WHOA-HO! So I mentioned I went to Collingwood on Friday, and it’s preeeeetty unlikely that I would go on a long trip like that and not do any sketching. SO! Why not have a look-see?

This was part of the harbour in Collingwood. Ooooh. Ahhhh.

Aaaaand then I found this place called the Osprey Wetlands, just south of Collingwood… Lemme see if I can explain. I THINK it’s a little wildlife reserve kind of area, and I know you can hike and stuff through it, but I couldn’t really find an entrance. At least not in the traditional sense. I found a few access roads that I’d be weary to take a pickup truck down, let alone the small Toyota I was driving. Anyhow, the place is PACKED with wildlife and is RIDICULOUSLY beautiful. Really glad I stopped there. Yes, I did manage to pull over for a good SKETCHING.

But my sketch really didn’t do it justice or turn out that great, so I redone it, I did! Yeah! Why not check them both out…

This is what I did while I was there...

Much much much much much much closer to what I really saw. Hahaha, big difference.

Pretty cool. Collingwood is a really nice place, too. I had a killer coffee that some kid made for me. Alright.

Here’s a good example of why my studio is like an optical illusion sometimes…

I was doing a painting of a couple souvenirs I bought at the Nature Museum (yes, I’m still talking about it), and I was about to go make some coffee or something when I realised what I had sitting on my desk.

The painting is pretty unfinished at the time of the photo, but REST ASSURED I finished the heck out of it a little while later.

At least it’s not a painting of a painting. Those really confuse me sometimes when I’m doing other stuff.

Now the FOSSIL in the painting is of Knightia Eocaena, a quite common specimen from the Green River Formation in Kemmerer, Wyoming. Why is this so cool?? Well, for starters it’s a fossil, but if for some reason that isn’t enough, the Green River Formation is one of the most unique fossil sites in the world. It was essentially an entire ecosystem that was fossilized, and therefore one of the most complete pictures of an extinct ecosystem we have. Everything from insects to plant life (quite rare otherwise) to these little fish were all preserved. And apparently since it’s such a rich site, there’s a profusion of these fossils, which I guess is why I was able to purchase one for $20. Quite a steal, if you ask me.

And it doesn’t stop there! I JUST realised after reading about the fish fossil that the ROM has a small section specifically dedicated to the Green River (”realised” meaning Jessica pointed it out to me). So the next time I’m there, you can bet I’m gonna draw the crap out of it. Learning? Don’t mind if I do.

So last week we had a mouse problem that we were all blissfully unaware of until just after 4am one day I awoke to this…

Now I love our cat, Napoleon, but sometimes he really freaks me out.

I felt it necessary to make this painting part of my “I Am Artist” project. I’ve recently come to a bit of a fork in the road with these paintings and this one, “4am” (haha, overdramatic?), is the first entry that was not painted from life. I’m changing my approach slightly to make sure I fulfill my thesis.

The big thesis-type project that I’ve been working on for a year and a half now, “I Am Artist,” along with a lot of other things, is about my life as a painter. So a lot of it (83 paintings finished so far) has been about painting, so naturally there have been a few paintings of paintings. So here’s a fun one to introduce the project, you know, hype it up.

So this portrait I was working on was off and on of my easel (yes, it is in fact an old ladder) for about 13 months… I developed a bit of a love hate relationship with it, so I felt it necessary to document it’s horrible, looming presence.

This may have been painted with a tiny amount of hate.

But I finally managed to finish the thing just before Christmas. The painting of the painting I did in October. Here’s a photo of it finished on the easel JUST for fun…

And for the most fun we could possibly have here, here’s the portrait itself…

...Alright fine, I don't hate it anymore.

This project has about a dozen equally important driving forces behind it, and it would take an awfully long time to get into them all, so I’ll leave it at this for now, but there’s more to come before it’s scheduled completion in September 2010.

Whoa! So it turns out that I can’t even keep up with all the Dinosaur news lately… Since last week there’s been a whole bunch of hoopla about Sinosauropteryx and how we now know exactly what colour it was! Man, that’s cool… feathers and all! Don’t get me started on the feathers…

BUT this week I was planning to talk about the Mosasaur and talk about the Mosasaur I shall! Ok, so a Mosasaur isn’t TECHNICALLY a Dinosaur, it’s a reptile, and a kickass one at that. And I’ve just recently learned HOW kickass they really were…

Ahem, the Mosasaur was an aquatic reptile. After it’s emergence, it managed to become and remain the dominant predator in the ocean until the great extinction, you know, when all the coolest animals died. Which is a serious bummer. (I gather they showed up sometime in the Cretaceous period, which was the last age of the Dinosaurs)

How cool IS that, you ask? Well let’s think about all the other badass predators that would have been around at the time… They beat out the Plesiosaurs (long-necked, Loch Ness Monster types) and the Icthyosaurs (kinda like dolphins if dolphins were horrible monsters) and even the Ginsu Shark… That’s right, it bullied the biggest shark to ever swim in the oceans.

THAT’S the really cool part I just learned… I always thought that as soon as sharks arrived on the evolutionary scene, it was game over for every other kind of predator, especially giant reptile monsters. And this would have been true for the Mosasaur, except that their answer to the Ginsu Shark was to grow so large that even a pack of sharks were no match for it. The Ginsu Shark’s response to even bigger Mosasaurs? Move to parts of the ocean WHERE THERE WERE NO MOSASAURS!

Apparently that’s why sharks still exist to this day, because they were smart enough to know when they were beaten. Wow. Here’s a fun retrospective of all the times I’ve drawn a Mosasaur…

From the Museum of Paleontology in Florence, Italy.

From the ROM.

The ROM (I love that place).

The ROM again... this was the first time I used this SWEET new pen... the Lamy Safari Pen! ...oh, no one cares but me...

And to top it all off, I actually have a fossilized Mosasaur tooth. My brother and his wife gave it to me a while back. I did a painting of it for the big project I’m working on, “I Am Artist.” But more on that some other time.