13-Sep-19 Happy Birthday, Jason Voorhees

[DiveMilw]

OK.  I don't know when his actual birthday is but it seems fitting that it should be on a Friday the 13th.  And since he is nearly a mythical or magical being it isn't without reason to assume that EVERY Friday the 13th is his birthday.  I'm celebrating his birthday by sous viding some shrimp.  And I'll go for a short walk as well.

[KathyB]

Happy Friday the 13th. I spent today talking with a friend who has two black cats. (Both of them are just fine.) I could celebrate by doing laundry, but I think I'll postpone that until tomorrow.

[scenicdesign71]

As my boss at work commented sometime after lunch, for a traditionally "unlucky" day, yesterday was actually quite a nice one by recent standards.  In fact, last week overall was unexpectedly mild and relaxing; after hearing horror stories about this season having thus far been rife with twelve-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks and general insanity of all the annoyingly-usual kinds, it seems I picked the right week to finally return to work.

I spent the day painting a lightly-caricaturized cutout portrait of a lovely young Korean-American actress for an upcoming episode.

Portraiture is an inexhaustible challenge, not an area in which I've had a whole lot of experience, but always fascinating -- although yesterday's project was far from my best work, even for a "quickie" attempt (roughly eight hours from start to finish) with, fortunately, no obligation to look especially accomplished: according to the parameters of the storyline, it was supposed to be a piece of fan art.  The finished result looks... sincere, let's say.

After the large agitprop-style portrait-mural I worked on for MS last year, I had the extreme pleasure of doing another mural for the ITH set this summer: a triptych of faces, covering an 8' x 24' plywood construction barrier.  As much as the three faces themselves, that latter assignment was about capturing the extraordinary color and style of a brilliant real-life contemporary muralist who permitted us to reproduce -- as faithfully as we could in a little under a week -- three specific works selected by our equally-brilliant designer.  The results were so warmly admired by seemingly everyone who saw them (from curious local passersby to at least one of our topmost "creatives," who yearned for a smaller version to hang on her livingroom wall) that I'm hopeful they might get a little screen time in the finished film.  By my count, our main "neighborhood" location and its associated interior sets ended up featuring at least four different murals (counting the triptych, on which I was a lead painter, as a single mural) -- and I had a minor hand in two of the others (designed and/or inspired by various other artists) as well.  I like to fantasize that the end-credits might run over a sustained montage of all these murals; my own pride in the finished works aside, I think they would make a fitting closure to what promises to be a fantasically colorful "urban tapestry" of a film.