works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • Spring Snow

    It’s the latter half of May and after weeks of sitting in the backyard sun, cooking out on the campfire grill, starting the garden work, and contemplating the birds, bugs, and flowers, it snowed last night.

    It snowed a heap.

    So much for spring. Well, for today, at least.

    Of course, I stepped out into the yard and checked my trees. The apple tree was covered (no, COVERED) in blossoms and while snow does not equal freezing or frost (mind = blown?) the chill temperatures are not great for those delicate little flowers-soon-to-be-apples.

    The dog on the other hand was in her glory.

    Born in September, our eight month old puppy spent the first couple months of her life with her litter inside, in a heated garage, cuddled up with her siblings.

    Then we adopted her, and brought her home in a minor blizzard, and set her in the backyard to do her puppy-business in a hand-depth of powder.

    The first four months of her life here were bound in snow, covered in ice, and braced in chill winds. In short, she grew up in the snow covered city and will likely forever be a snow dog.

    It’s probably not surprising then, that when I opened the back door and let her into the yard as the flakes began to fall, her reaction was…

    Nostalgia?

    Elation?

    Unfiltered puppy excitement?

    I didn’t think I could express this any other way than to share a bit of art with you: she ran in circles for nearly ten minutes, chased snowflakes and leapt through the patches of accumulation settling into the greening grass. She shook and jumped and played, and in the end I had to coax her inside with a treat to dry off and warm up.

    At least one local was excited about the temporary change in the weather, I guess.

  • Backyard: Clean-Up

    It’s always striking to me that we live in a deeply seasonal place.

    I’m sure that other parts of the planet go through their own share of seasonal variation, but living in one of the more northern capital cities on the Earth also makes places us in a group where vast differences exist between the heart of winter and the edges of summer.

    Today I sit in my backyard in spring and enjoy a mild temperature, barefoot kinda day.

    Four months ago I hardly dared open the door to the brutal cold.

    Four months from now I’ll be picking fruit and veg from trees that at the moment seem barely alive and from soil that is little more than a crusty brown patch in the corner of my backyard.

    I’ve been busy spring cleaning for the last couple weeks.

    Grass to be raked. Leftover leaves that didn’t get sorted out before the snow last fall were starting to rot on the lawn. Flowerpots are full of crusty dried remains of last year’s greenery. Weeds are emerging and poking through the lawn and garden beds. Winter dust and the bits of residue from the long-melted snow needs to be wiped down. And that’s not even to mention the various bits of fence, deck or furniture that need a touch of paint or a tightened screw.

    My lawnmower died as well, and neither wanting to see it dropped into the landfill nor having the patience or skill to repair it myself I hunted down a guy online who takes them as donations, fixes them up, and gives them a new life. But of course that meant a big clean-up of the shed, and rearranging all the various things I’d stored in there over winter, all to extract a broken tool and roll it out to the curb.

    Spring cleaning is a real thing here, not because it’s a good time to get it done but simply because the season ticks over and that it needs done becomes obvious.

    The trees are budding with their baby leaves and blossoms.

    The grass is turning from a pale yellowish-brown to a vibrant green.

    The bees are buzzing through the air and investigating the spring-waking world.

    A few weeks from now it will all be just another summer, but for the moment spring is in clean-up mode, as am I, and the passing of winter feels like a barefoot kinda day in the backyard.

  • Comic: Be Prepared!

    I’m still working on my new comic, but in the meantime I’ve been digging through the archives of my previous strip and realizing that there are dozens of stories about hiking, camping, and outdoor sports.

    For example, after a particularly expensive outfitting trip to the local camp-gear store, I was inspired to draw “Be Prepared!“

    A four panel comic strip.

    This comic was about a guy and his daughter...

    What kinds of adventures do you think a guy and his dog could get up to in the Canadian wilderness?

    I’ve been writing some scripts.

    Drafting some art.

    Preparing to post.

  • Family Day

    Where I live we have a province-wide statutory holiday called Family Day. Today. It always falls on the third Monday of February, and for as long as I’ve been working it has been a random day off in the middle of winter with a clear theme, but no clear method of celebration.

    You don’t exchange cards or gifts.

    It’s not something that we decorate for.

    There are no fireworks, and you generally go to bed at a reasonable time because you’ve got to get up and go to work the next day.

    And in the middle of February it is almost always too cold to do much outdoors beside bundle up and listen to everyone gripe about frozen toes and ears!

    I’ve been pretty clear on the theme of this blog: cast iron cooking and outdoor adventure.

    A snowy mountain canyon with two figures hiking deeper into the trail.

    What I haven’t written much about (though I’ve alluded to frequently) is my family.

    My wife of nearly eighteen years.

    My teenage daughter.

    My new puppy.

    Relatives all across the country, and around the world.

    And many good friends that have earned honourary aunt and uncle status with the kid.

    And I’ve written about all of it for a long time. In fact, over the years I’ve created a few different websites, and if you had asked me a dozen years ago I’d have said that the biggest theme of most of my writing was fatherhood and how it intersects with all the other things in my life.

    For example…

    The first of the two notable websites was a “dad rules” blog, where I would come up with tongue-in-cheek rules for being a dad based on things the kid was doing, write about the silly antics babies and toddlers got up to, and tie it altogether into a cohesive article.

    A three panel strip.

    The second fatherhood website that got a lot of traction was my “This is Pi Day!” web comic. The name came from the idea that pi day, March 14th, was essentially just a celebration of both math and dad jokes. The whole day was just one big dad joke. My comic was mostly the kid character reacting to the dad joke sense of humour of the dad character. The site is still live, but if it happens not to be working when you click on it, note that I host it on a homebrew server in my basement that crashes occasionally.

    While those two blogs were focused on family stories and how they interected with the things I was interested in, if you’ve read enough of this blog you’ll probablly note that it is spun around the other way: focused on the things I’m intersted and how it intersects with my family.

    I cook and bake and set an example of sustainable, healthy eating while teaching these things to my daughter.

    I run, camp, hike, and spend time outdoors, doing much of it with my family and to set an example to a kid who loves her screentime.

    And I try to instill a sense of legacy and purpose into my work, the hobbies I do and tools I use to build up something to someday pass down to my now and future family.

    These are the things I’m interested and how they intersect with family.

    So, on this family day, a diversion from that regular focus to spin it back around for a moment: that’s my family and how it drives almost everything I do. No cards or gifts or decorations, just a quiet celebration at home today.

  • Comic: Kicking off Gaige and Crick

    I alluded in a previous post that I was fumbling through the idea of starting another web comic as a kind of spiritual sequel to the comic I stopped drawing about two years ago now.

    I think it would make a great addition to a daily blog like this and allow me to supplement the wordy nature of daily blogging with something unique and more visual.

    It’s not much to look at yet, but it blossomed out of an idea to take an art style I’m comfortable with and a legacy of drawing comics about parenting and then extrapolating it into a story about a guy and his dog and their adventures through the backcountry.

    I fussed through some concept work over the last couple days and did some loose sketching on my iPad:

    Rough sketch of a cartoon man and a dog walking up a mountain trail.

    I roughed that out in my go-to vector editing program, Inkscape, first playing around with a character design and getting the models where I liked them. What resulted was some basic art and recycling of the some of the assets from my former comic to rough out the scene:

    A rough vector art cartoon of a man and a dog hiking.

    I did another hour or so of work to build some updated custom scenery, specifically looking at how I can do “nature” better if that’s going to be the primary setting for a future strip. I sketched some trees, I cleaned up my backgrounds and worked on some shadowing.

    I’m also keeping to my custom cartooning font that I created and tweaked for use in that aforementioned web comic project.

    The final result was a masthead that I’m reasonably happy sharing as a kick-off to this sub-project:

    Where this goes next is probably going to take me a few weeks or more to get rolling properly. Stories & jokes. Some settings. More art assets. And a schedule for designing and publishing these on this blog.

    Stay tuned.

    The Adventures of Gaige and Crick has taken it’s first step out the front door.