The Eye of Horus

Horus is a lesser-known god in the pantheon of ancient Egypt.  He was sort of the B Team.  However, he did contribute one great symbol that often adorns the walls of tombs and temple pillars and obelisks.  That symbol is known as the Eye of Horus.   It is recognized as a symbol of protection, royal power, and good health. 

Back in the seventies when King Tut was becoming popular this symbol was often used as the motif for articles about the king.  I liked the look, it struck me as cool and jazzy.  I assumed it was a modern creation by some hip graphic artist in Greenwich Village or San Francisco.  I was surprised to learn that it's a symbol thousands of years old.

I drew this with Adobe Illustrator.

KING TUT: Original Clip Art by Stogie Using Adobe Illustrator

The Death Mask of King Tutankhamen.  

This one took me a while, several hours over several days.  It took my mind off the Democrat Fraudulent Election.

When Howard Carter opened King Tut's sarcophagus in 1923, he found a wreath of dried flowers placed on the forehead of Tut's burial mask.  Flowers that were placed there by his grieving widow 3,000 years before.  

Update:  I improved the beard, made it lighter in color and braided, like the original death mask.

Back to Work: Tax Season Starts Today

 Bummer, I have to start work today, doing taxes.  With Covid and Newsom's ridiculous prohibitions, it will be a challenging tax season.  A lot of tax returns will be prepared virtually, with clients sending their tax documents to us through a secure server, with reviewing and approving the completed return the same way.  Many clients will not have to come into the office.  Face to face meetings will be rare, or conducted via video camera.

I'd rather stay home and work on Adobe Illustrator projects, but that doesn't pay the bills.

I have my biggest and best Illustrator project in progress and I hope to post it this week.  It will feature King Tutankhamen.  

I find ancient Egypt fascinating, mainly because of its art and sculpture.  Massive temples and statues carved out of stone with primitive tools, boggles the mind.  Many of these artifacts are thousands of years old.  The massive Great Sphinx was staring out across the sands two thousand years before Christ walked the Earth.  King Tut was dead a thousand years before the same event.  Wow.

EGYPT - Original Clip Art by Stogie (That's Me)

I created this clip art just for fun.  I used Photoshop to add the brick texture but everything else is from Adobe Illustrator.

The more I make the better I will get, theoretically.  You learn by doing. 

Happy New Year (Clip Art)

I knocked out this clip art for Happy New Year.  I don't want champagne glasses and fireworks, I'd rather focus on peaceful nature on January 1st.

Time for coffee.

 

The Cold Gray Dawn of a New Year

The morning of a new year never seems cheerful or hopeful or optimistic.  Not for me, anyway.

It's cold, the sky is gray and overcast.  How will I spend the first day of 2021?

I will work on graphics.  I want to create my second clip art creation.  What shall it be?  Happy New year?  Nah, overdone.  Blogging?  Maybe.   

Update:  Okay, here's an ankh.  It is an ancient Egyptian symbol associated with King Tut.  It is the symbol of life.  It looks a bit like a Christian cross, but it is not.  In the 1960s hippies wore them around their necks.  It wasn't difficult to make it in Illustrator.  Decided to start off with something easy.

UPDATE:  I flared the arms and foot a bit to look more like an actual ankh.

  

Making My Own Clip Art With Adobe illustrator

 I thought of another great use of my growing skills in Adobe Illustrator:  making my own clip art.  

Here is my first effort.  It is an Egyptian Scarab Beetle.  What are the red spots?  I believe they are meant to represent the Sun God that was pushed as a new religion by Pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV, 1364-1347 B.C.).  Egyptians didn't like having a new religion forced on them, but they had to put up with it until Akhenaten died.  

Scarabs have been religious symbols in Egypt both before and after Akhenaten.  I remember when I was in the fourth grade a lady showed up in our class to tell us about ancient Egypt and scarabs, and to show us her green scarab ring.  I have liked scarab depictions ever since.

Adobe illustrator: Drawing Charlie Brown and Linus

I took an online course to learn Adobe Illustrator, a graphic art and drawing program.  I think it will be an asset for making memes, illustrations, cartoons, logos and what-not.  My first practice exercise after completing the course was to draw Charlie Brown and Linus, standing behind the stone wall in the snow.  I added animated snow using Photoshop, but the drawing itself is all Illustrator.  (Click on the picture to see a larger version.)

Linus and the Great Pumpkin Patch (#Illustrator, #Photoshop #Halloween)

This image is way too early for Halloween, but it is how I spent most of my day and I am anxious to share it.  I drew Linus and the Pumpkins with Adobe Illustrator, but the leaves and everything else was created with Photoshop.  Save it and use it for Halloween if you like.

My Drawing of Charlie Brown (#Illustrator)

I figured I could study or draw Charlie Brown.  Charlie won.  I drew him in a blue shirt instead of the usual orange or yellow.

Charles Schultz, the cartoonist who invented the comic series "Peanuts," knew well the cares and concerns of grade school kids.  There were kite-eating trees, baseball teams that never won a game, little Red Haired girls that captured your heart.  There was an obnoxious brunette (Lucy) who tricked you into kicking a football that was drawn away at the last minute.

 The upside of childhood, however, was a loyal dog with a great imagination (at times assuming the role of a World War I Ace pilot, a lawyer, or a writer), and whose best friend was a bird who often flew upside down.  There was Peppermint Patty, a kind of young hippie/tomboy who wore sandals and played great baseball, and Linus, a kid who was overly attached to a blanket and who believed in The Great Pumpkin.

Charlie Brown, however, was the chief protagonist in this drama of life, always screwing up, failing at everything he tried, enduring one humiliation after another, but who never quit trying.  Alas, he never was able to connect with the little Red-Haired girl whom he loved from afar.

There are a lot of us who can identify with Charlie Brown.

Pamela Geller: a Graphic Portrait in Adobe Illustrator CC

I have been working on this graphic for a week, spending many hours learning how to do it.  I did the graphic as a learning exercise for Adobe Illustrator CC, and yes, I did learn a lot.  You learn by doing.

This is my portrait of Pamela Geller.  Is it perfect?  No.  But it ain't bad for a first serious effort at creating a digital portrait using Adobe Illustrator.  This program is not user friendly.  It's complicated, because it does a lot of complicated things.  Use as you see fit.

Learning Adobe Illustrator CC

I purchased Adobe Illustrator last week, and have been spending many hours attempting to learn it.  It is just about as difficult to learn as Photoshop.  What I really want to do is to create vector art with it, drawing and painting portraits of people, especially famous people.

This week I have been following a five part YouTube tutorial, using Pamela Geller as my chosen subject.  She is a beautiful, well-known conservative woman, and that is why I picked her.  Certain parts of the portrait have been completed with pretty fair results, namely, the eyes and mouth and teeth.  I am not satisfied with the teeth yet, however.

Still to do:  the nose, the contours of the face, using the blend mode.  The great thing about attempting this portrait is that it forces me to learn to use the Illustrator graphic tools, and to research problems as they arise.  In other words, to build a skill set through dire necessity.

Illustrator can create graphic art that is photo realistic.  Take for example this Illustrator drawing I found on the web.  The lips could be better -- they look too dry.  The teeth, however, are amazingly lifelike.

Adobe Illustrator: My First Attempt

I have added Adobe Illustrator to my graphics programs.  It is a vector graphics program -- that means it draws pictures.  The graphic at the left is my first attempt, using a tutorial I found on YouTube.  Frankly, it isn't very good.  However, the only way to learn a graphics art program is to use it, learn what controls do what.  So my first learning episode is done, and I will seek a more sophisticated tutorial for my next attempt.