Sketches: Eagle Down

I try to spend as little time as possible second-guessing myself and my work, but mostly, I get nowhere with that. I'll have an approach that I like, or what I think is a (reasonably) clever idea, or an unusual solution to a design question — but then, I'll stop and wonder: is this concept going to win over whomever has to make the decision to approve it?

And then I might think, what small adjustments might be made to nudge this into more crowd-pleasing territory? And then, how much time and effort do I want to put into that? Often followed by, geez, why don't you just trust your instincts?
This was one of those occasions. Much as I wanted to use the target shape to replace the missing letter "O", I was kinda concerned that the word didn't instantly read as a word, as it ought to. The shape was there, sure, but it was the difference in color and contrast that created doubt in my mind, and like a juror instructed to not to consider stricken testimony in court, you can't "un-see" something. (Not really.) Out of concern that this might doom the entire concept, I did an alternate version, mostly for myself — that's it on the right, the version with the target shape filled with a clean version of the sand texture in the background. (You're probably not seeing that texture on screen — I think it's been mostly lost to the JPEG compression, though I hope will be a bit more obvious in print.).

While I was wondering over which I ought to submit, my nine-year-old son saw the original version (that's it on the left), and read the title out loud with a moment's hesitation, but without prompting. I guess if a nine-year-old can make sense of this, I shouldn't be too terribly concerned.

Oh, and here's the quick sketch I did before I started working on this. I had been asked to design a cover based on the cover of the screenplay, but there really wasn't anything there to draw on for a formal book cover (and I wanted to do something in keeping with the other books in the series). But I did use the silhouetted figure.

There's a turtle in our pond.

It's a small pond, and a big turtle. (Reasonably big, anyway. It's about the size of, I dunno, a salad plate? Seven or eight inches wide, I think.)

Seems a good chance this is the same Painted Turtle we saw briefly last year (seen in the photo above), when it spent the morning inexplicably wandering around the edge of the unpaved driveway in front of our house. We were concerned it might wander into the street, so we brought it to the backyard, where it discovered the pond, and eventually wandered off. That was the last of the turtle excitement.

Then, about two weeks ago I spotted it — or quite possibly another turtle, can't be certain — from an upstairs window, basking in the sun on the big flat rock in the middle of the pond.

It's difficult to get too close enough to get a better look, though — it seems rather shy, and retreats into the water before I can get the least bit near to the pond. It's a bit more comfortable under the water, though. It hides among the leaf litter and algae, but it can usually be spotted. That's how we know it's a Painted Turtle.

(We have a frog, too, but we've had frogs every year. A turtle, that's something extraordinary.)

Monday Evening

I should be working right now. I'm not, and I suppose really don't have to be — but I can't help but feel as though I ought to be. I can't just sit here, comfortably, and do nothing without this sense of unease that something isn't getting done.

That's the way it is when you enjoy your work, I suppose. It expands to fill a vacuum. And when you're self-employed, it becomes difficult to seperate work from home from whatever else. I have to make an effort to make the time for whatever else.

Much as I enjoy my work, though, it can still wear me down. I need the time away — that's what "now" is supposed to be. But that desk in the next room, the computer on that desk, it's all still there, and were I to wander over to the office, I could easily lose an hour or two with some small task I-just-want-to-get-this-done, and end up falling into bed at 3:00 AM.

Saturday Afternoon

Mind is meandering. Decision-making has wandered off somewhere, to look for more interersting stuff to decide. Concentration has become diluted. Work is done for the day.

Jayne Mansfield

I've been working on a book about Jayne Mansfield this week, and it's solved a mystery from the recesses of my memory (though I'd never thought to look for the answer).

I remember seeing pictures in an article in Playboy — yes, it was an article — of a nude scene she had done in a film. (With a man. He wore glasses.) This was ages ago, and I was still young, though wise enough to understand that a nude scene would have been uncommon for an established film actress in the 1960s, and I've always kinda wondered about the circumstances.

I now know that the film was Promises! Promises!, remembered mostly for her nude scenes (and for an obscenity charge against Hugh Hefner as publisher of Playboy, which had featured a pictoral taken on the set of the film). As Roger Ebert wrote, "In 1963, that kind of box office appeal was all she had left."

Mystery Girl

Note to Self:

Make a point of writing notes to self in such a way that they can be read and easily understood after-the-fact.

Field Day

I made my son a special shirt for his Fourth Grade class's Field Day. It was bright yellow (that was the team's color), but at his request, I carefully lettered his name in a gentle arc, and a big number on the back, both by hand, with a fabric marker, just like a sports jersey.

One of his friends said to him that day "You must have a really cool Dad." 

(There's not a Dad alive who doesn't appreciate having his awesomeness confirmed by a neutral third party.)

Sketches: The Time Tunnel

This is, as it happens, the second cover I've done in a year or so where I started off working in red, and made a last-minute switch to blue. I dunno, the red seemed to work better in theory than in practice — the black-and-white photos looked dull in context. That, and the print vendor has somewhat oppressive ideas about ink density, and I was concerned that laying black ink over all that magenta and yellow was just going to cause no end of disappointment and trouble.
I'd been thinking of two tumbling figures (perhaps even as a surprint), but I never could find two figures to work with. (And someone did that, though not particularly well, for the DVD package, anyway. Maybe they couldn't find anthing to work with, either.) There was a great publicity photo of the two leads, in color, though one of them had this odd expression on his face (and he was not in his recognizable green wool turtleneck), so I used another black-and-white publicity photo, instead.

(I spent far, far too much time trying to take that recognizable green wool turtleneck from this photo and place it over the body on the other photo, which had a sharper, better-quality image, but I decided if I couldn't get to the point where I could convince myself that it was possible, I was never going to be able to convince anyone else.)