From the monthly archives:

July 2008

If you’re one of the people who can’t make it to 27 Dinners tonight, I’ll be doing a live visual facilitation of the event, along with live-blogging of the pics I make.

If anyone wants to write commentary, please contact me on http://twitter.com/royblumenthal or royblumenthal@gmail.com, and I’ll add you as a producer on my CoverItLive console. (You need to be running Firefox 2.* or Internet Explorer for the console to work on your machine.)

This live blog is my first public run using CoverItLive. So please join in and leave comments. It’ll be great to hear from you.

If you’d like to hire me to cover any of your events, I’d be happy to chat about what I can offer.

You can take a look at my profile as a Professional member of PSASA, the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa. It’s at http://snipurl.com/psasa-profile.

My online portfolio is at: http://snipurl.com/visualfacilitation.

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2008-07-23 Power — Use It, Don’t Use It — Low Res

by Roy Blumenthal on July 28, 2008

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

by Roy Blumenthal on July 27, 2008


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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Roy Colouring a Sketch — Using CoverItLive.com to Live Blog the Process

July 27, 2008

Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and visual facilitator. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.

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Possible Logo Design for FlyingSolo SA Unconference

July 26, 2008

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Possible Logo Design for FlyingSolo SA Unconference, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.
In the FlyingSolo SA wiki, Jo Duxberry, one of the organisers, mentioned that they wanted someone to volunteer a design for the [...]

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My ‘Questioning Phoenix’ tattoo

July 21, 2008

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Roy’s finished ‘Questioning Phoenix’ tattoo, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.
Here’s the answer…
Nope. This didn’t hurt much at all.
It was more of a sort of vibrating vague sting, that numbed out after about ten [...]

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MoneywebLife — Roy’s Quick Draw — I wonder how the wealthy live?

July 19, 2008

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MoneywebLife — Roy’s Quick Draw — I wonder how the wealthy live?, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.
Mandy de Waal asked me if I’d like to do a post in her new feature on [...]

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Classroom Innovations by Roy and Jennifer — Wherever I Lay My Mat’s My Home

July 15, 2008

The idea behind this classroom idea is for you to buy a whole bunch of 1-metre long sections of yoga mat material. Allocate one per child in your classroom, and let each person mark their's individually. The mat belongs to that person only.
Now… give permission to your learners to use their mat as they see [...]

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Randburg Court 22 — Domestic Violence

July 14, 2008

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Randburg Court 22 — Domestic Violence, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.
Jen and I spent the entire morning in this courtroom. We were there to finalize a restraining order against her wifebeating ex-husband…
The magistrate [...]

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Playing with different pens in ArtRage 2.5

July 13, 2008

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Playing with different pens in ArtRage 2.5, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.
Bwooohaaahaaaaa! Just saw a post on the ArtRage forum that prompted me into a quick doodle to check out a particular brush [...]

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