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January 24, 2005

Finally.. he updates.

Hello from the ice planet Hoth, though on just about all maps I've managed to find for the place, it's been grossly mislabeled as Bloomington, Illinois.

It's, uh... pretty fuggin' cold outside. Not the worst it's been since I got here, mind you. Right now we're at a toasty 21 degrees Fahrenheit. About a month or so back we were down to about 6 below zero, and it was windy on top of that. My tales of this Yeti's paradise prompted my parents to buy me a functional winter jacket (black leather of course, because I must look like a mafia hitman at all times) and nice thick wool gloves.

A week and a half later, the temperature was in the 60s. Naturally. But that's okay, about 12 hours after the temperature was 67 degrees, it had dropped to 6 and central Illinois was hit with a major ice storm. No lie, everything not sheltered somehow ended up with a solid coating of ice on it. The grass outside my apartment was no longer grass, it was a field of thousands of glittering green icicles pointing at the sky. It crunched like soft glass under my feet.

Paved surfaces were probably the slipperiest I've ever seen. Usually this means doom for me, but I have these attachments for my feet that are so mean and so pointy, that if I tried to get on an airplane with them, they'd look at my personal information, see that I'm a major Bush critic, grab me by the throat and haul me off for an interrogation that involves little clothing and an amazing, impersonal and wholly unwanted journey of internal discovery. This, because y'know, it's so hard to tell a democratic-leaning artist who's terrified of breaking legs and destroying knees on ice from a crazed religious fanatic determined to kill as many innocent people as possible to make a point. But I'm not here to talk about how much the President and I are alike, I'm here to talk about my new place of residence.

I work at a newspaper, called the Pantagraph. It's that one that I mentioned offering me a job in my last post. So I guess now you know I got it. Funny thing is that 2 days after getting back from my interview in Illinois, a place in Ocala, Fla. contacted me for a similar interview for a similar position. While, I would've rather stayed in Florida, the pay they would've offered me would've been the same as what I'm getting here in Illinois, but the cost of living there is twice as high as it is here. Add the fact that the Pantagraph wanted me specifically because I am an artist who can draw, and the place in Ocala wanted me to be a page layout guy for their newspaper and magazine, and any illustrations that I'd do for them might be months in between. They were talking about having them at least once a week in Illinois, so, being an illustrator with bills to pay and a desire to do what I'm GOOD at, I took the Illinois job.

And thus I went through the looking glass.. right about the same time I crossed the time line from Eastern to Central time zones. I call it the looking glass because my situation almost completely inversed in the process.

Before: I lived with my parents, in a house full of animals and also the smell of animals. My room was cramped because of the stuff in it: a king size bed that came with the house when my parents bought it (think about 75% of the floorspace gone already), my drawing table (also big), a computer desk (with computer on it), and a whole mess of boxes filled with stuff some of which was mine some of which wasn't. I had the same amount of walkable floorspace as I did in my freshman year dorm room. I was unemployed and SO broke it hurt. All my gas was paid for by other people. I couldn't buy anything I wanted, so I just went without. The only time I spent money was on the weekend, and then it was only for food and gas so that I could go see my friends and get a bite to eat. Money for this came from my parents, and begging for it every week was emotionally catastrophic. I do not like being a leech. It kind of destroys my feeling of self worth. Florida cops all of a sudden decided that I was their new soccer ball, and I was stopped about 4 times in the space of 2 months, a little of which was deserved, but I'd been doing nothing different than I had in the four years in Florida prior to that. This further strained the money situation and made it more difficult to do my weekend drives to hang out with my friends, which were 45 minutes to an hour and a half away, depending on which weekend we're talking about.

Now: I'm being paid enough money to pay my bills and have a decent amount of disposable income left over. I have a 2 bedroom apartment to myself. If you know the Ringling dorms, think Bayou village apartment, chop off one bathroom and two bedrooms off the side of it, but make the bathroom and bedrooms that remain about 50% bigger. Kitchen and living room are practically the same, but thankfully they are not painted cold white. The furniture is my own. I have that all to myself. I live alone. Very alone. I have no friends here. I never go out. I have no human contact outside of the workplace. I don't even have a pet at home to keep me company. I can't get one either, because they're forbidden in my lease. I've had car problems ever since I got here so driving at all is tricky. Currently the problem is that my turn signal lever broke, which I can compensate for with a screwdriver but the windshield wipers are stuck on in the lowest possible setting, which is annoying as hell when it's dry and completely inadequate when it's raining or snowing. Despite being financially viable for the first time in my life, I am utterly miserable because now I have nobody. I was lonely and occasionally despondent about my social life before, but now I don't even have one, period.

I can't even go out by myself half the time: every time I try to, it rains or snows, then freezes, and I just don't want to deal with the ice, even if being unable to see thanks to windshield wipers not working wasn't an issue.

Florida: too hot.
Illinois: too cold.
Situation: totally inverse.

So. To all those in Florida, I miss you. Painfully.

On the other hand, now, in Illinois, I'm drawing. I'm doing my art thing. I wasn't doing that in Florida.

The illustration work I've been doing at work has been great. And, because I know people out there are sure to be really curious about it, and I haven't had time to put stuff up on my portfolio website yet, here's the work I've done. Enjoy, and leave comments. Please. I'm dying for some friendly words, here.

Pictures are in the 'Continue" link below

All of the following were done in Photoshop 7.0 with a Wacom tablet on an old and twitchy Mac G3
In the order that I did them . . .

Published sometime in mid November, not sure the exact date.
This ended up getting pushed back so it wasn't published untill after the next two illustrations. It was for an article about how marketeers are invading people's privacy and collecting personal information on people before they're even born.

Published on November 14th, 2004
This was my first Viewpoint cover. Viewpoint is the name of the large Opinion section that we run on Fridays. It features a column by the Editorial editor, a tall man named Bill Wills, a vitriolic column by Kurt Erickson who apparently holds no political bias to keep him from attacking whoever is in office, and then the Pro vs. Con piece in the center, where an issue is brought up and two people argue for and against the issue. They do this in dueling columns, usually one on either side of the page and some kind of illustration in the center. This has kind of turned into my thing now. If nothing else, you can usually see my artwork on the Viewpoint cover on sundays. This week's issue was ostensibly about stem cell research, but it seemed like half of both sides' arguement was just talking about Ronald Reagan and what he would've wanted. So, since the entire issue was dumped on a dead ex-president who could barely remember his name, I decided to put a giant stem cell on his shoulders, Atlas style. So he's carrying the weight of the argument on his shoulders, get it? Okay, a little iffy in terms of readability, so we put a caption on it and everything was alright. I kind of like it because the stem cell looks like something from Metroid, and it almost looks like the story should be an undead, giant Ronald Reagan defending The City from a giant mutant stem cell from space, Godzilla style.

Published sometime in late November
Front page of a feature section, for an article about people getting drunk at company Christmas parties, making asses of themselves, and getting themselves in trouble, possibly losing their jobs. I daubbed charcoal dust on the drawing for the texture effect, but much of that was lost when it went to press. It got some good feedback, and it was also the first one that I did that involved text running over an 'empty' portion of the illustration. From here on, if it looks like the picture has a bunch of empty space in it, that's where text went. I've been doing this a lot with open areas of blue sky.

Published on November 29th, 2004
Viewpoint cover. This time the issue was whether Bush winning the election (anger anger) has given him the moral mandate to do whatever he wants, like he says it does.

Published sometime in late November, early December
This went with a story dealing with how best to plan your end of the year expenses to get the most out of the change in tax laws. Exciting.

Published December 19th, 2004
Viewpoint cover, dealing with the issue of Bush letting companies drill for oil in the arctic federal wildlife refuge and other federally protected lands. This was sort of a breakthrough piece for me. It took longer than it should've, and I was right on deadline when I finished it, but I got more feedback for this than I had for anything else I'd done. There's talk of sending the resulting page for consideration of recognition for the Society of News Design. It made me some friends in the building and I'm occaisionally looking for opportunities to do something similar, but faster.

Published on December 26th, 2004
Viewpoint cover on whether or not importing medicines from other nations should be allowed and whether or not it's safe (nevermind that some of the countries that people want to import from, like Canada, have stricter guidlines for safety than the United States, and it's cheaper on top of that).

Published on January 2nd, 2005
This is something I'm proud of because it came out of nowhere. It's why newspapers get staff artists: they had a story that needed art, either photos or otherwise, but they were unable to get any really good photos for it. All they had was one okay photo, but nothing to put at the top of the page. So they went to me. They needed something on the subject of people throwing out Christmas Trees (the problem being that we were running it before people were doing it, so no photos) and they needed it now. From idea to finish, this took me 2.5 hours. And it got good feedback, too.

Published on January 2nd, 2005
Viewpoint cover on the subject of price gouging on fuel efficient hybrid cars. They're teeny, and people love them because you can get up to 50 miles to the gallon, and they pollute much less.. and to take advantage of people, dealers are charging more for them in some cases than the enormous SUVs next door. So, I did my best to make that point.

Published on January 4th, 2005
This is another favorite. It was for a story about how some doctor guy has this baby-care method that keeps them really happy. So, HAPPY BABY! This ran huge. I did the page layout so I kind of cropped him at the waist and blew up the remaining so that there was this giant baby head taking up half the page. Tons of good feedback, and even better: a reporter later told me that she was visiting an area elementary school for a story of some sort and, walking down the hall, spotted a spot on the wall where there were pictures of babies plastered all over the wall, like a daily art project for the students... with my picture in the center. That's right, my art turned into a day's art activity in an elementary school. A couple dozen kids and a teacher all giving me the best praise they could. Makes me all warm and fuzzy on the inside.

Published on January 9th
Viewpoint cover on the subject of whether people need to freak out and wear gas masks on their way to work or if the terrorist threat isn't something you should live in fear over.

Published on January 16th, 2005
Viewpoint page on the subject of wether Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear was unfair towards environmentalists. Basically Crichton says that if you're an environmentalist who believes that global warming is something worth being concerned about, you're either a con artist, an imbecile, or both. Anyhow, Crichton is the guy who brought us Jurassic Park (where Raptors are smarter than scientists) so I represented him with a T-rex. One of my favorites. Very pleased at the dino.

Published on January 23rd, 2005
Viewpoint cover on the subject on whether the US has been stingy in its aid response to the horrific tsunami in Asia. Originally the concept was to be much more edgy: the marine was handing them a mop.. and that was it. Sorry to hear about your family! Here's a mop for the water, we hear there's a few puddles around. Anyhow, it was a mocking idea, me mocking our wonderful Bush administration mocking the tsunami victims by only contributing for the sake of not looking bad, not actually showing any compassion. This is directed at the government, mind you. Citizens have been very generous. Of course the columnist defending the govt's actions said that the govt didn't need to contribute much because it knew the citizens would do it on their own. Suuure. Anyhow, as I was working on it, the sensitivity of the subject contrasting with the sharpness of my little attack made me rethink my strategy and I took the neutral path. I think everyone's better off this way. I'd hate to have someone think I was making fun of tsunami victims. I most certainly was not. Some of the photos from the disaster have followed me into my dreams. Words cannot express how horrid it is.

Published on January 25th, 2005
Full page illustration (minus room for a side column on the left) for a feature story on eulogies. Text overlaid the illustration over the sky, with the walls of the grave and faces of mourners creating a border around it.

That's all so far. I'll try to put up more as I do them. I have a feeling that I may have missed one or two.. I'm not sure. If so I'll add those too.

Thanks for reading this far, by the way.

Posted by Eric Chapman at 02:02 AM | Comments (3)