How Would You Hibernate? - Illustration Friday

This week, the word challenge for 'Illustration Friday' was "Hibernate." In announcing the challenge, the host of the site provided this quote from Anais Nin: 

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

Hibernate detail

This is not how I picture hibernation. First of all, I don't think of it as a restless condition.  Restful, yes, but not restless. An absence of pleasure? I suppose that would be true if you define hibernation as withdrawing from life. My idea of hibernating is to stay in bed, which can be a most pleasurable thing to do, especially if one has a good stack of books at the bedside. I suppose my idea of hibernation is probably closer to the concept of cocooning. In other words, not going anywhere, staying inside surrounded by the things that comfort you. 


When I think of hibernation, I always think of bears. So, in my illustration I have depicted a bear, cozy in bed with a couple of stacks of books. He's not quite ready to hibernate yet, he wants to spend some time reading first. I've also given him a pal - down at the foot of the bed, is a little mouse with his own blanket and pillows and even his own books (see detail at right, click on images to see them larger).

I created this image in Corel Painter 12 and I worked in a slightly different manner than I have in the past. First of all, I spent more time on my pencil sketch. I did a number of sketches until I got the bear looking just right. Once I had the bear the way I wanted him to look, I tightened up the sketch and made a cleaner drawing. In the past, I've inked in my drawings, but this time I decided I would keep the sketch visible and not use any ink pens. Another thing I did that I don't usually do was to create selections so that I could paint in areas while protecting others. I created the selections by creating new alpha channels and painting the areas I wanted to protect in opaque white on the alpha channel.  Once I had the areas painted that I wanted to protect (think of this as applying a frisket mask to watercolor paper), it was easy to load and save these areas as selections. 

First sketch

Second Sketch

Third Sketch

Fourth Sketch

Fifth Sketch

Final Sketch

Starting to paint, I protected certain areas by using selections created from alpha channels

Screen shot showing selection

Almost done. I completed the illustration by adding some darks and some colored pencil details

Hoarding and Vintage Valentines

Members of my family have a history of holding on to things from their past, myself included.  Over the Christmas holidays, I had an opportunity to watch 'Hoarders,' that new reality program that looks at people who have a compulsion to save every thing.  As I watched in horror as clean-up crews uncovered dead animals under mountain high piles of trash, I told myself, "I'll never let myself get like that," and "I'm going to start throwing things out as soon as I get home," (we were in Omaha visiting Mark's family at the time) but here I am two months later and I still haven't begun to go through things or thrown anything out.  Now, don't get the wrong idea, we don't have mountains of trash littering our home, but our dining table does tend to get covered with junk mail that sits around for weeks and right now, as I sit in my small office, I am surrounded by piles of books, magazines, bills and receipts, CDs, DVDs, small boxes of miscellanea, old padded envelopes (that I intend to reuse) and . . . well, I think you get the idea - there is a lot of stuff.

If my father had lived alone, without the influence of my mother, I think he could have turned into a first-class hoarder.  I don't remember a time, during all of the years that I lived at home when we were able to park a car in our garage.  The reason? My father had filled it with stuff, from floor to ceiling, front to back, side to side (see the above photos).

I had planned this entry to be about vintage Valentines and I've gotten off track.  The reason that I started off talking about hoarding and saving old stuff is for the simple reason that I wouldn't have the following examples to show you if I hadn't held on to parts of my past.  Some of the cards shown below, may have even been found in some of the boxes stored in the above mentioned garage.

I have fond memories of how Valentine's Day was celebrated in our classroom when I was in the early years of elementary school.  You brought an empty brown paper lunch sack to school on that day.  At some point during the day, the teacher would take a break from regular classwork and tell us to put our empty sacks on our desk.  Then all of the students were allowed to get up from their seats and drop Valentines in to the bags of their classmates.  As I recall, it was a free-for-all, kids going up and down the aisles searching out the desks of their intended Valentines.  After all the cards had been given out, you were allowed a few minutes to look at the cards that had been put in your bag.  Of course, now when I look back at this practice, I realize that there were probably some kids who received very few cards in their bags and may have gone home feeling sad.  Not that I received tons, but lets just say that I was always satisfied with what I received.  I remember there were always a few kids in class who gave every one cards, and there were others like myself who, as I recall, only gave cards to the classmates that I really liked (or had secret crushes on).  I think one reason that I had to be selective was that my mother would only buy one package of Valentines for us to give out and that one package had to be split between myself and my brother and sister.  So I chose carefully who I would take aim at with my cupid's arrow.

Okay, that brings me to the Valentines themselves. There are some things that I think most people would probably agree were actually better in the good old days.  I think Valentines made for children are one of those things that were better in days gone by.  Today, if you look for Valentines for kids (and I'm speaking of packaged cards, not the individual Hallmark type of greeting card) all you will find are boxes of small rectangular cards with perforated edges that have popular characters on them - Spongebob, Batman, Disney Princesses, etc.  There are no longer any die-cut cards cut in the shapes of the animals they depict.  Gone are the cards depicting two anthropomorphized hot dogs holding hands (some people may think that is a good thing), no cute little monkeys in sailor suits riding very big bananas (get your mind out of the gutter), no ducks in hats, dazed bears or happy peacocks.  As far as packages of cards go, I haven't seen any that aren't tied into some sort of merchandising for a brand (Nickelodeon, Disney, DC Comics, Marvel).  Now I have nothing against using popular characters on Valentine cards, I actually find that phenomenon to be a fascinating part of pop culture, just like I find Christmas wrapping paper depicting Spiderman wearing a Santa's hat to be an interesting slice of American culture at this moment in time.  Later this week, I will share some of my contemporary kids' Valentines depicting merchandized characters, but for now, I hope you enjoy these vintage cards.

All of these cards were given to me when I was in elementary school, so they are at least 45 years old.  I'm 55 now and I think most of these cards were given to me during my first three years of school.

You can click on each of these cards to see them slightly larger.

and my personal favorite - 

What child wouldn't want to become a vegetarian after receiving this card?