I recently visited the aquarium and exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. They hold a weekly ‘happy hour’ event in the evening that is adults only, and you can buy drinks and cocktails to take around the museum with you.

I took my sketchbook around instead. It was awkward to draw because there were very few places to sit and still have a view of any exhibits, so I only ended up with a single page of sketches.

I liked the albino alligator a lot. Unlike the fish, he was sleepy and still. Even that starfish I doodled moved around more than he did. And the gazelle thing didn’t count, because it was taxidermied.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and the movie based on it, The Secret of NIMH, are two of my favorite things from childhood. I’m extremely leery of the new CGI/live action movie they’re making based on the book. I personally can’t see it working on the same emotional level that the book and 2D animated movie did. There’s a certain expressiveness in the style of those Don Bluth animated films that suited it very well.
Now, if it was Pixar handling it rather than Paramount, I could easily believe they could pull it off and be true to the spirit of the original book.
Anyway, to get over my pre-emptive ill-will towards the new movie, I’m rereading the book and doing my own illustrations for it. I’m doing it in an unstructured way…just drawing whatever scenes strike me as needing to be drawn. Here’s the first:

“With her forepaws and sharp teeth she pulled off a part of the husk from the top ear of corn and folded it double to serve as a crude carrying bag. Then she pulled loose as many of the yellow kernals as she could easily lift, and putting them in the shuck-bag she hopped off briskly for home.”

I have a deep love for vintage prints and books, and I was thinking that some of them need to be shared with the world.

This is a plate I picked up this past weekend at a Vintage Paper show here in San Francisco. It’s an odd piece, according to the label it’s some kind of plan or schematic for decorations on a piece of furniture. I love the birds and the mice, but it’s the little Xs marked on the drawing that really make it for me. You’ll sometimes see that used to denote areas of a print that are to be filled in with black, but I don’t know if they serve the same purpose here. Anyone know?

Details:

This print is from a loosebound collection called “Documents d’Atelier Art Décoratif Moderne”, published in 1898. The only clue as to who the artist might be is the ‘Th. Lambert’. Which may not even be a name!

I’m going to try to make a weekly feature of posting scans of some of the vintage peices I’ve collected. Just need to come up with a snappy name for it…