July 2008

2008-07-23 Power — Use It, Don’t Use It — Low Res, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

This pic and writeup is the second of my ‘Roy’s Quick Draw’ cartoons to appear on Mandy de Waal’s ‘MoneyWebLife’ feature. Here’s the link: www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page215461?oid=217092&am…

Roy’s Quick Power Draw

Everyone – male and female – believes somewhere deep down that they’re powerful.
Roy Blumenthal
27 Jul 2008

Everyone — male and female — believes somewhere deep down that they’re powerful. Potent. Able to seize control of any and all situations. Even those people who believe they’re powerless harbour secret yearnings to somehow release their inner potentate.

At the same time, the truly powerful people in the world are in their positions by choice. Yup… power is a choice. You make the choice, you’re powerful. All you have to do is tap into your internal power source. Do you think Bill Gates and Donald Trump and Richard Branson and Jacob Zuma became powerful by accident? Nah… they voomed into their voltage sources.

What this means in the world of power is that every moment of the lives of the powerful is a tussle of choices. When one is powerful, there are many options to choose from. Do you choose right? Wrong? Left? Green? Do you kill? Do you fiddle the books? Do you go home to your spouse an innocent?

I chose to depict the struggle the powerful and impotent have by showing the inner he-man. (If you’re a gal, just imagine the dude with breasts, and pretend she’s hot.) I mean, heck, my girlfriend reckons I look as hot as this muscled hunk. It’s just that it’s hidden to most people under Tim Tam padding.

On the dude’s bicep, there’s a plug socket. And he’s holding a power-screwdriver in one hand. And a pretty big screw in the other. The power cord lies inert over his arm. Will he plug into his power stream and drive that screw home? Will he screw or be screwed? He chooses.

Ultimately, the CHOICE itself is the power.

I painted this cartoon entirely in ArtRage2.5 with a quick visit to PhotoshopCS3 to pop ‘Roy’s Quick Draw’ in place. All on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc.

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2008-07-27 Follow Your Nose, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

This pic started out as a sketch in my Moleskine.

I used it to test coveritlive.com as a means of live-blogging my visual facilitation sessions.

If you’d like to take a look at my step-by-step breakdown of colouring sketches in ArtRage, please head to: schmucknews.blogspot.com/2008/07/roy-colouring-sketch-usi…. Click on the ‘replay’ button, and you’ll see screengrabs outlining the process.

There are several great things about CoverItLive.

1. It’s free. Completely.
2. It’s live. Realtime. What I live-blog is INSTANTLY seen by viewers.
3. It’s at MY location. It uses embed code to place it into any blog or webpage of my choice.
4. I get live commenting from people viewing the session.
5. I control all of the media that gets published to the live-blog. So if there are any disruptive wise-asses, I can just ban them.

My main need in a live-blogging tool is that I need to be able to make it a private or public post. And CoverItLive makes that possible.

This pic started off as a Bic Gel Roller sketch in my Moleskine. It was then scanned. And coloured in ArtRage 2.5, live, on the internet, with viewers. It’s a new world.

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