Andy Chase

My wife gave me an excellent Shag t-shirt for Christmas along with another 1950's collecting guide/photo reference, and suddenly I'm all interested in design and even digital illustration again.Not much to write for tonight. I Put up another good photo of the Safari Inn sign from yesterday.

I spent most of the evening diddling around with Painter 6. After 5 comfortable years spent using Adobe (and to a lesser extent, Macromedia) interfaces, Painter is positively confounding.

Plus there's the added strangeness of not having actually painted since high school. I got pretty good with acrylics, but didn't stick with them when I pursued animation in college. So it's like learning to paint again through the layer of abstraction added by drawing on a tablet and seeing the results on the screen; the lack of immediate, physical feedback is disconcerting. But I shall persevere.

Also, go visit Shag's site. Go there right now. No finishing up your e-mail or reading The Onion, just go. And if you're going to be in L.A. next month, go see his exhibition, Bottomless Cocktail, at the La Luz De Jesus gallery in Hollywood. I missed the Night of the Tiki exhibition last fall, so I'm looking forward to this one.

I first came across Shag in an article in Juxtapoz a few months ago. I know I'd seen his stuff somewhere before that, but that was the first time I learned that there was an illustrator who specializes pretty much exclusively in exactly the kind of retro-tiki-lounge stuff I like. The Night of the Tiki book has been on my Amazon Wishlist ever since I saw that article, but my wife gave me an excellent Shag t-shirt for Christmas along with another 1950's collecting guide/photo reference, and suddenly I'm all interested in design and even digital illustration again.

Things have come a long way since I used to painstakingly draw 32 color, 320x240 scenes on my Amiga 500 in DeluxePaint IV and although I'm way out of practice, I know I'll be able to blow my older stuff away in time. That boxy old mouse has nothing on a pressure-sensitive tablet.