Platypus of Truth

This still cracks me up every time I see it. Some things you just had to be there for...

Cover of Evanescence: Synthesis Medium: Red and black pen Why: Pen forces you to commit to every line and own up to every mistake. It may raise the stakes, but it also forces you to get better at your craft.

Poor Bob... He set out to traverse the upper elementary like Flat Stanley. On the way, he lit the teacher's desk on fire and our Admin decided to make an example of him. Below is the rule of our Awesome Imperiatrix as the 9th graders describe it (with a little help from Frank Miller and Herodotus).

Ok, so I couldn't resist... I've been fiddling around with Paint for my own amusement and using it to dress up a few of my pen and ink drawings. Spending time around the local comic shop with a few coworkers recently has also put comic book layouts are on the brain. My own efforts are about as far from Hellboy  or Rai  as I am from Pandemonium or 4001 A.D. Still, it's fun to play around with a little zero-risk creativity. Often we wish our hobbies were jobs. Jobs can be wonderful things when we love what we do, but they are also work. There are deadlines to meet and customers to satisfy. We may enter a business in one department and drift inevitably over time into another. In other words, when we're tied to the paycheck, we have to follow the money. In our unpaid hobbies, however, we are free. No one penalizes us for puttering away at side projects. The labor is unprofitable by definition. Henry David Thoreau worked for six weeks a year and then lived simply so th...

It all started with a whiteboard doodle during a brainstorm session in study hall. We were experimenting with pitches.  Suddenly, the room synergized and a story began rolling out with the force of a freight train. We had an idea -a great idea. How often do our thoughts come back to us with an alienated majesty? We discard them because they are our thoughts. Reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self Reliance  with my students this year, this passage struck me with the force of that freight train. Do I distrust my own thoughts simply because they are mine and not some paid authority? In a democratic nation, creators crave the votes of the masses; votes in the form of dollars. As the 51% (hoi poloi) become the arbiters of Right and Wrong, so the Paid Position tells us what is worthy (to agathon) and unworthy (to kakon) of our attention. Plato taught that we do evil through lack of knowledge. No person would knowingly choose the bad since the bad would inevitably harm themselves...

Not my all-time favorite Dickens book, but it has it's moments. Here we have a pen and brush marker rendition of a whiteboard doodle I did to help my students along. We're such a visual culture that some rudimentary art skills are almost a requirement for teaching these days.

Here is the final doodle in my Frankenstein series. As with the others, it is based on an original whiteboard doodle used in classroom instruction while teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein . I had forgotten how haunting the novel's final image is: The monster drifting away upon a small block of ice into darkness. As with Walton, the narrator, we have heard both sides of the story and are called to render judgement. What should become of the Monster? Like Shakespeare's Prospero, we are free to send him anywhere our imagination likes. I. personally, think that the Monster is slowly dying and with Frankenstein dead he has lost all possibility of repairing himself or fathering others of his kind. Whatever the exact nature of his interior life, it will be lost forever. The Monster imagines himself as Milton's Satan, but he is not. He is a Man, and that is far more and far less than even the greatest angel.

Today's post marks the 300th literary musing here at Platypus of Truth. That journey began with a review of two of my favorite books: Aeschylus' Oresteia  and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings back in '06. Ten years later, we're still going strong and still drawing as often as not from the literary canon. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein  makes a fitting companion to two originators with her towering fantasy that explores of the origin of pain. This is my third time reading Frankenstein . At first, I thought it was a Rousseauean fable placing the source of human evil in the corruptions of society. On a third read, the message appears more complex. Frankenstein and the monster he has created mirror each other. Both experience early tragedy, both are left to educate themselves, and both engage in highly articulate blame shifting that seeks always to root their evil deeds in the inattention of others. They are Milton's Satan: starting off proud and towering a...

This is another marker doodle copied from a whiteboard illustration that I used in teaching Frankenstein . Here, we have Frankenstein looking up at the mountains before he meets with the creature on the glacier. Ice is a recurring theme in the book where nature closely mimics the human action. Linking the monster with ice may be a reference to Milton's Satan who has his dominions amidst pyramids of ice in the northern reaches of Heaven (c.f. Tennyson's The Last Tournament  where the Red Knight's bandits make their last head like Satan in the North ). Nature and natural sympathies are the bread and butter of the Romantics, but I have been surprised this time by how overt a role Nature plays in Frankenstein . I didn't remember the descriptions of the Swiss mountains or the Rhine being so lengthy and vivid. In keeping with that, the lion's share of my doodles for this book have focused on impressionistic images of the setting rather than close-ups of the characters.

My students are reading Frankestein right now, so here is a modified version of a white-board doodle I cooked up for them. R. Walton imagines that he may well find the Earthly Paradise should he arrive at the North Pole. Frankenstein warns him of the dangers of obsession and proceeds to tell Walton how his own passion for scientific control of Nature led to his undoing. So here we have the northern seas giving way to the Earthly Paradise in the land of perpetual sunlight. The scene is enclosed in an elaborate terrarium that signifies Walton's desire for control and dominance cloaked in the flowery guise of Poetry. Medium: Brush Marker on sketchbook paper

Pulled from the Whiteboard: Promo for my study hall student's t.v. show pitch featuring a promo poster and sketches of the final scene.

Hrriches buy you hhhwarriors King Hhhrothgar! Ph33r teh P0ssumz The Dagron comes in the Night! Props to you if this one makes any sense at all. Telemachus' mom has got it going on...

 It's Finals season and that means Whiteboard Art Mayhem ensues!  This year, the Slugbeast has been slow in making his appearance.  In the meantime, Literature is representing loud and proud with this updated version of a classic text.  Stendhal has broken out on the whiteboard with the aid of Jean-Paul Sartre.  Gotta love those tacos.  Mummy kitteh can has rotten onion.  Props to you if you know what this is about.  Ah!  The Slugbeast cometh!  He is as the howling wind that knoweth not pity, that knoweth not mercy!  Of colossal tread is he...  I think this speaks for itself.  Look upon their works ye mighty and despair. *Please note: the little girl, chilled man, and mummy kitteh are courtesy of the students.

This picture of Sigurd and Fafnir is loosely based on the Hylestad Door .  It's my attempt to honor our transition from Beowulf  to The Volsungsaga .

Trying to help the students envision what the monsters might look like.  Prior efforts can be found here .

Picture 1 features an Autumn nymph just getting ready to dance upon the wind as the leaves begin to fall.  Picture 2 depicts the epic battle between those eternal rivals the Water Donkey and the Vampire Possum.  Picture 3 focuses on the Water Donkey in its undead form with all the relevant statistics.

What could be cooler that J.R.R. Tolkien brandishing the Lance of Longinus along with a Grail-toting C.S. Lewis, and an apparition of Charles Williams, riding on a rocket bear with dual chain guns for arms? Pro-mo for the school's Inklings reading club.

So, I like whiteboard art.  I use it in the classroom and post it on my blog.  I've been working on my craft for several years now, and thought it might be time to record a few thoughts. Whiteboard art is a limited medium.  Expo markers, my preferred tools of the trade, only come in about twelve colors (at least that I can find.)  They don't admit of blending in the way that chalk or pastels do.  The fact that adding a new line to an existing line with an Expo marker can erase it also provides some unique challenges to drawing and shading.  Filling in solid objects is a real bear. Given these constraints, whiteboard art lends itself to cartoons, pointillism , and impressionism .  Getting into the right mindset for the latter two techniques can be a little rough at first, and I recommend stepping back from your work frequently in order to get a sense of the overall effect.  Spending some time with a volume of impressionist paintings also helps....

 All Images Copyright James R. Harrington 2011

More art inspired by Charles Williams' Talliesin Through Logres mixes with a lecture on Dark Age Europe. All images compyright James R. Harrington 2011