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August 13, 2004
Blowing off steam: The Saga of Hurricane Charley, part 4 (finale)
There was a knock at the door. Eric got out of bed (he was napping) and went to see who it was. Being someone that has the IQ of a fudgesicle when he first wakes up, he did not look out the window to see who it was first.
A big, violent-evil looking man stood there with a hunk of arcing power conduit in his hand. Charley was there.
Eric: What the!? What is this, Vietnam??
Charley: Good morning, sunshine! I found this outside. It was attached to your house.
Eric: UH!
Charley dropped the power conduit on the ground.
Charley: Bend over. I'm coming in.
(The time for joking is over. This hurricane is serious.)
Posted by Eric Chapman at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)
Blowing off steam: The Saga of Hurricane Charley, part 3
The phone rang. Against his better judgment, Eric picked up the receiver.
Eric: Hi.
Charley: Heelloman.. I juss.. I juss wan'ed ta say hii...
Eric: Okay, now what the hell is your problem?
Charley: S'no problem ociffer. I ain't been drinkin.
Eric: ... okay this is just ridiculous.
Charley: Dude! Buddy! Whassall thish.. hoshtilit-EE fer?
Eric: ... well for starters, there's a drunken hurricane giving me harassing phone calls.
Charley: Hokay!! HOO-kay-ee.. buddy.. I haff been drinkin a liddle. S'what makes me so strong, y'no.
Eric: Where the hell have you been drinking??
Charley: Out inna Gulf of Mexico. Tequila.
Eric: Yeah, great. I'm hanging up now.
Charley: NO! No you cann'go till I tell yuu whadd I called to tellyu.
Eric: I can't understand a word coming out of your mouth. Do you even have a mouth? How are you making these phone calls??
Charley: Shhhhhh shhh shhhh.. SHHH, DAMMIT!!
Eric just stared into the telephone out of disbelief.
Charley: Whadd I called to tell you, man.. is thad I love you man. Yer da greatesht. Yer my beshtest friend... inna whole worl'. I wan' you to know that. TAKE ME SERIOUSHLEE, DAMMIT! I LOVE YOU, MAN! An' I'll be getting there a liddle later tonight. We gonna have a blast!
*click*
Posted by Eric Chapman at 11:31 AM | Comments (0)
Blowing off steam: The Saga of Hurricane Charley, part 2
The phone rang.
Eric: Hello?
Voice: Hello again, peaches!
Eric: (unintelligible)
Voice: Yeah yeah, glad to hear it. How you holding up?
Eric: Er, well, the thunder and lightning is a nice touch, but
Voice: I'm not there yet.
Eric: I know. I've got the Weather Channel on television. I'm watching the poor overnight weather woman talk herself hoarse about you.
Voice: They're talking about me?
Eric: Yeah, they can't shut up about you.
Voice: Oh! Well it's nice to be noticed!
Eric: . . .
Voice: Did she sound like she liked me? Was she cute?
Eric: Er, well, she did say she had her eye on you.
Voice: Yes!
Eric: and that you were expected to intensify.
Voice: Dude! That is so right! I.. uh.. I'm intensifying a little right now. Was she blond?
Eric: Yep.
Voice: Oooh yeah..
Eric: Alright, that's enough.
Voice: Huh?
Eric: Why me? Early in my life I didn't appreciate the great outdoors but I've grown into a person who reveres nature as something sacred. I pay attention to environmental issues, I'm careful about how I dispose of my solvents when I paint so they don't get into the water supply, and I vote Democratic in most elections despite considering myself an independent.
Voice: Like that matters.
Eric: So why me?
Voice: When was the last time you turned off your computer, fucko? That power has to come from somewhere.
Eric: Er.
Voice: Right. Now, back to the blond. Was she hot?
Eric: Alright, That's it. I'm done with this. I refuse to sit here talking on the phone to a horny personification of a major weather event that's approaching my area. Especially one that got its name from the mascot of a can of tuna fish.
Charley: ARRRRRGH!!! You are SO getting it! *click*
Posted by Eric Chapman at 04:26 AM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2004
Blowing off steam: The Saga of Hurricane Charley, part 1
*ring*
Eric: Hello?
Voice: Yeah, hi bitch. How ya doin'?
Eric: . . . . uhhhh
Voice: Careful, don't want to blow a neuron. You're so proud of those.
Eric: Who the hell is this?
Voice: You know who it is bitch. Look out the window.
Eric: Yeah right.
Voice: Oh?
Eric: Yeah right, man, I'm not falling for this.
Voice: This isn't a joke, meatball. Look outside.
Eric: Heh. Whatever. Okay. Fine. Going to look.
Eric checks first to make sure there are no sniper laser-sight dots hitting the window first, of course.
Eric: Yeah, see? Nothing out there but clouds and sky. You're full of--
Voice: Do not mock me. You've been asking for this for a while.
Eric: Who is this?
Voice: Is it windy outside?
Eric: ... a little..
Voice: Yeah, bitch. 'Cause I'm not there yet.
Eric: *silence*
Voice: Still don't get it, huh?
Eric: No...
Voice: Go out and look at your car, moron. *click*
Eric went outside, stared at the back of his car, not sure what he was supposed to see. Something about the fictional Cape Cod Tunnel he had an exclusive permit for? No.. that can't be it.. wait. There it is.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2004
Site launched!
HAHA! Finally I've gotten my professional art website launched. No longer will people be redirected to this blog when they go to http://www.ericchapman.net
... though the link to come here from there is present.
It's not done yet. I have more art to add, and I want to give it an honest-to-goodness contact info page, rather than just a mailto link, but still. It's there. Go look.
An update to this blog's design is forthcoming. As are parts 2 and 3 of Travelling Backwards Through Time. I was waiting for the site to be finished before posting part 2, as it will mention some of the art on the website.
Er, one thing about the website. It'll load really slow on dialup connections. I designed it figuring that my target audience will have a better-than-dialup connection, so I really let loose with the graphics. I'm sorry if that means it takes too long for you.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 08:43 PM | Comments (2)
August 08, 2004
Biography - The Director's Cut
I spent all night writing and trimming, writing and trimming, and putting together an utterly goofball version of my life to post as a biography on my professional website. If I hadn't done all that trimming, it would've been about five times this length. After completing this thing, I looked at it, pleased with its cleverness and humor.. and had doubts as to whether it's what people want to see when they look at the biography page on a professional artist's website.
I looked around at a bunch of other creative types' websites to see how they handle it. Unanimously they're very serious and succinct, even the ones belonging to bigger goofballs than I. Brevity, as I was taught in scriptwriting class, is a virtue. Often times, humor is a smoke screen. I realized that in this bio, I was making alot of funny but not really telling much about myself as an artist. So I scrapped the funny and went for real. The funny will remain here, because I like it, with a hidden link on the bio page that directs you to this spot here.
I hope that, if you found this through that link, you'll find it amusing, and maybe you'll have a use for my humorous side.
* * *
The following story is slightly true. The events have been changed to protect the innocent. . . from boredom.
Eric Chapman occurred in the great and strangely-shaped state of Massachusetts, a state historically significant as the spot where a crazy person rode around on a horse at midnight, yelling at people how many arms he had. Eric was always a creative sort, drawing things before he knew how to say them, and spent much of his time before his record-breaking growth spurt finding fun new ways to damn near kill himself. There was at-home, summertime bobsledding, a sport involving a set of stairs and just about anything flat. It was first attempted with steep back porch stairs and an old mattress his parents were about to throw out, and was awarded his first broken bone for this triumph. It is said that this was the original inspiration for the X-games. Other innovations involved flight training by repeatedly driving his bike head-on into a hole in his yard, stopping the bike cold and launching him into the great blue yonder. “Cast-Iron Pursuit” was a game that required nothing but frying pans, a best friend, a house devoid of parents for a few hours, a good dose of overconfidence applied to the notion that complicated aerial ninja maneuvers aren't that hard, and a trip to the hospital the next day when the parents notice you're unable to walk on your feet due to a broken bone in your foot.
Eric's father developed a case of Spatial Attention Deficit Disorder and the family moved 4 times in the space of 2 years, starting in his home town of Hyannis, Massachusetts; hitting Florida, New Jersey, and North Carolina before finally coming to a stop once again in his home town of Hyannis, Massachusetts. As none of those houses were very good as a full-contact obstacle course, Eric devoted his pent up creativity fully into drawing, thus saving his own life.
In high school, Eric somehow managed to graduate with a little over half of his credits from art classes, including 4 years of Fine Arts, 3 years of Cartooning and Animation, and one year each of Drawing, Sculpture, and Graphic Design. This is no small feat, as there are some schools in Massachusetts with no art or music classes of any kind, and yet his High School's art program was rated 51st in the nation at the time. Wanting to go to art school, he began to search high and low for a means to pay for it, as his family was not the wealthy sort, and had just sold their last cow to a shady man for what he claimed were magic beans (which on closer inspection were revealed to be licorice). By this point, Eric had become a giant physically, and he thought he had it made when he was contacted by Japan. They were quite worried, as Godzilla had just said something nasty about their mother and was making threatening hand gestures at them. When Eric demanded First-Class accommodations on the flight overseas to fight the beast, however, they decided they'd just throw the giant moth at it again, and Eric was forced to take smaller paying jobs locally for four years before he'd finally get the loans he'd need to attend college.
He applied and was accepted to Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL, majoring in Illustration. While there he was featured in the school's Best of Ringling exhibition two years in a row, was published in CMYK and Sarasota Magazine, and was awarded a first-of-its-kind internship at the Boston Herald newspaper, in their editorial art department. While at the Boston Herald, he designed a set of 68 weather icons depicting the common conditions of Boston throughout the year, featuring well-known landmarks in the background, to appear on the front page every day until a recent redesign removed weather from the front page entirely. He graduated in 2004 from Ringling with a GPA of 3.26, and now resides in Englewood, Florida, roughly 40 miles south of Sarasota.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)