gratitude

Catching up this blog, as promised. I'm back to work as a full time illustrator for the first time since last November and it feels great. Just completed: the dummy for the book that was put on hold, the Tibetan Chiru, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin for Houghton Mifflin, who have all been so good to me through the hand trauma.












Also another card for Peaceable Kingdom Press. This is the first painting with my new hand. Not just a fairy or a unicorn, but a fairy AND a unicorn in one card! I really like this one, and this company is unbelievably wonderful.

Chapel Street

The Chapel Street store windows during the filming.





























































Extras and one of Indiana's doubles under the lights illuminating the Yale dining hall.













The newspaper boxes, traffic lights and parking meters being replaced, returning New Haven to its usual landscape.

stunt cars

The cars were beautiful, and many of them had hidden agendas. This one had a back window that popped out, and many replacement windows stacked in the truck behind it. Inside, the elegant console, with the addition of mysterious modern switches.

Indiana Jones

I've been distracted away from blogging by many things including a chauffeur job, returning to full time illustration, and Indiana Jones. More on the first two later.

Within a day of the Arts and Ideas Festival ending, the same New Haven streets were taken over by Paramount Pictures filming the fourth Indiana Jones. Being addicted to spectacle I couldn't stay away from it. Chapel Street was turned into the 1950's, from the removal of parking meters, to the rebuilding of facades, down to the smallest details of the window displays. Dozens of old cars, hundreds of extras in period costume, and a whole city of crew, trailors, trucks and equipment comfortably settled in all around town. A casual stroll through the city might have brought you a motorcycle chase being filmed, or one of Indiana's many doubles, or the real Steven Spielberg walking down High Street for a paper.

What was even more interesting then the filming was watching New Haveners take everything in stride with the most laid back sort of curiosity. The few aggressive gawkers I met in my extensive wandering turned out to be out of town professional autograph hunters, who were also fascinating with their intricate network of watchers stationed at key locations, passing valuable information on to each other. If you wanted to know the best place to see something, follow one of these people, though information from them directly is certain to be intentionaly false.

First photo: College Street filled with 1950s cars and trucks. Next photos: Chapel Street transformed into a movie set, and it's steady stream of onlookers who were never kept too far away by the crew. All the shops stayed open behind their facades, with vinyl signs of their true identity displayed while filming was on hold. The promanade went on day and night for a couple of weeks. My favorite hunters who professed to have obtained autographs from Spielberg, Lucas, and Shia LaBeouf, but were out for the elusive great white whale: Harrison Ford.