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.

While poking around online for an old book for somebody else, it occurred to me to see if there were any copies of Three To Get Ready, one of my favorite childhood books that I probably checked out of the Princeton Library 2 dozen times over the years.

Sure enough, used copies of the book are available at decent prices. I never paid attention to the writer and illustrator when I was a kid, but it was written by Betty Boegehold and illustrated by Mary Chalmers. The book contains three stories about three different kittens learning basic life lessons (all that stuff about being nice to one another and minding your parents) from their mother. The stories are nice, but what I liked best about the book were the illustrations.

Then I decided to see if I could dig anything up about one of my other favorite books that I still have, which is actually here in California. Now, my fellow Generation X-ers will no doubt snort derisively at the title of this one. (wow, according to this page both my older brother and my younger sister belong to gen-x, too) It's called The Snuggle Bunny, by Nancy Jewell. And, as I realized tonight for the first time, illustrated by Mary Chalmers.

It's not surprising that two of my favorite childhood books would be illustrated by the same person, but it gave me the same spine-tingling feeling I got when I first saw the Dire Straits video for Calling Elvis back around 1990. The video used footage from Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds. By the time I saw the video I had completely forgotten about Thunderbirds, but in a flash I remembered many early childhood Saturdays spent watching Thunderbirds on some UHF station out of Boston.

It's like Deja Vu, only stronger because you really did experience the stuff you suddenly feel like you've seen/heard/watched before.