A Little Book of Sloth

A Little Book of Sloth by Lucy Cooke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you’re not yet a member of the Sloth Appreciation Society, you will be after reading this adorable non-fiction book by Lucy Cooke that immerses readers in the world of orphaned and injured sloths. Filled with sweet photographs that are guaranteed to make even a curmudgeon smile, you’ll learn fascinating facts about the Bradypus or three-fingered sloth with their Mona Lisa smiles and their two-fingered cousins, the Choloepus who, according to the author, look “like a cross between a Wookie and a pig.” One of the things I learned  from this book about these adorable creatures is that sloths, unlike other mammals, can not regulate their body temperature. Consequently, sloths, like reptiles, need to bask in the sun in order to warm up. I also didn’t know that sloths are slow and slothful due to their diet. Cooke informs us that in the jungle, they eat slightly toxic leaves which don’t give them much energy. Because it takes them four weeks to digest a meal, they need to take it easy to stay free from painful indigestion. As fascinating as all of these facts are, I think the main attraction to this book, at least for kids, will be the adorable photographs of Buttercup, Wally, Honey, Sunshine, Sammy, Velcro and the other cute sloths that fill these pages with their cuddly personalities and sweet smiles.

Below are some of Lucy Cooke's photographs from "A Little Book of Sloth."

Mateo with his plush toy, Mr. Moo

Sunshine and Sammy

Baby sloth in a special onesie

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Illustration Friday - Scattered

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Walking my dog, I see lots of squirrels. My dog has a squirrel obsession, so we often end up following them. I would never let my dog catch a squirrel (at least not intentionally) but I do let her 'be a dog,' and engage in her instincts by allowing her to track them up into a tree. Once the squirrels are safely sitting in the trees above us, my dog is perfectly content to sit beneath the tree and stare up at them for as long as I will allow her to do so. Some of the squirrels are quite brave and will climb part way back down the tree to check us out. I always have my camera with me so while my dog is fixated on the squirrel, I try and take pictures of them.

One thing I notice while standing under the squirrel-laden trees is how many acorns and leaves are scattered about on the lawn. So, when I read that this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge was the word "Scattered," I decided to do something with squirrels and scattered acorns.

I started out by doing some sketches based on a couple of the squirrel photos I had taken. At this point I wasn't sure in what direction I was going to take this image, but I kept sketching. As I worked on it, I decided I would do an image of a mother squirrel who has discovered that her son has scattered their acorns all over the floor of their den.

I finally decided I would put clothes on the squirrels. You can see at this stage I also decided to change the position of the mother squirrel's arms.

I thought the female squirrel looked too young and not at all like the mother of the other one, so in order to age her, I gave her a few extra pounds and put her in an apron.

At this point, it was just a matter of shading things in. I created the image entirely in Corel Painter 12. For the most part I used the 'Real 2B Pencil' brush, but for the background, which I created on a separate layer, I used the 'Real Sumi-e Wet Brush.'

I decided that I wanted to make the mother appear to be backlit so I added another layer and created some darker shading.  Once I had the shading the way I wanted it, I collapsed the various layers I had created so that it would be easier to do blending and smoothing out of the overall image.

What Mesmerizes You? I.F. Mesmerizing

I had several ideas for this week's 'Illustration Friday,' which this week is the word "mesmerizing." The idea I ended up using came to me while I was sitting in an auto-shop waiting room, waiting to get my oil changed and my tires rotated. There was a big screen TV in the room that was set to a channel playing old sitcoms. I had brought a book to read, but I had a hard time concentrating on it. The giant TV, which was showing an old episode of 'Bewitched,' was so mesmerizing that I found my eyes constantly drifting over to look at it. Since there was no one else in the room, I finally got up and turned the sound down, which helped a little as far as concentrating on my book went.

So, from that experience I came up with the idea of a waiting room filled with children. All of the children in the room, with the exception of one little girl, find the TV to be mesmerizing. The child who is the exception, would rather read her book.  This is my first image that I started and finished using the new Painter 12 upgrade (I did take a side trip into Photoshop to add some filters, but more about that in a minute).

Since it's small enough to fit in my pocket, I almost always carry my camera with me.  For this illustration I consulted a reference photo that I took while in the auto-shop waiting room (see photo at right). From there, I made a digital sketch. I knew I wanted to have the little girl and her book off to one side of the image, so I started by arranging the chairs and figures. After the initial sketch, I did another one where I refined the figures and darkened the lines.

Once I was happy with the sketch, I started doing some coloring. On a separate layer, I filled the canvas with a soft yellow color to give the image some overall warmth. Then, using the Digital Watercolor 'New Simple Water' brush, I began to color in the background and shapes. You can see my progress in the images below (Click on any image to see it larger).

As I worked, I created lots of layers so that I would have the flexibility of changing the opacity of different objects and adding special filters to some areas.  When everything was colored, I saved the image as a Photoshop file and then opened the image in Photoshop CS4.  In Photoshop, I used a third-party filter called Mister Retro (made by Permanent Press) to add some speckled texture to the various layers of color. The second to the last image in the progression (see below), shows the image with all of the coloring finished in Painter, prior to adding the filters. The last image in the progression shows a screen shot of the finished image, re-opened in Painter, after the Mister Retro photoshop filters had been applied. In this image, you can see all of the layers I created while working. I reopened the image in Painter in order to add some shadows on the little girl and under the chairs. I created the shadows on their own layer and painted them using Painter's Smart Strokes 'Textured Chalk' brush.

The Decline of the Golden State

I've been trying to keep the topics in this blog related to the art of illustration, but every once in a while I will be veering off in another direction, to something that has caught my eye or interest.  Last November, in my very first entry to this blog, I talked about a movie theatre that my siblings and I use to attend when we were kids, one that had closed in the early 70s and then was left to fall into ruins.  It was an historic theater called the Golden State and it was located in Riverside, CA.  In my blog I told how I had found a way to sneak inside the old theater where I took some pictures.  Yesterday, I came across some of those photos.  With the exception of the last photo at the bottom of this post, they are all SX-70 polaroids. If you read my original post, you will know that this is the theater where D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," had its sneak preview.  You may also recall that the theater burned down a few years after these pictures were taken.  So, as a sort of visual update to my very first blog entry, here are some photos of the late, great Golden State theater.

The closed box office booth

The door of the booth leaning against the poster cases

Upstairs, outside the manager's office

Water damage to the ceiling

The organ grill

Seats from the auditorium had been ripped out and strewn in the hallway and on the stairs

The candy counter

An exterior shot taken from the rear of the building

A feral cat who was living under the building.  This is one of my favorite photos.  I like the fact that the image is almost monochromatic.  The only vivid color is in the discarded orange, to the left of the cat.

The late, great Golden State Theater

All photos copyright Vincent Desjardins 2010

It's about time and the Golden State

I created this blog account 5 years ago and left it dormant, in other words blank, empty, unused.  I had almost forgotten that I had a blog account.  I think I neglected to use it because I was too intimidated to post my thoughts, fearing that I'd come across as stupid or boring.  I'm still not sure what I'll be writing about, hopefully I can come up with something interesting.  I guess time will tell.

I'm writing this from the confines of my cramped little office (I've described it to friends as the size of a train compartment).  It may be cramped, but I'm glad to have it.  It isn't as nice as the upstairs office I had up until two years ago, when I was still living in Mount Vernon, Washington.  From that office I had a view of the Olympic mountains (when they weren't covered by clouds) and lots of trees.  But this tiny little office with its view of our small, leaf covered back yard, is cozy and it's a hell of a lot nicer than having my office in our dining room which is where I had to work for the first 9 months after moving to my present location in Bloomington, Indiana.  At least it's a private room with a door that I can close, a place where I can listen to whatever music I want, a place to display some of my toys and books.  Right now it needs a good straightening up, but because I hate going through stacks of receipts and bills and because I don't have any place to put the things stacked on the floor, I keep finding excuses not to deal with it.

So I'm sitting here writing this, when I should be working on my artwork.  I've been working really hard lately, trying to create some new work to include in my illustration portfolio.  I'm really happy with my new work, but I still feel the need to come up with a few more pieces before I start sending out samples, in the hope I can find some illustration work.  Maybe I'm just finding excuses to put off sending out my work, not wanting to have to face the possibility of being rejected.

Over the top of my monitor I can see two photos hanging on my wall.  One is of the Golden State theater, a no longer existing movie theater where my sister and I use to watch movies on hot summer days while growing up in Riverside, California.  This was an historic theater, the theater that held the sneak preview of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," when the film was still called by its original title "The Clansmen."  Built in 1890, it originally opened as the Loring Opera House.  I don't know what year it changed from being an Opera house to a movie theater, but I was sad when it closed down in the early 1970s, a victim of the new multiplex that had opened up at the mall.  It was even sadder when, about 10 years after closing, it burned to the ground.  It's thought that the fire was accidently started by some homeless men who had been sleeping inside the deserted theater.  At least that's the story I heard.  Before the fire, there had been talk of restoring the theater, but the restoration got held up by some sort of litigation against the landlord of the Loring building, the building that housed the theater.  It's really a shame, because if the litigation hadn't held things up, the theater most likely would have been restored and probably would still be around.  By the way, the above photo was taken in 1974.

After the theater closed down and before its fiery destruction, I managed to find a way to sneak inside.  One day while attending the University of California Riverside where I was completing my B.A. in art, I was in downtown Riverside snapping some photos for a printmaking class I was taking.   I walked by the old theater and was filled with nostalgic memories of the many afternoons I had spent inside watching films like "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" and "Krakatoa, East of Java".  I went up to the front entrance and peered through the filthy glass doors.  Because the glass was so dirty, I couldn't see much but I was able to make out the shape of the dust covered candy counter where I had purchased many a bag of popcorn and boxes of Junior mints.  I took some pictures of the exterior, including the padlock and chain on the front door and the dead bird that had been sadly swept behind the booth of the former box office.  I then decided to wander around to the back.  There was no one around so I walked up the back fire escape and to my surprise found that the fire escape door was slightly ajar.  I pried it open a little further and managed to sneak inside.  I walked down a hallway that was illuminated by the filtered light of a dirty window half covered with a broken venetian blind that hung down at a skewed angle.  I walked by the projection booth that still had pieces of equipment inside.  On the floor I found a scrap of 35 mm film.  It was a piece of leader film, the part of the film that is used to thread the projector.  The title of the film was displayed in one frame, "Billion Dollar Brain," a Michael Caine film that came out in 1967.  I put the scrap of film in my pocket (I still have it, stashed away somewhere), and then proceeded downstairs.  I found the stairway was partially blocked by piles of cushions that appeared to have been torn out of the theater's seating.  I managed to maneuver my way through them and finally arrived in the lobby. Then I walked through the doors leading into the main auditorium. I was excited, after the passage of so much time, to see the inside of the theater where I had spent so many hours of my summer vacations.  But upon entering, I was saddened to discover that all of the downstairs seating had been ripped out and that the movie screen, upon which many a Hollywood star had at one time flickered, was no longer hanging across the stage.  Where it once hung it was now dark and empty, the back walls of the theater barely visible from the light leaking in from the lobby.  Even so, the theater was still recognizable.  The ornate lighting fixtures were still present as was the gold-painted grill work that adorned each side of the stage.  With my 35mm Canon, I took some long exposure black and white photos.  They came out rather grainy, but I was so happy that I had found my way inside and was able to take them.  Even showing the theater in its dilapidated state, those 30 year old photos still have the power to transport me back to the summer days of my adolescence when I spent so many hours in the dark watching Hollywood's latest fantasies unwind before me on the big screen.

The pictures below were taken on another exploratory trip that I made inside the old Golden State Theater. These were taken with my SX-70 polaroid camera.