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12.1.25Holiday Lights Mini-BlinkThe Art Museum is open late every Thursday and Friday until the end of the year. To help with attendance, a custom projection-mapped show is playing on the north wall of the courtyard. The show is about 4 minutes long and plays every 15 minutes with a full soundtrack synced to the visuals.I photographed it for the museum’s marketing team this evening.
12.2.25Coming Soon8K are finishing up an apartment renovation in Evanston and needed to start listing as many apartments as possible. These are rent-controlled units that I think are quite nice, especially for the price and size. While the building is still under a lot of construction, I was able to shoot two apartments without much trouble. The rest will need to be done next month when construction has wrapped and the floors have been cleaned.Also, it snowed again. I like this type of snowfall because it’s light, doesn’t sit atop an inch of ice, and minimally impacts the roads. It’s good coverage, but we’re not all trapped in our homes. It’s beautifully fun and devoid of the worst traits of a heavier storm.
12.3.25Unearthing GameboyThe sketchbook I used to have was missing. I’d looked in the art cabinet in the living room, my workshop, and on the bookcase. The only other hiding place it could’ve been was my office closet, but sorting through that mess was a can of worms I wanted kept shut. Alas, the sketchbook was important, and I knew it wouldn’t resurface on its own.I got a fresh can of Coke Zero from the fridge as a salve to soothe the pain in the ass that was to come. Taking a long, refreshing drink, I slammed the quarter-empty can down on my desk, flung open the office door, and cracked my knuckles.After a sweaty 10 minutes of lifting tote after tote, I finally found the sketchbook. Mission accomplished. Cue fireworks and Blue Angels fly-over. The worst part was yet to come, though: putting all this shit back. As I started undoing the progress I’d made, I stopped to look in a couple of totes; every Enquirer on my birthday from 1986 until 2000 my grandmother collected and gave to me, a box of tchotchkes and framed photos, and my surviving collection of retro video games from my childhood. Atop the pile in that last box was my old original Gameboy with Tetris wedged in the slot.I took it out, turned it over in my hands a few times, ran a finger over the screen, and tapped the buttons a few times. The way it felt in hand was immediately recognizable. You don’t forget the shape of a Gameboy like this. It felt lighter, though, so I checked the battery compartment: empty, thankfully. I thanked my past self for not ruining an irreplaceable object like this by carelessly leaving corroded batteries in it for decades.After putting all the totes back in the closet with one less Gameboy in them, I slapped fresh Duracells in the unit and fired it up. The familiar descending Nintendo logo sank from the top frame of the screen and settled in the middle with that iconic “coin” chime. Tetris’ theme began playing shortly thereafter, and it brought me back to sitting in the back room of my grandmother’s house—the one with the ancient TV on the rolling stand and the pull-out couch that would later have a computer in it within a few more years. She gave it to me for Christmas and I remember it being a helluva gift.I knew it was going to be my photo of the day.
12.4.25Myrtle Christmas 2025This is the ninth year in a row that I’ve made a Christmas photo of Myrtle to send out in holiday cards. And, to be honest, I think this one is the best we’ve ever done.Christmas 2017 she was an otherworldly cute puppy. Christmas 2020 had the best classic staging and lighting. 2023 melded my interest in woodworking into the mix by having her sit in the toy box I made for her among all her toys. 2024 was a fresh departure from tradition with a paired-down white backdrop for a more minimal approach.This year, I wanted to get creative with it. I wanted a challenge—something that would stand out and make the recipient stop and actually look at it for more than a couple seconds.I took a box, made a wooden frame out of scrap to put around it so it would keep its shape, and stapled a black piece of cloth with a slit in it to the back. Myrtle stuck her head through the slit and out of the front of the “gift box”, and the goal was to decorate each box with something different. Ashley devised a lot of the art direction within each box while I added small stuff around her work. I moved the camera around four times to achieve the different perspective per quadrant.Even though she’s a very well-trained dog, she has her limits and decided when she was done. We felt like these were the best four options of the many we tried, and I stitched everything together in Photoshop. There was absolutely no AI used for any of this; just good old-fashioned Ps. There is only one object that I added in post from a generic Google image search that wasn’t actually in any of the photos. If you email me your guess, I’ll tell you whether or not you got it right.
12.5.25Drafting TableI’m getting back into illustration so much that I went ahead and added a drafting table on the other side of the office. Having a dedicated space to draw, pin up works in progress, and come back to them when I’m able is so much better than clearing my computer desk every time.
12.6.25Let There Be LightAdded under-the-shelf lighting to these shelves a couple months ago. I had every intention of photographing friends at a gathering that we had at our place today, but I was too busy living in the moment and forgot to take a single photo, so this is what I am submitting for today.
12.7.25InspirationSince I’m drawing more, I’m finding it’s easier to get in the headspace of what I want to do by revisiting the works of artists whose styles I emulate closest. That’s not to say I want to copy directly their styles, but their illustrations are closest to how I prefer drawing. Since I’m still refining my approach and process, it’s nice to refresh myself on what they’ve done so I can have a more cohesive vision for what I want to do.Locally, I really love the way Caroline William drew her scenes. Barbara and David Day are also hugely influential. Additionally, old architectural drawings by Samuel Hannaford and his contemporaries are always worth looking back on.I got this book from the Ohio Bookstore years ago. It’s a collection of floorplans and sketches by George Woodward, originally printed in the late 1800s. I find them among the most beautiful sketches of houses and Victorian-era buildings I’ve seen. They’re so technical and precise. While that’s not how I prefer to work (I like Williams’ more loose approach), I can’t get over the shading in his drawings. They add so much dimension and beautifully highlight the many shapes and corners of each building.
12.8.25UpgradedI posted about our bedroom projector on November 30th and talked about how I had an upgrade on order from B&H. Well, that projector was damaged in transit, so I had to send it back. They replaced it with another one that actually works, though. It’s a ViewSonic LX60HD. I set it up on the shelf, manually adjusted the keystones because the auto-correct feature didn’t work, and now Ashley can comfortably watch TV on the biggest “screen” in the house without needing to have anything bigger than this little box on a shelf in the room.Also, I've not had work outside the house for five days, so if this last week of images hasn’t been overly interesting, it’s because I’ve just been puttering around my house doing all my stupid little hobbies.
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