Oh, such a very late Christmas card "reveal"...!

Well, we knew it would be late...! I've been busy finishing work to be included in a show in Atlanta, for a gallery that's new to me. (Very exciting!) It was my year to come up with the Christmas/holiday card, and I just couldn't make time for it until the last minute. We've had a "Noir" wall calendar this year, so it's not much of a guess that the garish film posters it's illustrated with inspired the direction of the card. Rather than taking the precious time to create something from whole cloth this go 'round, I adapted the Belgian (?) poster made to promote the 1946 version of "The Killers".

I needed a little more room to work, so I expanded the image on the left side and the top. Ava Gardner's dress is blue in the original, but I adjusted it to a more Christmas-y green. And as I could not live with her pink ankle-strap sandals, I likewise tweaked their color. I gave the film's producing credit to Nicholas - O'Donnell+Little=O'Dittle - whose silhouette looms ominously in the background. And the director is a certain "P. Prévert", a reference to G's sometime performance persona, Penny/Prudence Prévert. The actor credits are a play on our first and middle names; G's actual first name is Eugenia, if you didn't know. I tried to find fonts that were close to the original, though I had to individually "shred" the ends of the letters in the main title. Then there's our usual gender reversals; I always look great as a redhead, I must say. And G looks particularly studly here. I think her masculine allure is only enhanced by that mustache, borrowed from none other than Clark Gable.

Half a century - Gigi's birthday card "reveal"

It doesn't seem possible, but my sweet wife turns fifty years old today. If you knew her, if you could see her in person, you'd be every bit as incredulous; she barely looks out of her twenties. And more than her youthful appearance, it's her vivacity and curiosity and humor. In countless ways, she's really quite a remarkable human. And I'm so grateful that I get to share my life with her; how I got so lucky I'll never understand. Gigi - Eugenia Bain Little, ma belle Eugénie - I salute you!

But one more thing about that "eternally youthful" business? If people start asking if she's my daughter, I'm going to be very cross...!

Nicholas salutes her, too.

And the image of Nicholas as used in the card? A bit of cotton wool for the doggy ears; Nicholas adores Gigi, but loathes fireworks.

'Twas the night before Christmas - and, thus, this year's holiday card!

It was my turn to produce our holiday card this year, and I just couldn't come up with an idea; I was running out of time and I had nothing. I eventually conjured the thought that I'd like to find something with the saturated colors and rich detail of Early Netherlandish painting. When the amazing Arnolfini double portrait by van Eyck showed up in my search - as it certainly would - and I noted the predominant green and red in the composition, it seemed like a more than reasonable choice. And not too difficult to manage; not much more than face-swapping. It even had a dog in a supporting role!

The Arnolfini Portrait (aka The Arnolfini Wedding, The Arnolfini Marriage, Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife) by Jan van Eyck, 1434.

And yes, with such an iconic painting, all sorts of cheeky - or worse - things have already been done to this image, painted, photographed, and Photoshopped; I'd like to think our version is a little more subtle, more tasteful, a little more respectful of the original, that most. Since, unlike the way we usually concoct these things, I started with an image rather than a concept, when it came time to give it a title, we really had no idea what story our silly mugs were trying to convey. We eventually gave up. And now we're leaving the story for the viewer/recipient to imagine. So, what is the story?

Nicholas would like to wish everyone a happy holiday, a merry Christmas, or whatever lovely thing it is you do to celebrate at this time of year.
(Yes, it pretty much sounds like a bark, but it actually translates to "Joy!")

A celebration of the season of "Weird" - this year's Christmas/holiday card

As I posted then, October saw the début of "City of Weird", the book that Gigi spent the last year and a half editing, illustrating, and designing the cover for. I was pretty sure the book would do well - we were all quite hopeful - but it's done even more spectacularly than we ever could have imagined. Already in its third printing, its "Weird Tales" cover design inspiration seemed the perfect inspiration for our own holiday card. Since G and I now alternate the creative duties for this yearly duty, and since this was her turn to take on the task, it seemed only natural that she would keep "working the theme". I think it turned out brilliantly! A boyish G, a girlish me, and Nicholas; what else could we need? Happy holidays - of whatever persuasion - to you all! xo

Happy New Year!

We were late getting our famous - infamous - Christmas/Holiday card started this year, so we went ahead and decided to make it a New Year's card instead. (As it turned out, we weren't as late as we thought, and most recipients got theirs before Christmas anyway. Whatever....) Since we bought a house this year, we decided to go with a "new home" theme. And what better home-y source material than a photograph of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh lounging about Windsor Castle? Thankfully, there were no Corgis cluttering up the composition, giving us a perfect spot to insert our dear Nicholas.

Why is it that I always look quite convincing as an old woman...

... while G always makes the most peculiar looking fellow...?

Thank you to everyone who "tunes in" to this blog. I so enjoy working at it, spending far too much time scouring up pictures, finding new stories to tell. And I so appreciate your attention and your kind and very smart comments. Here's to a happy and productive and prosperous new year, all of us!

***

Source material: a recent photograph by Thomas Struth. I added a bit more chandelier at the top; never want to scrimp on the chandelier.

Happy Holidays!

It's that time of the year again: the O'Donnell/Little Holiday Card reveal! G did the designing honors this year - the superheroes theme might have given you a clue that it probably wasn't a product of my aesthetic bag of tricks - but it turned out great, and I totally approve and think it's very fun. G did an especially great job comic-book-izing our faces... and creating a certain superhero dogbody! Oh, and you might notice that we didn't go with the expected gender reversal this time; when you mess with all that sort of thing as much as we do, it's almost radical to just... leave it alone!

Nicholas looks adorable in a cape, but I don't expect he'd be overfond of flight!

Christmas Card 2013

It's time for this year's Christmas card "reveal".  G and I didn't share responsibility for the image this go 'round; with a show coming up, I didn't feel I had time for the necessary back and forth negotiating it normally takes to put our card together.  So I did all the Photoshopping and she did all the printing and assembly.

My starting point was the paired state portraits of the Empress Eugénie and Napoléon III by Winterhalter - nice Christmas-y color scheme if nothing else.

There are many, many versions of these two portraits; they're all copies.  The originals are
presumed to have been destroyed when the Tuileries Palace was burnt in 1871.

Rather than the usual oil painting, I believe this image is of one of the tapestry copies of the empress'
portrait; the general tone is brighter in color, and some of the details are more generalized.

Already, the two were nicely oriented toward each other, and the lighting came from the same direction.  It was fun to blend the join between the two backgrounds - draperies, trees and palace - and make it look like it was all one big painting.  I had to do away with the crowns - Nicholas needed to be the master here, not either of us - and then I needed to establish a centrally-located draped table and cushion.  I copied and warped elements from the existing tables and took much of the cushion itself from another Winterhalter painting, the Garter portrait of Queen Victoria.  (Which I recently posted about here.)

There was much fussing: a lot of color adjustment (the red in the emperor's portrait was much less so than in the empress'), subtracting details and then camouflaging the subtraction, copying and adjusting details, then moving them to a different location.  When all that was done, it had gone from this:

To this:

Then to add our faces.  You may not be surprised that G's face went on the boy body, and mine went on the girl's; that's just how we do things around here.

We were pretty easy to do, but Nicholas was a little harder.  Because of the lighting, the table and cushion where he was sitting was quite shadowed, so I had to "shadow" his lower half, as well, but making it seem that light might reach the upper part.  Also, in the original photograph, his right ear had light shining through it and glowed bright red; it just looked wrong.  Blending elements from his left ear and adjusting the color and lighting, I "constructed" a better right ear.

Then he needed some princely ornament.  Because of his tiny head and his big ears, I couldn't get any sort of proper crown on him.  At first, I thought I might just go with a jeweled collar: this being a pearl and diamond bracelet - French, of the same period as the portraits, actually - that I Photoshopped in:

I still like this version much better.  (I also had to lose some of the background details;
they were visually distracting once Nicholas was added to the image.)

But I agreed with G that, scaled down to the actual card size, this would just look like he was wearing a regular collar.  So I eventually settled on adding an emerald brooch (which had belonged to Catherine the Great) to his collar, and topping his little head with the Duchesse d'Angoulême's - much warped - emerald and diamond tiara, once part of the French crown jewels.  I did a lot of work on these two last items, but I still don't think they hold up as well in close-up as other parts of the finished image.  From a distance, though, they add the desired "princely ornament" and a bit more Christmas-cognisant green.

If Nicholas is distressed at having to wear "girl jewelry", he's been too diplomatic to mention it.

A few words by Nicholas about a favorite activity

On Sleep

Sleeping is good.  To sleep heavy, to sleep light.  When it's bright or when it's dark.  But it's always dark underneath, curled up in the quiet and the warm.  It's always good to jump up there, to get on top and push at things, to find the way to get underneath.  And there in the dark, I yawn and scratch and move around to the best place.  And then I curl around myself and make myself warm and go to sleep.  I can sleep so long, it doesn't matter how long, and I don't need anything but the dark and the warm.

When the others are beside me, when it's dark and quiet, usually I curl up next to the small one.  Next to the large one, too, but not so often.  When it's dark and quiet, they move around, and then I have to move around, too, and find a nice place again.  Sometimes I crawl up from underneath, because it gets too warm, and I lie on top and sleep.  Sometimes I come up just a little, the rest underneath.  Sometimes I lie straight out, one of them behind me, and I stretch all the way out and touch the other, pushing against the other a little.  It feels nice to be with both of them, touching them.

When they are gone, both of them, and I don't know when they'll be back again, I stay underneath and sleep and sleep.  When I sleep heavy, sometimes I can't make myself wake up, until one of them comes and makes noises at me, wakes me up and pulls me out from underneath.  And I always stretch and yawn, I jump down and we go out.  But when I sleep light, sometimes I know they're coming soon, I think I hear things, and I come up from underneath.  And I listen.  I listen hard and I wait and wait.

Many times, the small one will pick me up and hold me, and I will curl up where the small one bends.  It's nice to sit there, but I can't really sleep like that.  And then the small one puts me down and I'll go and curl up in that little soft place that is mine, that smells like me.  But it's never really dark there and I can't ever sleep heavy there.

Sometimes I want the bright, though.  And when it's very bright, I go over and sit down in the brightest, warmest place.  I look right up into the bright and sniff at it.  I have to blink and squint at all that bright I like so much.   I lie down and pretend to sleep, there in the warm.  I can't really sleep, not with all that bright on me.  But I lie there because it's warm and it's very nice, until it's time to go and crawl back underneath and really sleep.

Nurse G has a birthday

It was G's birthday yesterday.  Her birthday is one of several days in the year that brings about frenzied Photoshopping.  We both indulge in this activity.  (As I've often shared here.)  The yearly events thus honored are her birthday, my birthday, our anniversary, Christmas, and Valentine's Day.  We both have such fun trying to impress the other with our quite fantastic cleverness.  And, frankly, it's a lot easier and a lot less stressful than trying to come up with the perfect present or presents for each other.  (That's really hard; I don't know how people do that successfully.)  Need I add that it's also quite economical?

Because of G's great good care of me during the last month and a half of my recovery from my fall, it seemed only logical that this year's card should have a nursing theme.  This one is pretty simple, really.  I just Photoshopped G's face onto an old picture postcard of a WWII era Red Cross nurse.  The text was based on the sort of things you'd find on many postcards of that time, celebrating famous figures and/or exemplary wartime service.  I thought that since she needed a decoration, I'd use the Order of St. Nicholas, a fictitious award - named after our dear little dog, Nicholas - whose medal I designed for a recent painting.  (Because, in the painting, the medal and its ribbon are partly obscured, I needed to switch out the ribbon and Photoshop in the rest of the medal.)

Le Monocle - acrylic on panel - 16x12 - 2012

The "Order of St. Nicholas", inscribed with the faux Latin "Nicola Canis", is on the far right.

Oh, how G earned this medal!

Dogs can't eat chocolate

Recently, I was sent a lovely email by one of my collectors.  He and his wife live in California, but over the years they've purchased four of my pieces.  We've never met.  His email was just to tell me how much he admired my work, and how much he and his family enjoyed living with it.  I was very touched.

At the end of the email he asked if we might like a gift of his art.  By which he meant chocolate.  I said, yes, we would most definitely like.  Then I proceeded to get the bug that's going around - G got it first - and rather forgot about the possibility of chocolates winging their way to our doorstep.  A few days ago this arrived:

Six pounds of gorgeously packaged Woodhouse chocolates.  My collector and his family are Woodhouse Chocolate.  A family business in St. Helena, Napa County.  In my email to thank them for their rather magnificent generosity, I mentioned that G and I were still getting over being sick, and that we would commence tasting once we'd gotten to the point where we felt we could do the gift justice.  Last night was the night.

***

José

Every March 1st - or leap day, if there is one; it really should be leap day - G and I celebrate "José Day", the day on which, in 2008, our very aged little Chihuahua passed away.  Since we have Nicholas now - Chihuahua redux? - he's included in the evening's entertainments, which include a dog-related film and treats, for us and for Nicholas.  Last night we got started too late to watch a whole movie.  (It's always rather a scramble to find something apt, anyway; our collection of dog-related films is quite meagre.  And when you're mourning the loss/celebrating the life of a dog, just how comforting is "Umberto D."?)  So we decided to watch a few episodes of "I love Lucy", instead. 

As part of our Christmas gifts to each other this past year, we bought a huge, garishly packaged complete set of "I Love Lucy" and, when we don't have time to watch a movie, we'll often watch an episode or two.  Or three or four.  This first time through, we've been watching them in the order they aired.  Last night, as I put the next disc in, the one that was the beginning of the second season, I thought, you know, we're going to have some of that chocolate tonight, what if...?  And as fate would have it - it usually does, you know - the first episode on the disc was the one where Lucy and Ethel go to work in the candy factory.  Perfect.

***

By the way, our chocolates were amazing.  Subtle and complex and sure to play major havoc with my diet.  Nicholas got his treats as well.  A miniscule amount of good cheese, a miniscule amount of roast chicken.  Nicholas did not get any chocolate.

Sleep wear trends for the post-op pooch

Two Mondays ago - the day after my birthday - our dear little dog, Nicholas, started feeling very ill.  We had a few really scary days, going back and forth to the hospital, before they finally figured out that he'd ingested part of a doggy toy.  That Wednesday he had surgery.  We had more vet and hospital visits in the days after that, mostly because we wanted to be very sure that everything was going the way it should be and that he was as comfortable as we could make him.  He's doing fine now and almost finished up with his convalescence.  He's been a total trouper through the whole thing; G and I were completely wrecked!

(G tells a more detailed version of the story on her blog.) 

One of the most challenging aspects in the week and a half or so since his surgery has been sleep time.  We arranged our schedules so that, during the day, one or both of us was here to watch him, because the biggest concern was that he'd try and fuss with his incision.  But at night we needed to put him in what they call an e-collar, so that he'd be protected from himself while we slept.  At first he was quite obviously very uncomfortable and none of us slept much at all.  It's progressively gotten easier.  Everyone's seen the sad little dogs and cats burdened with what looks like a inverted lampshade on their heads.  Nicholas' versions were slightly different, and he has kindly agreed* to model them for you.

Model number one:  Thick transparent plastic.  Black Velcro closure.  Matching piping at base.

Pluses:  See-thru and Astro-chic.

Minuses:  Stiff and too small; it was right up against his chin and he couldn't move his head at all.  Also gave him a bruise on his neck.

Verdict:  Thank you.  We've got enough problems right now.  We'll keep looking.









Model number two:  Stiff but quite pliable blue synthetic fabric.  White edging and drawstring.

Pluses:  Softer and more size-adjustable.  Adaptable - can be worn facing out for sleeping, or folded back for day wear.  (see below)

Minuses:  It's a collar.  For a dog.  And Nicholas doesn't find that color blue at all congenial.

Verdict:  It's still a big, floppy, annoying thing.  Thank you, but we'll keep looking.

[Folded back when worn during the day.]
















Model number three:  Green cotton onesie, size: 3 months. Embroidery of an effeminate monkey on the side.

Pluses:  Our vet told us that Nicholas might be more comfortable sleeping in a onesie for the last few days of his convalescence.  It fits perfectly and is a nice chartreuse color.  The monkey embellishment is a nice - if rather ironic - reference to the cause of all his problems.  The manufacturer placed three snaps at the butt-end; if one only connects the two outer snaps, there is ample space left to accommodate a dog's tail.  It's cuuute!

Minuses:  He wiggled out of it the first night. 

Verdict:  He goes back to model number two for the duration.





*  No dogs - meaning Nicholas - were harmed in the production of this photo shoot.  Mr. O'Dittle is displaying that rather pathetic aspect merely to give the public some idea of his recent suffering.  In reality - finally, happily - he's feelin' fine!