Here is my studio in its temporary space. This is where I work while construction is being finished on my new studio.
Kermit watches over the studio
The Great Gonzo
Bug
My beloved guppies.
The Wildthings...and I don't mean the figures.
Chalupa the puppet
WOMAN!
My drawing desk. A hybrid of traditional and computer.
I am currently working on illustrations for the book Jimmy and the Crow by Christine Stanley. This will be Christine’s first children’s book and it’s a wonderful story. I’ve had a blast with the illustrations so far and Christine has been amazingly receptive and great to work with. I look forward to seeing the final product.
Following are two samples of the artwork for her book.
The Crow eats an egg.
Jimmy dissaproves.
With our baby’s due date approaching at blindingly fast speed, we had our baby shower this Sunday. It made me start to think about my first baby and the items that I found most useful. Following are ten baby items that I could not live without as a father. I highly recommend them to all new fathers to make their journey into father hood easier.
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Baby Carrier: I highly recommend this for new fathers. It’s important that you not entirely restructure your life to fit around the new addition. Find ways to implement your baby into your life. A baby carrier is a great start. My wife and I are involved in theater. It is a love we share and it brings us together. However, having a baby can present a problem with us both staying involved. We found our solution with a baby carrier. It allowed me to rehearse and perform in the musical “Seussical the Musical” with our baby strapped firmly to my chest. We made it through the musical as a family with neither of us having to stay home. No, I didn’t play the sour Kangaroo, though Aubreigh would have made a wonderful baby kangaroo. Baby Bjorn makes a great baby carrier. There are also more affordable variations that work just as well such as Snugli. |
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Jogging Stroller: Once the baby is here, it’s time to work off that baby weight you have gained with the pregnancy…yes, guys gain it too. A jogging stroller is a great way to lose that weight and for the baby, it provides a joyful stroll. After all, you need to start taking care of yourself so you can be around for all the grandchildren and great grandchildren you will one day have. There are many variations out there. My advice is to research on the internet to find the best combination of price and functionality to meet your needs. |
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Suitable Television: Babies are highly impressionable. Though they don’t understand all they see or hear, it still influences them. Remember: A baby can only dream about what it knows. Make sure they have good dreams. There will be times you are sitting up late at night with your baby and though it may be tempting to turn on “Superbad” and have a laugh or pop in the latest thriller, resist the urge. Avoid violence and harsh language. Instead find a happy median: Entertainment you can enjoy that will positively influence your child. I highly recommend Fraggle Rock. It has great characters, great stories, great fun and best of all, great music. All four seasons are available in a box set from Amazon or your local DVD dealer. |
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Baby Wipes Warmer: A no-brainer. Cold and backsides go together like orange juice and toothpaste. If you have ever touched a cold wipe to a baby’s bottom, you know what I mean. A wiper warmer spares your baby from the discomfort of experiencing a cold chill on their tush. Not to mention it saves you from having a “sword in the stone” moment. This happens when you use a cold wipe and your babies cheeks clench down like the jaws of life. It’s impossible to unearth the wipe from the depths of East Cheek and West Cheek without leaving behind bits and pieces of paper which you must later fish out. Be kind to the behind. Prince Lionheart makes a wonderful wipes warmer and it is available at most baby retailers. |
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Diaper Bag: Aka, the survivor kit for being a father. This will host everything you need to care for your baby while out and about. Don’t leave home without it! Diapers, check. Wipes, check. Blanket, check. Toys, check. Bottles, check. Now you need a way to carry them. Don’t be ashamed to posses one in public, it’s a badge of honor announcing your dad status to others, not a purse. For a more discreet papa, there are book bag style diaper bags. Diaper Dude Diaper Bag is a great bag and Skip Hop makes great bags as well. I personally carry a Vera Bradley Mod Floral Pink diaper bag and yes, I have gotten many nice compliments about it from women. |
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Good Computer: Now that your new life has started, it’s time to save those memories. Investing in a new computer is an excellent start in documenting your child’s path from diapers to drivers-ed. Not only does it allow you to print and store digital images, but it allows you to easily create videos using home movie footage, still images and music. As far as quality, ease of use, stability, and value of software out of the box, you can’t go wrong with a Mac computer. Both the MacBook and iMac are affordable, professional computers for image and video creation. |
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Bouncer Seat: An affordable solution to calm your new baby. I recommend a bouncer seat that includes a rumble motion. This often has a calming effect. A good bouncer seat is a comforting and welcome seat for your newborn. Not only is it great for playtime, but often it can lead to a nap. Find one with bright colors, music, toys and rumble motion. Boppy makes a great bouncer I recommend that is extremely soft and comes in colors for both girls and boys. |
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Infant Gowns: Trust me on this one: Snapping the countless snaps of a one piece sleeper of a crying baby with a dirty diaper in the middle of the night is about as fun as licking a porcupine. Often you will end up with a leg through a hole that is no hole at all or extra snaps that have no opposite snap to buddy up with with the only option being a restart to to porcupine licking contest. Infant Gowns eliminate this frustrating trial. Don’t worry, their for boys too. If it makes you feel better, think of it as a kilt. Gowns allow for easy diaper changing when a child is young and diaper changes are frequent. |
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Baby Toys: As a work at home father, the right toys helped me to grab a few minutes of work time while keeping my baby entertained with educational and stimulating activity. For newborns, I recommend a play mat/baby gym. They provide endless hours of entertainment with varying actives for young children. The one I personally recommend is Bright Starts Baby’s Play Place Play Mat. It’s a Swiss Army Knife of baby play. Starting out, it has sides that fold up to provide a safe environment for your child to lay on their back and stare up at flashing lights and mirrors and listen to colorful music. As they grow, the sides fold down to expand the play mat and provide quality tummy time. A play mat allows your child to be entertained and give you a much needed and deserved break. As your baby grows and starts to stand, I recommend an excersaucer for the same purpose. |
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Most Importantly: Love. Love your new baby and your significant other and your entire family. The love you show and display for your child is the love they will share as they grow. Provide a warm, nurturing environment for your child and watch them bloom into amazing human beings. |
Have a reccomendation of your own? Feel free to leave a comment with your favorite baby items.
A Pig Named Sue
by Jeff Duckworth
Do you know Sue? She thinks she can fly.
She thinks she’s a fairy. I do not know why.
She knows of the ground, but not of the sky.
She knows of low down, but not of up high.
Sue made some wings, she made them of wood.
Held together with tape, they weren’t very good.
Then she flew far, as far as she could.
But found herself standing right where she had stood.
I’ve been quite busy in the past two weeks. Lots of great projects in the works for the future. Moo-Pig is off to the publisher for consideration. I will let you know when I hear something back. Might be up to three months. I have a number of other books I’m working on now. Two are for submission and one, This Tree is For Me, is for this Blog. Should have an updated on that next week.
Below is the final illustration for our Baby Shower Invitation.
Final Baby Shower Invitation
I also designed and painted three baseball helmets last week. Here are the images for the final painted helmets.
Baylie's Painted Baseball Helmet
Mattie's Painted Baseball Helmet
Tanner's Painted Baseball Helmet
These are all personal/family projects. I like to make sure I keep my family involved in my work. Designing for them is very rewarding. As you can see, my dino from the invitation made it onto a helmet. I love this character and plan to develop him further.
My son is now in the 1st grade and my daughter is 17 months old. With the birth of our new boy approaching faster than I can believe, I have been amazed about how much my children have grown and most of all, how smart they are.
Samuel can now read a book with no problem. He read all by himself, for the first time, a book that I wrote and illustrated. That was an amazing experience! He spells words that I still struggle with and he has begun to beat me regularly when we play Nintendo together. He is becoming an independent young man and has already begun to develop teenage habits. The other day he came home with a girls phone number.
Aubreigh is amazing as well. She now opens child safety-locked cabinets with the ease of a master locksmith. They still perplex me. Now if I need a cabinet open, I spare myself beat up knuckles and just ask her to do it. She dresses herself, although not tastefully. Her outfits consist of large socks, shirts worn as skirts and various articles of clothing slung about her neck. She even feeds the cat many times throughout the day (2 pieces of a cat food at a time. It is adorable.)
A few things have happened in the past weeks that have really put things in perspective for me.
1. I decided to play a joke on my usually gullible son. I took a pinch of black Play-Doh and smeared it on one of my front teeth. I then approached him and casually said “Did Mommy tell you what happened earlier? I got a tooth knocked out.” I grinned to show him the blacked out tooth. “DUH,” he replied, “That’s just Play-doh. That’s preposterous.” He was right. Play-Doh may smell tasty but it isn’t. And it doesn’t easily come off teeth. Who was the smart one here? The 6 year old with no Play-Doh on his tooth or the 29 year old with black Play-Doh smeared across his tooth and the horrible, salty taste associate with it.
2. My youngest is akin to a cat. She does things that make no sense to anyone but herself. I was in the shower when I was greeted with a “DAAAADDY.” Then suddenly, my clean underpants were thrust into the shower and were soaked. Of course she was trying to be helpful. All I could say is “Thanks,” followed by a mumble of “what a nut…she makes no sense sometimes. What is she thinking” A little later, she begged for my car keys, which I let her play with. She immediately took them to the VCR and shoved them in. Again, all I could do was say to myself “what a nut! No sense at all, that one.” I went to the VCR to fish them out. The lights on the VCR begun to flash wildly, in and out, as I dug around blindly inside with my hand. That’s when it hit me, who is the smart one in this situation. Who is the nut? The 17 month old thrusting my clothes into the shower and my keys into the VCR? Or the 29 year old wearing wet underpants with his \hand jammed into an electronic device, still plugged in and powered up.
Jeff – Zero. Kids – Two.
The day we get to meet our little baby boy is quickly approaching. Only three more months until he is here. WOW. I am currently working on the invitations to send out for the baby shower. Here is the artwork.
Baby Shower Invitation Artwork
It is an absolute honor to create artwork for this extraordinary event. Who knows. One day you may be reading about the Life and Adventures of Baby Duck.
*ding ding ding*
In this corner, wearing the dumb confused look of frustration and goofy red shorts that went out of style with the Swatch Watch: Jeffrey “The Goat” Duckworth
And in this corner, sporting a red frame, multiple families of mice and a dull blade: Snapper “I don’t want to come out of Hibernation” Mower
Now, lets have a good clean fight….not likely says the Snapper.
Yes, it’s that mowing time of year. This year I approached our outbuilding that houses our Snapper Lawnmower with optimism that the mower would start without a hitch. I might as well had hopes that if I stood in the ocean, a crashing wave would slap me in the face and delivery a freshly cooked lobster for dinner. I opened the outbuilding door to a scattering of mice. “Quick,” I heard them squeak, “It’s the dorky human with the unsightly shorts. Run.” One mouse even stopped in hus scattering about to thank me for the supply of grass seed I had left to feed them through the winter. I am at heart a softy. These mice would meet no harm.
I hopped onto the mower literally with mice scampering about and over my feet. They are friendly mice. I turned the key over and: Nothing. As I yanked the mower out of the building, I kept running through my head possible solutions. First the basics: In neutral? Check. Brake On? Check. Battery Hooked up correctly? Check. Gas? Oops.
There was a hole in the gas tank. Apparently the mice were bored over the long winter holiday and decided to entertain themselves with gas fumes. This explained their goofy behavior. No problem. I took the gas tank off for patching. In the mean time, I pulled a gas tank from a push mower and put fresh gas in it. Gas? Check. I tried to crank it. This time the engine turned over but wouldn’t start. It was getting dark at this point so I called it a night. Round 1 went to the Snapper.
Round 2: Towed the mower down to the garage. I took off the engine cover to reveal the biggest mouse nest I had ever seen. In it was a momma mouse and her 4 babies. They scampered away harmlessly and I cleaned their nest off the engine block. I felt bad for destroying their home but knew they would be OK. I pulled the spark plug and cleaned it off. I sprayed some starter fluid into the carburetor and cleaned off the air filter. Turned the key and…nothing. I had enough mouse home wrecking and threw in the towel. Round 2 went to the Snapper.
Round 3: I installed a new sparkplug. I also patched and replaced the gas tank. I cleaned the connections of all possible wiring problems, including the ignition wire which had an inline fuse. I gave snapper a fresh drink of starting fluid and tried to start the mower and it turned over a few times before dying lifelessly. The Fuse had blown. Round 3 went to the Snapper.
Round 4: MacGyver, aka my father-in-law showed up at this point. No one messes with MacGyver! He took out an empty pack of cigarettes, tore the foil in a small piece and wrapper it around the fuse. He then turned the key and of course it started the first try. This caused a sadly funny scene. The mice had built their nest back in the mower. As the engine roared to life, mice were quite literally blown out of the engine. They hit the ground safe and undeterred. They turned to fuss at me before running off to safety. One mouse was blown across the yard 5 feet. The mother was the last to leave her rebuilt nest, her last baby in tow. MacGyver then sets out to make a new deflector shield for the mower with a sheet of tin and a few self taping screws. Round 4 went to Macgyver.
Round 5: The snapper got one last punch in. 30 minutes into my fight with the lawn, the belt snapped. I replaced it and finished the yard without incident. And the winner is: Jeff, with the assistance of MacGyver.
In the end a gas tank was patched, a spark plug replaced, wires were cleaned, blades were sharpened, a new deflector shield was made and a few mice took the ride of their lives. After I finished mowing, I decided to take a chance on starting the weed eater. No problem, right? The weed eater had observed my battle with the Snapper and wanted nothing to do with me. I picked it up, gave it a few tugs, and it fired to life. Somewhere under the rumbled of the weed eater, I couldn’t help but to mumble to myself: “That’s right, Homelite, don’t mess with Mr. Duckworth. He is a certified Bad Grass.”
I have a business update for you this Monday, but before I get to the boring stuff, here is what is going on in family life:
I ripped my pants. One of my favorite pair of pajama pants that is. It started out as a small hole with a little draft in the seat and ended up in a good laugh. I can’t resist a good laugh! I communicated with Keeley about the the hole in a way only her and I could understand. The way married couples do. This left Samuel, my son, out of the loop on what was happening so he had no idea I knew of the hole. Keeley told Samuel as I pretended not to hear. Playing dumb comes natural to me. He was having a bad day and needed a good laugh. He waited until my back was turned and I was distracted. He gripped both sides of the hole and *RIP.* What started as a small hole was now an open gash. He couldn’t stop laughing. When he finally did, I simply replied. “you mean I have had a hole in my pants? No wonder every time I tooted I heard the sound of a flag flapping.” This sent him into more fits of laughter. I think there is a moral here. Maybe take one for the team? No. When life gives you a problem, the best cure is laughter? Maybe. No, I think what I think the moral is this: Toot jokes are super funny to a six year old.”
I have put a lot of work into my freelance design business this week, mostly by working on the website. I have optimized, socialized, prioritized, adwordatized, tednerized, designatized and etceteraized www.duckofalltrades.com with one goal in mind: Create a self maintaing site that I can easily update with new content as needed that meets the needs of my target audience. I’m hoping to get it to a point where I can focus less on the business side of DoAT and more on design. I want the site to take care of itself.
When I last left you, I realized how little time people actually spent on my site. Most people were clicking on one page and then leaving. I set out to fix this problem by directing searchers to new front pages that are designed to draw their attention in more and be targeted to what they are looking for. The results are a success so far. On an average, people are staying 2-4 times longer and clicking through more of the pages. Traffic wise, I’m still averaging about the same as before. I’m hoping to increase this next week. I have a few ideas on how to do this. I’m trying to be creative about it. Should be fun. I am thinking it will be better to push this site and use ite as a launching pad to my other endeavors. I want to create something people care about.
I should have numbers to share with you next week. Right now it is still too early for them to be significant. I can tell that this site has been successful so far. Readership has doubled every other day! I already get more people on this site than the DoAT site. I have been using AdWords to advertise DoAT now for about two weeks. So far I have had little success. When I say little, I mean none. My click through ratios are HORRIBLE. On an average, they are .04%. What does this mean? Out of every 100 people that view my ad, only .04% click on the ad and go to my site. That isn’t even a whole person! That’s like a whole person’s pet gerbil. So out of 100 people, 1 pet gerbil goes to my site. Gerbils don’t need design or illustration. I think they just like to play with mice.
The hardest part of being an artist is knowing when to put then paintbrush down. When to stop? I thought I was at this point with Moo-pig. Apparently not. I had an idea yesterday that I just had to try out. Originally I had planned to do the book in black and white. Then it turned to black and white with a splash of blue. Yesterday I had the idea of adding in more color to see how it works; a pig color/texture for Moo-pig and only Moo-pig. The idea? In Moo-pig’s world, she seems out of place, not real. She isn’t one thing, she isn’t the other. But visually, she could be colorful and real in an otherwise black and white world. She is herself and that is what makes her real. Might work, I’m playing around with the idea. Here are two images. One with her in black and white and one with her in pig color. What do you think?
Moo-pig in color
Moo-pig black and white
At the ripe age of 15 months, Aubreigh has reached the terrible twos. Her worst habit? Removal of clothes. Were not just talking about one or two socks, but removing everything except her diaper (and sometimes even that). She thinks about it constantly. You can look into her eyes and see the wheels turning. She is thinking, plotting about when and what her next clothes escape attempt will be. Sometimes she is clever about it. One minute she will be fully clothed, the next she has ducked behind a chair made a few grunts to cover the sound clothes being stripped off, pops up and is in nothing but her Huggies. Sometimes she is less obvious. I call this the stop, drop and run method. This entails a sudden stop of activity as the thought enters her head followed by a sudden burst of running while sliding arms out of sleeves, kicking legs free of pants and general shimmying about until sufficient lack of clothes is achieved. This method is not as successful, usually ending in tripping over slippery pants as they fall to her knees or the dreaded “shirt over the eyes” run into the random object disaster (the ottoman or couch being the most common and comical of items to watch her bounce off of.) It does not matter how cold she is. She is going to get out of those clothes.
The reasoning? Well, quite honestly, I think it is because she can. It is a game to her to see what she can get away with. “I’ll show that daddy! He says I can’t play with electrical outlets? Fine, we will see how HE likes it when I show him that if I can’t have what I want then he won’t have a clothed baby.” Or sometimes it is just for comic effect. “I wonder if I can slip out of these pants with no one noticing….yes! I can. Now to be funny, I will pop on on the count of 3. 1…Y…5(she can’t count yet of course)…TA DA! Look Ma! No pants!” This is usually followed by either Keeley or I chasing her down as she squeals. She is the Houdini of baby clothes. She has thwarted every attempt I have made to prevent her removing them. Finally, yesterday I put on a one piece footed pair of pajamas. To further thwart her, I placed a safety pin through one side of the collar, through the zipper and through the other side of the collar. I was feeling confident when I opened the door to get her up from her nap. Of course I was greeted to Aurbeigh smiling, her clothes in a heap on the floor. The safety pin had been easily unfastened, discarded without injury and clothes shed. She proudly greeted me with a “Bye bye, Beeeby.”
Lately she has developed another funny habit. She insists that I wear my hat at all times during the day. If I don’t have it on, she finds it follows me around and yells “DAAAAAA” until I bend over and let her place it clumsily on my head. If I take it off, she quickly puts it back on. This is her way of gaining a little control. It’s her way to let me know that yes, it’s OK for her to strut around the house in her diaper like a banty rooster. But me? I am doomed to have perpetual hat hair. If she could talk, I’m sure she would simply say “Nudity for some, hats for others.”
In other news, here is the most recent sketch for Marmalade. Your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Moo-Pig gets laughs, but not a blue ribbon.
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