The water was ice cold.

A raccoon out fishing in broad daylight. How strange. I didn't get very close to him, this is through my Dad's old 400mm.

White Clay Creek. Newark DE:

It was here I got a text from some old friends in Newark asking if I wanted to hang out and go see the Lego movie. The movie was at 8pm and it was around 4pm when I got the message. So with 4 hours to kill, I drove back up near Newark and checked out another place I always meant to go see called White Clay Creek.  This park is a big, wide open valley with a tiny creek running through it. Might be a nice place to have a picnic or fly my stunt kite. Yes, I own a stunt kite. Bought it at the beach one year and still haven't really taught myself how to fly it.

Someone left this mysterious collection of stones in the parking lot. It looks like a scorpion. Some mysteries will never be solved.

I hung around until sunset and took this really neat shot reflected off the roof of my car. doesn't it look like a lake in the mist?





I know spring will be here soon, but not soon enough. Every day feels like a month. I really wish I could fast forward through March, and then I can join my reenacting buddies again. I miss the warmth, the sunburns, the heat stroke and sweating my skin off. Enough of this Polar Vortex crap.  Enough! 

The purpose of this whole journey was to clear my head, get away from Facebook and Youtube and practice photo-taking.  But I think the REAL purpose of this oddyssey was to scout out potential locations for future photo shoots and nice places to go with a date.  I cannot wait to come back and visit all these spots again in the spring. It will be awesome.

I got a somewhat decent paying job now, I don't feel quite so crazy and desperate and hopeless.  I have a very special person in my life who is my romantic partner as well as my best friend ever.  I have regular use of my car again, and I'm almost completely done collecting gear for both Civil War and World War 2 reenacting.  And, me and my S.O. have even started to draw up a business plan to make money doing the things I love and went to school for. 

Jeff...this is your time. 2014 is going to be the first year of the rest of my life, and possibly the best one or at least better than the last 6 or 7 years past.  I am so relieved that for once, I won't have to make it alone. 

Thanks for reading and I'll see ya next time!

I think here would be a good place to stop.  I will continue this adventure in the next post.

Week of Feb 14-21

Friday February 21:  One of the most colorful sunsets I've taken. Just half an hour ago.

...And a long overdue poster, created in Adobe Illustrator, in tribute to the end of an era.




Also, from a photo taken on the 4th of July 2 years ago.  This is the reason why I love Delaware...people like the character shown below.

I actually have this enormous back catalog of stuff inside my head; unmade projects that were never completed, some of them never started. They tend to go back a few years. So right now, I'm currently making stuff I dreamed up three years ago but never got down on paper.

Blog Party Post #2: A Productive Snow Day. Who Knew.

I guess I am weird because I usually hate snow days. I can't go anywhere due to unsafe roads, sometimes we lose power, and everything everywhere is closed, and I get cheated out of another fifty bucks from my paycheck.  With all the snow days we've had so far and winter only half over, I think this is gonna be a skinny year salary-wise. I hope I'll have enough to even pay my taxes. :(

Anyway, I decided not to let this day go to waste, after almost a solid two months of procrastination. I went nuts today creating stuff, just trying to get ideas out of my head and finish up old projects.

Wednesday February 12:

This is a Minipacker machine. It automatically inflates a special kind of bubble wrap which is reusable. We got this at work to replace the old bubble wrap and the annoying foam peanuts. Welcome to the future of packing.

Like my shark face I drew on my car's salty grime with my finger? I also drew flames on the hood. Don't ask, just accept my awesome.

February 13: 

Whoa what a day.  I woke up at 3:00 AM to the sound of the house being blasted by what sounded like pebble-sized hail. When I go downstairs for breakfast at 8:00 after passing out from exhaustion and hunger...I find we have almost 2 feet of snow on the ground with plow drifts as high as 3-4 feet.  Dad eventually convinces me to go out and shovel a few cubic tons of snow.


Then I decided to help my Mom bake some cookies, because I'm still awesome like that.  We used an old Land O'Lakes cookbook from 1981 that my Mom used to make lots of tasty stuff from when I was a kid.  I did all this myself, she only helped me find the ingredients and supervised me.  I made coconut almond spice cookies and some orange glazed honey cookies (not pictured) Altogether it's loaded with sugar and really indulgent, as all cookies should be.  Then I heated up a pot of chicken soup to heat myself up before going out to shovel.

Hours later, I came back in and suddenly my creative brain went nuts.  herte's all the stuff I completed or worked on today:

1. Stenciled an army barracks bag to use for a change of clothes or carrying a neatly folded dress uniform at events like Fort Miles. I decided to adopt my grandpa's name and serial number as a sort of WWII 'persona'. The guys at events call me "Mel" instead of Jeff, it really helps me get into the time period and into his character.  Maybe someday I will try a first person impression at an event.

 
2.  Then, I busted out all my acrylic paints and worked some more on this leather pilot jacket, decorating it to look like one of the Flying Tigers. (P-40 pilots who were sent overseas with the Chinese air force to combat the Japanese air force, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and before our direct involvement in the war.  Legend has it that ancient Japanese pearl divers were mortally afraid of sharks, and when the Japs saw these snarling faces painted on our airplanes, they likely reconsidered their career choice.

All the details and lettering on this flight jacket is hand painted from visual references. I tried to come up with my own design rather than exactly reproduce one from the actual squadron. The Flying Tigers are one of my favorite stories of the Second World War, and they are second only to the Tuskegee Airmen in popularity.

3. And...still not satisfied...I finally gave myself a kick in the butt and started sketching concept art for the Lost Innocence Saga.  My first character sketch: the continental soldier from my creepy Valley Forge story I wrote in winter 2012.

Meet Jacob Ambrose, my fictional Revolutionary War soldier.

I'm actually excited now. I can't wait to come up with more visuals for the amazing characters of my epic story, of heroes spanning the history of warfare.

4. Oh yeah...one last thing. I updated two of my blogs. Check these out and feel free to subscribe if you have interest.  I have already put in 4 years of painstaking work and research about my family's military heritage, which become more exciting and more colorful the deeper I delve into it.

Grandpa's Navy

Dispatches From Company Q

It's late and my head is still exploding with ideas. But I guess I can safely say --for once-- that my day wasn't wasted. It really is possible to churn out this much art in one day, I proved to myself I can do it.

And it looks like tomorrow might be another snow day. I can't wait to see what I'll create with all this free time now that my artistic brain has finally reawakened. :)

Time to go meditate, watch a movie, ruminate or just vegetate. I think I've earned it.

7-08-2011. The end of an era.

 

Created with Adobe Illustrator

Political Art Poster: Anti War

Alright, first... how many of you have seen this photo?

This was taken either by an airplane or a news helicopter over the road leading to Tiananmen Square, Beijing China 1989.  There is clearly an unidentified man with his back turned to the camera, standing in the path of four Communist tanks. He appears dressed in business attire and is unarmed. he holds a shopping bag and a hat.

A magnification of the same image.

This iconic and frightening image was broadcast all over Chinese news and leaked out to the press, and the heroic faceoff of 'Tank Man' went down in history.  This is one of those rare photojournalist images that tells a powerful story, of unarmed civilians rising up against an armed despotic government.  It's come to symbolize peace and the anti-war movement, as well as signify the slaughter of so many innocent civilians on that day.

I remembered this photo, having seen it before, and last night I came up with this poster about it.

...And here was my reference material and the type of Russian tank that appears in the famous picture.

Vector artwork poster - 17 years in the making

This whole thing started with an exercise in one-point perspective I had to draw for my 8th grade art class....in 1997.  I was 12 or 13 when I drew this in colored pencil.

Then, a full decade later, I brought my art into the new millennium with a computer vectorization...with nice crisp lines and clean gradients.

...then in January 2014 I started playing with colors. I added some cool space-age laser beams and went for a warm vs. cool color scheme. I always liked the interplay of warm oranges against cool blues.

...Then, finally, I settled on a unified color scheme and made this TRON-esque tour de force in geometry, which I finally settled on a name for...

"Convergence."  Adobe Illustrator vector drawing, 2014.

Written alphabet for my fantasy book trilogy

January 2014 Blog Party - 1-27-14 Post

I'm sick... sick as a dog.  I called off work today and did almost nothing except lay around coughing my lungs up. Except I did take this one photo of the spectacular "layered" sunset this evening.

We've had snow on the ground on and off all month, but I only got to go out in it once, and it will probably be gone again before I feel strong enough to leave the house.

I'm afraid this month has already gone by and I barely started. Sorry.  :/

Maybe February will have to be my journal month instead.

Yeah. Lazy bum.

Mashup: Zippity-Doo-Dah featuring Trolololo Guy

This is what comes out of Jeff's brain when he forgets his medication and doesn't sleep for two days.

January 2014 Blog Party, 1-11-14 entry

Happy 2014 Blog Party to all you invisible readers!

This was a thing started by my best friend and creative partner Stephanie Ann on her World Turn'd Upside Down blog.  How it works is you keep a visual "diary" or an online sketchbook of writings, photographs and artwork as much as possible during a one-month period and share it with your "bloggies" (blog buddies). This turns the internet from an anonymous networking tool into an insight into your life, outside of your blogging.  I'm doing mine on my new artsy blog since it was intended for this kind of stuff, unlike my Dispatches from Company Q blog which is strictly 1860's and Civil War reenacting.

I actually do other things, you know....although I'm afraid I am an even bigger dork in real life.

Today, as I'm typing this entry...I'm sick. And it sucks, for 5 big reasons:

1. It's very cold out and we have lots of snow. And I wanted to go out in it.
2. I still want to go to work tomorrow regardless.
3. I'm afraid this will screw me out of another day of volunteering at my new job.
4. Being sick doesn't bother me as much as being unable to do anything I want and gow here I want.
5. I miss my BFF and I could really use a hug.

 Oh...I never told you gals/fellas:  I got a new volunteering job! As a tour guide.  I'll give you the juicy details of this new gig as I start my blog diary.

Saturday: January 11, 2014

 Fog. The creepiest, coolest, most Gothic-looking fog ever.  Though it was probably foolish to do so, I ventured out in it because I had to take these photos.

...As I roamed around I thought: "Hey, today would be great for a creepy Gothic photo shoot."  So I began to look for anything that appeared decaying, crumbled or ornately decorated.

...And I found myself at Rockwood mansion (An historic estate on Shipley Road very close to where I live)  It looked absolutely awesome in the fog.  But right as I was about to start shooting, it started to POUR. And the place began to flood. Being the only high ground in the area (as Delaware is very flat,) I moved my car to the upper parking lot and made a mad dash for the imposing Victorian Gothic mansion at the top of the hill. I found it was open. 

So I knocked on the door, holding my wool jacket above my head as I got dumped on, my hair dripping...and a short, hunched over figure opened the door and said in a raspy voice: "Come in."

Sounds like a horror movie, right?  Well it wasn't.

I was standing in the anteroom of a lavishly-decorated, beautiful Victorian house I once liked to visit as a small boy and had completely forgotten existed. My parents had sent me on a summer camp there when I was eight or nine....about 1993/1994.  This was literally the first time I had set foot in this house in 20 years. As I gazed around me at the rich oriental carpets, the intricate bronze candle sconces, the satin damask wallpaper and the crystal gas chandelier above my head, I was filled with a childlike wonder as I instantly was 9 years old again.  The hunched, Quasimodo-like figure turned out to be a very nice elderly woman with a charming Old Southern accent, dressed in some rich Victorian-era fashion. She offered me a tour of the house.

I won't give too much away....but this is a tiny glimpse of it.

The more of the house we explored, the more of it came back to me from all those years ago. I started giving her a tour of the mansion. I was identifying objects in the house and explaining details she had never even noticed.  She was stunned at my knowledge of the mid to late 1800's, and I explained my Civil War reenacting.  Well, by the end of the tour, she had me meet the volunteer coordinator of Rockwood estate who promptly offered me a job as a docent!

Later in that day, I also went to the Boothwyn Farmer's Market and found two things I had been really sewarching for to complete my WWII GI infantry kit: a bayonet/knife and an M-43 entrenching tool with a canvas cover.


All three items total cost me 40 bucks. If I bought these all authentic reproductions, it would cost me over 200 dollars.

 The M8A1 Combat knife. This is the WWII grandfather of the "KA-BAR." The blade was a bit corroded and the handgrip was dried out, but some application of Neatsfoot oil and #0000 steel wool had it looking good as new. This could be clipped to the web belt or tucked into a boot.

 And my M-1928 Haversack I ordered from At The Front finally came in the mail!
I think it's the most ridiculously complicated packing system ever devised, but it's what the soldiers carried. It took me over 2 hours to figure out how to pack it.

...All in all, I'd say this day was a win.  I found a new job, almost completed my WWII reenacting kit, and took awesome pictures!

Tune in next time for my next adventure, this was only January 11th....

Why I Suck At Programming

This blog topic was triggered by a discussion I was having with one of my friends who is trying to learn website programming. I think it's a sad fact that as of about 10 years ago, suddenly all graphic designers have to be web developers. 

The Rise of Flash

This was a gradual industry shift that occurred in the midst of my education; between the time I entered high school and when I graduated from college.  It was in the early years of the last decade, I think somewhere around 2001-2003 or so (still can't believe that 2003 was a full decade ago. I am in denial of how old I'm getting)  When websites started to evolve from the static, text- and image-based pages to the colorful, interactive and media-integrated miracles we see today. 

All this started in 1998 when the FutureSplash company created "Flash," which was later bought out by Macromedia. It was a new standard in animation that didn't rely on the simple frame-by-frame graphics, like the animated GIF. (And for any of you that still use Myspace...I'm sorry. Animated GIFs are butt-ugly and a relic of the 20th century. Sparkly names and hopping bunny rabbits aren't glamorous, they're annoying and distracting.)

Using Flash, instead of drawing out an animation frame by frame and pixel by pixel, you could draw an object in its beginning and ending state, and use a "tween" animation created by specific programming language called Actionscript to tell the object what to do. This is the basis for all modern websites.

In the beginning, Flash was limited in application, and Flash objects were inserted into a page like images. Now it's possible to create an entire website structure in Flash, with trippy animations and fun little cartoony effects.  An entire subculture has sprung up around Flash-created cartoons on the internet, because *supposedly* it makes animation easier than it has ever been before.

Example: The staple of our internet youth: Nyancat.

Well, I beg to differ.

Why Programming is Not My Friend

I for one, absolutely hate flash.  I think by some miracle, they managed to invent something less intuitive than HTML coding.  I tried to learn both HTML and Actionscript in school, and I failed miserably.  Part of this could be my learning disability. I have very poor math skills, and IQ tests also determined I am bad at coding. The simple "1-2-3/A-B-C" code we learn in grade school was almost too much for me to wrap my head around.  (By that code I mean A=1, B=2, C=3, etc)

I am not a math-oriented person.  Numbers and complex equations make me want to cry. If you gave me a printed page of HTML code or Javascript, I'd probably look at it as if it was written in Klingon, or some occult language from an ancient Necronomicon written by an evil dark wizard. It looks like pure gibberish to me, and the more I try to understand it the more stubbornly my brain rejects it.  I mean, look at the title I chose for this webpage. I Think In Pictures. Not in abstract numbers and formulas, thank you very little.

The sheer amount of work involved in coding simple animations is staggering.  An entire paragraph of Actionscript will yield little more than a red rectangle that moves back and forth across the screen, turns purple and quacks like a duck when you click on it.

That was what they taught me in school.  A button that quacks. Why I would ever want to make a color-changing quack button is beyond me.

And HTML is also the bane of my existence.

I managed to learn some basic HTML by reverse-engineering other websites. By that I mean going to a webpage, clicking on "view source" and seeing all the pages of code sprawling across the screen. After many hours of careful experimentation, I discovered that by tweaking numbers in certain variables, and removing certain tags in critical locations, I could take a beautifully functioning website and turn it into a glitchy, jumbled nightmare of broken links, missing image placeholders and 404 errors.  Not unlike my first portfolio webpage! (Wish I was joking but I'm not.)

I had one web-dev teacher who described the HTML side of Dreamweaver as the "Rosie O'Donnell" side. The one that's working in the background, but not to pretty to look at and hopefully able to be ignored as long as it's doing its job.  It's like the guts inside of our bodies. They're squishy, slimy and gross, but as long as they do what they need to do, we can go on living without knowing what lies beneath our skin.

Looking at Flash is sort of like looking at boobs. Boobs are wonderful and perfect, beautiful to look at and fun to play with. They're round, bouncy, jiggly and gravity-defying. While scripting is like the yucky insides. The bloated sacs of fat, pulsing blood vessels and water-filled silicon implants underneath the surface that we don't need or want to know about. It's the skeleton in the closet.

Programming code is not pretty.  And they won't let you get your Graphic Design Bachelor's Degree of Useless Nonpaying Liberal Arts(TM) without it.

With all the software innovations we have today, why is coding even necessary for putting together a basic webpage?  Can't we just "drag and drop" predetermined snippets of code into our pages and draw the shapes with invisible arrows telling them where we want them to go? Or corner handles on boxes to let us resize a table or section to anything we want?  Adobe Illustrator can do that.  If Dreamweaver is capable of doing that, nobody taught me how to use it that way. 

Every course I try to take in Dreamweaver; every book I read about it makes it sound like all those buttons and menus are just for show.  And people still make webpages in a text editor and paste it into a browser like they've been doing since 1994. It's like "Here, son... we'll let you get your driver's license. But first, help me put your car together with these complicated instructions and exploded parts diagrams written in Japanese..."