JaMiE BaKeR: fallout

Another quick Super-Heroine sketch done while sitting at my booth at a comics convention. This one is of my new favourite super gal; POWERGIRL.

I got a bit lazy with the hands and feet on this one, so I’ll tidy them up later.

Almost a year ago I posted the sketch that formed the basis for this illustration. The book contains a limerick that references a beauty pageant held each year in Thailand for bigger ladies (to raise money for elephant conservation) known as the MISS JUMBO QUEEN PAGEANT.

The latest news about the ELEPHANT book is that it is finished being printed in China and is now being shipped to Australia for its April release down there. While I was busy finishing the illustrations on this book, my Father actually wrote a SECOND book (about a famous Australian racehorse called PHAR LAP) that will be released at around the same time by the same publisher. I hear that my Dad is already being lined up for radio interviews as part of a double-pronged PR blitz for the two books in Australia and New Zealand.

More news as it comes to hand!

Even though it is about a very grim subject, the hunting and poaching of elephants, this is one of my favourite illustrations that I did for the book, mainly because of the colours. Choosing a colour palette is something that I always wrestle with, but in this case I was rather happy with the way that the limited palette came out.

It remains to be seen whether it will reproduce in print the same way it looks on my monitor… but I should find out soon enough; I am expecting to see some advance copies in of the printed book sometime in February.

In 2006 I was pretty consistent in updating this here NEWS page, on average about once a week. But I was very slack in every other section of my website… Until Now!

The galleries in the FOLIO section have been updated to include a few of the many pics posted in this page over the past year. I still have a lot more to add, so check back in a week or so when hopefully it will be more representative of ALL the art I have stored on my FTP.

I just added TWO new galleries in the PHOTO section. Like the first three they are each a random jumble of pictures taken from different places and times and there isn’t any consistent “theme”.

The LINKS section has been updated with some new blogs and couple of websites that belong to some friends of mine. I also added an Emma Peel site that might interest any AVENGERS fans out there. I bought myself an Avengers DVD for Christmas and really enjoyed watching those old shows a great deal.

This picture was made with assorted photo textures and illustrates a story about elephants being sedated with ALCOHOL when they are transported in certain countries.

Speaking of BOOZE, 2006 has come and gone and along with it my least favourite holiday of all. Some people express frustration with the pressures of Valentine’s Day and Christmas, I even know one reactionary curmudgeon who dislikes Halloween, but for me NEW YEAR’S EVE is the holiday I most like to dislike.

Other holidays are criticised for the rampant materialism and crass marketing that accompanies them, but at least most have some idea at their core but I can relate to. But boozing up and hitting the town so as to have your tongue down the throat of a drunken stranger at the stroke of Midnight just isn’t a worthy goal…

…besides which, how come it never happens for me? Boo Hoo…

I have tried to get into the spirit of the occasion and gone off to wherever you have to go to get boozed up, and watch the fireworks displays… I’ve put on the fancy clothes and shelled out the money for a posh “New Years Eve bash” a few times, but despite the fanciness and high expectations I’ve always ended up being stranded with hundreds of booze-addled people trudging over broken Champagne bottles and fighting for taxis at 3 am.

The times that I have enjoyed New Year’s Eve have been those that I have spent with a few close friends who turned their backs on the madness and did something else. Like a dinner party. One time I even saw in the New Year while sitting by a campfire under the stars when camping in Death Valley. I liked those particular New Years Eves because they were a bit more reflective. If the traditions were different, New Years Eve COULD be a moment to pause and reflect on the past, present and future… but all that often gets obscured by booze, belligerence and broken glass…

Anyway, I have been engaged in a bit of reflection of my own recently, and not just over the events of this last year I’ve also thinking about events from many years before, as I continue to sift and sort and scan my photo collection. There are already 3 galleries online and I should have another up soon.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I hope that you all had a very happy-merry Kwanz-ukkah-mass! Here is another image from the Elephant book; the title illustration for the chapter on “Captivity.”

2006: The year in review
Highlights
Securing the TRADE MARK for Rocket rabbit put an end to someone else’s attempt to take that name. Cease and desist!

The Civil War road-trip around Maryland and Virginia in the company of my Dad and my Brother Jo was another high point of this past year.

Puting the finishing touches on ELEPHANTS IN THE NEWS the book collaboration with my Dad gave me a great sense of achievement. I also learned a lot about Photoshop!

Lowpoints
Having my laptop snatched and the ensuing chase was about the most stressful thing I have been through in recent years!

Recently I have been travelling back in time; scanning mountains of old photographs that I have taken from as far back as primary-school and e-mailing many of the pictures to friends. It has been fun to trade e-mails with ex co-workers, school friends, and old travelling companions about the memories that the pictures have dredged up… “Wallowing in Nostalgia” was the term used by my old pal Gary Page.

While sorting all these pictures and attempting to plug them into iPhoto in chronological order, I realised that I had forgotten a lot of details… not just names and dates, but the sequence of events. All of this has led me to think about the frightening impermanence of memory, and how it can fade if not sometimes replenished. I think that is one of the great things about photographs; that looking at them can help keep our memories alive.

Even before this photo-archiving project I had been writing down some funny little fragments of childhood memories for a similar reason; just to get them on paper before my mind goes completely. Continuing on from this recent Nostalgia-kick, My brother was in town last week and of course we swapped a few tales from our childhoods.

When I was a kid, I got a simple little Kodak Instamatik camera for my ninth (or tenth) birthday. I dont think that I ever managed to take an in-focus photo with that thing but that was the all photographic equipment I had up until I hit the road. When I was travelling in Asia I realised that I needed a camera more able to do justice to the fantastic sights I was taking in, and upgraded to a NIKON FG20. That did me fine for several years until it was stolen when I was travelling in Peru (along with a sketchbook filled with sketches of my travels for the 3 previous years). While still in Peru, I bought a fully mechanical NIKON FM2 which I have to this day. I have yet to go digital but that may happen sometime soon.

The period when I took photographs most diligently was from the time that I left Australia up until a little after I arrived to live in San Francisco. The time between those two events encompasses a lot of travel and many adventures in Asia, Europe and South America. It was a period in my life when I took pictures almost everyday for several years.

Part of me is sorry that I haven’t kept that habit up consistently since then, because there are some gaps in the photo record, but another part of me is glad I have sometimes laid the camera down as otherwise there would be even more to scan. And as it is, scanning my photo collection is already a massive job.

My habit was to shoot colour slides and Black and White prints. I don’t yet have the means to properly scan slides (I may buy myself a slide-scanner for Christmas) so it is the prints that I am doing at the moment, including some prints I had made from my favourite colour slides.

Many of the photos probably wouldn’t be interesting to anyone who isn’t in them, but a few that I took on my travels in South America, Europe and Asia (such as those shown here) may be of interest to even casual viewers. So I hope to have an updated online PHOTO gallery added to the site in the next few weeks.

UPDATE: The PHOTO section has now been expanded to include 3 new galleries. Each contains about 24 pictures, accessible via thumbnails. Please go take a look.

The book contains many many stories of humans giving elephants a hard time, and also quite a few tales of elephants giving as good as they get and hitting back at “the man.” Here is an illustration for one of THOSE particular stories.

Due to some unforeseen shenanigans, I am not really in the mood for writing much today. But “the show must go on” so here, at least, is another picture from the book.

These pics show the “looser” approach I used in the last week or two… These more scribbly elephants will be spread throughout the book so hopefully they wont come across as a jarring style-change.

While I wait for the FINAL proof let me tell you a bit about the Elephant book and how it came to be.

My Dad has written LIMERICKS for years and he has always expressed a fondness for elephants. (I remember his office at work had a few elephanty knick knacks about the place, including something I was fascinated by as a child; a cartoony cardboard elephant head mounted on the wall like a trophy). So, his co-workers started clipping news stories for him about elephants, in response to which he amused them by composing LIMERICKS about the elephants in the news.

Over the course of a year or two he amassed quite a few of these and a co-worker (named Ada Cheung) suggested he compile them into a little book. It was also thought that his cartoonist son might do a few illustrations. I am ashamed to tell you how long ago it was that I agreed to do the pictures… it was more than just a few years ago. I have a hard time keeping more than one project in my mind at a time, so the elephant book often took a backseat to my paying work and my comics. Dad often joked that, at the rate I was getting the art done, the book would be a posthumous publication in his case. However, I was able to get about 14 or so done in full colour and then I made a rough mock-up of the book which I sent my Dad for his birthday year before last.

At this point the intention was to self publish. The book is not exactly kid-friendly because so many of the stories deal with Sex and Death; rampaging elephants, crushed zoo-keepers, failed breeding attempts, elephant poaching, artists using Dung in their artwork and so on. I always thought the book to be a bit too idiosyncratic for a big publisher.

Now comes the really amazing part: Early in 2005, Dad was in the Australian country town of Wollombi (where his sister, my Aunty Marg lives) defending his TRIVIA NIGHT TITLE; a BAKER family team are (or were at the time of this story) the reigning TRIVIA NITE CHAMPIONS at the Wollombi pub. While there, Dad met an ACTUAL publisher who offered to publish the Elephant book when he saw the mock-up I had made… And unlike our self-published version, he wanted to do it in full colour!

Here’s me living on the west coast of the USA, supposedly one of the main centers of the media universe, with some connections in at least one branch of “the media”, yet I had Buckley’s chance of getting this thing properly published. So I had resolved to just do a simple version on my own. Meanwhile, my Dad wrangles a book deal on trivia nite at the Wollombi pub!

I love it!!

It took a while to get the contracts sorted out but while that was going on, the editor and I were still working on the book. She expanded it from the 64 pages that Dad and I had envisaged, which required even more illustrations, and I hadn’t yet finished the initial batch I had planned to do. After I finally roughed out the remaining illustrations in pencil, the designer, then used these to layout the book. That layout came in handy when I was finishing the artwork as I knew where the text had to go.

As to the current form of the book; It will be 128 pages in full colour and it is smallish, about 7×6.5 inches. At last count there are about 60 full colour illustrations and a few of those are double page spreads. The text consists of two things; the series of elephant news clippings Dad has saved over the years, and a limerick he has written inspired by each story. It will be published by EXISLE PRESS. The publisher is Gareth St John Thomas, the editor is Anouska Jones, and the designer is Nanette Backhouse.

The book should come out in Australia next April/May so keep yer eyes peeled. It will be entitled “Elephants in the News: Pachyderms in limerick”.