A Character
I have been thinking about my dad a lot lately. He just retired as a CAT Scan technician from Susquehanna Health after 38 long years; longer than I’ve been alive. When I first heard that he was retiring, part of me thought, You’re not old enough for that. And then I realized, Oh my god, he’s old enough for that.
My mom calls him a character. Sometimes she says it lovingly, sometimes jokingly-- when she is angry she calls him something else, but the sentiment is still the same. I can’t disagree, the man is nothing if not colorful. One of my earliest memories is my dad coming into our old apartment from a snowstorm, he seemed larger than life with the snow and cold air swirling around him.
He came from humble beginnings with apparently little to no parental supervision based on some of the stories he has shared with my sister and I. He still has a scar above his eyebrow from a friendly game of catch with the neighbor girl when he was a kid. Instead of using a ball, they used a brick (first mistake) and instead of catching the brick with his hands, he caught it with his face (ouch). There are many similar stories in this vein.
Ironically, my dad is actually pretty good at sports– basketball, football, track, ping-pong, did I mention he is also a horrible winner? I bet you've never seen a grown-man talk smack to a 10 year old after a game of mini-golf, but yeah, that happened. I can’t complain too much though, as he passed on his love of sports and competitive nature to me. He encouraged me to play soccer, basketball, and tennis and attended almost all of my games and matches with a play-by-play critique afterwards. One year, he was actually my assistant soccer coach and was much beloved by my teammates for his easy-going nature. One of the girls found a four leaf clover during practice (we learned the art of losing gracefully that year) which she gave to my father for safekeeping. Before every game that season, we would gather around him as he pulled out the plastic insert in his wallet with the four leaf clover pressed inside and we would rub it for luck.
His one “Hey, I’m pretty awesome at sports” exception has been golf. He’s mediocre golfer at best, but he’s taken it in stride over the years. More than that even, he’s become a philosopher and poet about the matter. We used to wake up early and walk the back 18 of White Deer golf course to collect lost golf-balls. I’m not sure my dad has paid for a golf ball in ten years. If you think it’s easy, it’s not. Only a bad golfer truly knows the best spots to find lost golf balls. Standing at the edge of the pond while my dad fished out golf-ball after golf-ball with his Terminator-esque golf ball retriever, he held up one and reflected,
“Terri, every one of these is a broken heart”, and dropped it in his nearly full bucket, before moving on to grove of trees that he has “sliced” into more than once.
Growing up, my dad pulled double duty being my own personal chauffeur, something I did not appreciate at the time. I would get into the car with him to go the grocery store or soccer practice or school and, I knew two things would happen: One, we would listen to “We didn’t start the fire” by Billy Joel as he pumped his fist in the air and sang along and two, we would have “a talk”. He would begin by asking me how things were going and then segway into a practical assessment of my strengths and weaknesses and finish with a strong warning against common pitfalls of teenangerdom. It went something like this:
“Terri, you can do anything you want. You’re smart, you’re cute, you’re athletic…. You’re a knucklehead but you have a good heart. You can do anything you want– as long as you don’t get pregnant!”
We will still take long rides together on occasion, but they are not the same. Partly because I’m an adult and partly because he’s losing his hearing and insists on driving with the windows down. When we’re in a car together, there’s a lot of “What?!?” and “Huh!?” and eye rolling. It’s much easier to just turn up the first Pitch Perfect CD and sing along. Yeah, he knows all of the words.
He’s hard to get a hold of now though as he’s been spending more and more time on “The land” which has little to no cell phone reception, which he considers a perk. A couple of years ago, my mom found 15 acres that was up for sale in Sullivan county. They purchased it under the premise that my dad needed someplace to hunt. Ironically, after two years, he has yet to bring home the bologna so to speak, and during hunting season, we call it “The Deerless Land”. He is optimistic and keeps busy by assembling and putting up multiple tree stands every year. Whenever I call, it seems like he and my mom have just put up another one. I haven’t been up to “The land” in a while but I can only hope that they have been adding elaborate rope bridges to connect the stands and create a tree-fort city now that he’s retired, which, quite frankly, would be a childhood dream fulfilled.
So what will my dad do with his retirement?
If you ask him what he’s going to do with all of his free time, he’ll tell you that he’s going to be an excellent house husband. He’s going to take care of the cats, clean the house, whip up meals, and putter around in his garden. He talks a good game, but I know will also be taking a nap around 10am every day with the permanent installment of Maine Coons and the new batch of kittens that we’re temporarily fostering.
But more than that, he’s going to take long rides to spot deer and wear his Penn State Watch on game days. He’s going to continue insisting that Coors Light is better than Miller Lite to the stupification of all, and grow his sneaker collection to girl-worthy level of shoe collecting.
In short, he’s going to keep being a character. Because this stuff, doesn’t write itself.
The Creative Process (Just Shoot Me)
Last month, I stopped at Central Market in Lancaster to pick up some some treats and candy for my family before heading home for the weekend... Continue Reading
Last month, I stopped at Central Market in Lancaster to pick up some some treats and candy for my family before heading home for the weekend. It was a cool, rainy day in April, the beginning of spring. I knew I wanted to pick up some Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Eggs from The Candy Stand for my mom, Shoofly pie from Wendy Jo’s for my dad, Black Peppercorn cheese from S. Clyde Weaver’s for me, and some Stroopies from Lancaster County Stroopies/ Amish Family Recipes for my sister; my definition of a good morning.
Of course I brought my camera along out of habit. The weather was less than ideal and I was in a hurry, but I knew better than to leave it at home; a classic just-in-case scenario. I was walking quickly into market, the dark sky intermittently spitting rain, when I saw two girls walking down the alleyway with totes, baskets, and umbrellas in hand. Instinctively, I snapped their picture, admiring the composition of the scene more than anything else. Otherwise, the colors were muted and dark, there were tons of extraneous and distracting details in the shot, no detail in the sky and I managed to get a few raindrops on my lens. In short, it was a crap photo.
See the slideshow below to check out the full creative process.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I was fiddling around in Lightroom that I came across the shot again. Yup, just as horrible as I remembered except for the composition…. except maybe this wasn’t a throwaway shot, maybe it was a salvage mission. This crappy photograph could be the base of a really cool illustration that I could turn out pretty quickly, or so I thought.
Fast forward four weeks later. The temperature has reached into the eighties, the flower petals are raining down with every gust of wind, and I have finally, finally finished this illustration, thank ye Gods! But after working and staring at this project to the point of burning in it my retinas, just showing you the “Ta-da!” end result seems kind of anticlimactic. Let us revel instead, if you will, in the insane amount of time and attention I have devoted to Rainy Market Day. If only I had spent more time on the title.
For those of you who listen to director commentaries or take the behind the scene tours, this is your lucky day. Continue reading below for the story behind the illustration, Rainy Market Day. I know you want to!
1. The Details: I used Illustrator for the bulk of my design, 90% roughly. My first concern were the details: the bricks in the building, the cobblestones, the rooftops, etc. Ultimately, I decided to stick with the detail in the cobblestone and just use solid colors, gradients and architectural details for the buildings. I wanted the piece to have some texture and depth to it, but I didn’t want the background to feel cluttered or distract from my focal point. Besides which, it would have taken forever! An important part of design are deadlines and time constraints, otherwise designers would work and improve on things for years.
2. The Colors: I realized when I was selecting colors for the background, they were pretty monochromatic. A lot of brown, tan, grays, muted reds. So I knew that I wanted to the make the women, with their the umbrellas, the focal point of the entire piece and adding some spring colors to their parcels, accessories, clothes was a no brainer. I picked yellows, blues, purples, and greens as their color pallet to reference spring and remind the viewer that rainy days give way to blue and sky and tulips and lush green grass, etc.
3. The Women: As for the actual women, I wanted to create characters that looked real in the space. I could have easily found some model shot to use as a reference point, with a cinched waist, flared collar, and high heels, but I wanted to maintain the integrity of the original photograph and the spirit of the illustration which is authentic to Lancaster.
4. The Texture: So for the background texture, I wanted add some energy to the piece and also reference the rain, and general grossness of the day. So I took my completed illustration into Photoshop and using watercolor brushes, created the background. I also really liked the contrast between the soft lines of the watercolor and the unsparing lines of the illustration.
5. The Text and Borders: Finally. I wanted to add a border, something that suited and complimented the illustration without being distracting. My mom is taking a stained glass class right now, and the idea for creating stained glass board germinated from a couple of conversations with her involving her class. Thanks Mom!
I pulled the text from one of the women’s bags. I wanted to keep the “love local” detail because that is sooo Lancaster and the spirit of Central Market, but I wanted it to pop a little bit more. So I pulled it off the bag and essentially added it as a caption, to the top of the illustration. I used a cursive font to keep with the hand-drawn effect.
Ta-Da! This illustration will be for sale in the near future.
Thanks for reading!
