 Vincent Cavanagh © 2024 Merry Christmas and a Happy Jubilee of Hope to you all for 2025!
Vincent Cavanagh 25 Dec 2024 Surrealism incoming! Illustrated 30 March 2024  Vincent Cavanagh, 2024 A spotlight on Bishop Stumbers’ short-lived career in stand-up comedy. Congratulations to anyone who “gets” the cameo appearances on the far side table ;) With apologies to Messrs Astley and Baker. Vincent Cavanagh 30 Mar 2024 / Holy Saturday Illustrated 1 January 2023
 ©VincentCavanagh 2022 Yes, I’m finally back on the blog again. For however long that may be.
And the subject that brought not just me but also Bishop Stumbers and the Dean back? Vocations.
So last fortnight I did something for the first time that I thought I would never do: I made a #MayThe4th cartoon, featuring Bishop Stumbers.
'Bishop Stumbers, May The 4th' Vincent Cavanagh © 2022
It’s been a long time since I’d last put a physical pen to paper. It was also nice that it was a fairly simply concept to draw.
For the red accent I used a Copic marker, and I think it helped to tie the whole picture together. I also adjusted the contrast of the image on my computer before it was read to share. Yesterday (17 May 2022) I finally got around to editing and uploading to my YouTube Channel the videos I took of the ride on the Puffing Billy Railway that my father and I took on our family holiday back in March 2019. It’s of the return journey from Gembrook to Belgrave in the Dandenong Ranges, east of Melbourne. Enjoy.
So, until next time, stay safe and God Bless.
~ Vincent Cavanagh, 18 May 2022. On Sunday (13 March 2022) my Instagram account, cavanaghcreative*, was hacked; through my own fault in responding to a message of help from another acquaintance on Instagram and for not seeking proper outside advice (ie. my IT-expert father) as to whether this message was legitimate or not. It almost certainly wasn’t legit. I don’t know how, but somehow through interacting with the (as yet unknown) hacker gave them a way or permission to kick me out of my own account and change both the phone number, email address and password; and thus, totally remove any future ability on my part to regain the account. It was 3 days later, on the Wednesday (16 March 2022), that a friend texted me with the conformation that I was hacked. They had received the exact same message as I had, but this time it was using my Instagram profile to do its dirty trickery. (see image below).  This is the same message that fooled me. DO NOT Respond to it. Thankfully I never linked my Instagram messages to Facebook Messenger; I have no idea how much worse this whole fiasco could have been if I had. From an email from a fellow artist on Instagram, I learnt that my Instagram Stories [short videos] had been taken over by content promoting Bitcoin**, just like my acquaintance’s account had started doing in the weeks before I received/responded to the fake message. Thus began a very trying time for me that lasted the remainder of the week, and following weekend, to twice try and confirm my identity/ownership of cavanaghcreative to Instagram through their Instagram Selfie-ID system. Which from my personal experience I can say, in the most polite way possible, ain’t worth a cracker. Yes, I have grown a beard [which shouldn’t really matter with facial recognition] since my profile picture was taken, which for the record actually is a photo of me — not a puppy or an oblique, black and white arty photograph, but an actual, front on, photograph of my face, in colour. (And yes, even just writing about this is enough to make my blood boil again.) And furthermore, there is/was a photo (or two) of myself taken with other human beings on my Instagram page, which to any other reasonable layman should have been more than enough telemetry/bio-data for Instagram (or parent company Facebook) to check against the two Selfie-videos I sent them to confirm my identity as the legitimate owner of the hacked account, cavanaghcreative. During this time I proceeded to the best of my abilities to warn family, friends and general acquaintances through texts, messaging apps, and posts on both Facebook and Twitter, that: — my Instagram was Hacked; — NOT to respond to any private Instagram messages from me (ie. cavanaghcreative); — if they themselves were on Instagram, to please flag the account as being Hacked/Spam; — and to unfollow cavanaghcreative and Block it from contacting them in future.  This is what the account looks like now. The arrow and warning were added by me. On 21 March 2022 I received information that my former account was no longer "public" or found via Instagram’s search functionable. It was also devoid of any 'posts' or 'follower' number (see image above). Either everyone flagging cavanaghcreative as a fake account finally got through to Instagram, or the constant barrage of reporting put the hacker off. Sadly, I just don’t know. Hopefully the hacker hasn’t just left cavanaghcreative as a trojan Private Account; but again, I don’t know. I would like to thank those who did flag the account as hacked and hopefully stopped any more people from getting hacked through my own personal mistake, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other account for this hacker or many others to keep on tricking people. So, with that in mind, and given that I have no wish to give Instagram the satisfaction of my creating another account† just for them to inflate their subscription/member numbers, I have taken the step of removing myself from Instagram. As of 13 March 2022, I am no longer on Instagram. The app has also been obliterated from my smartphone. For the foreseeable future I will now be focusing my energies on posting content to this blog, not on social media. Which on reflection is probably a good thing, given how (cough cough) irregularly I’ve been posting on here up until now. Until next time, God bless, stay safe and avoid any badly worded messages or emails. ~ Vincent Cavanagh, 29 March 2022. * To the best of my ability I have removed all links to cavanaghcreative, on Instagram, from this website and other social media profiles.
** I have never joined, been a part of, or promoted Bitcoin, and I never intend to. If you see any of my accounts start promoting such twaddle, know that that account has been hacked and proceed accordingly. † As far as I could find out, unless you happen to be a world-famous celebrity or have taken your story to a tv news outlet, the only real advice that Instagram gives in these situations where you cannot regain access to the account is to just make another Instagram account. Hardly what a layperson might call “consumer care”. And I most certainly did not want to have go through talking to their robot-helpline. Over a period of 37 days and multiple attempts here at last is my first 3D animation in Blender 3D with the assistance of Bishop Stumbers. Admittedly I didn't think his voice was going to be so deep, such is life. Below is a little gallery of Bishop Stumbers focusing on different aspects of the model. Enjoy!  Above is my most recent Bishop Stumbers cartoon, which I finished and posted yesterday (Feb 16).
The idea for this picture began to come together in the previous fortnight over conversations about the new guidelines from the Vatican on how to distribute the ashes for Ash Wednesday during a pandemic (ie. sprinkling the ash on top of peoples' head rather than making a sign of the cross on peoples' foreheads) in a note published on January the 12th (link here). Among the ideas discussed in those conversations was the fact that some of the more widely recycled memes about Ash Wednesday and the wide variety of cross placed upon the heads of Catholics would be no long applicable under the new guidelines, if anyone thought to think of it that way of course. And so was born Stumbers' ponderance upon the collect of memes now made irrelevant, and somewhat historical, by the Vatican's new guidelines. Hopefully next time I can get back to clearing the backlog of blog posts. Until then, God Bless. At last the comic strip is finished, and I can share it with you. But there is some other news I can share with you as well. The first part you may have already noticed: this website has had a bit of an overdue face-lift. I hope you like the changes. The second part is that I have begun a 3 month mentorship with Giuseppe Castellano from the Illustration Department. My first session was this week, and I have begun my homework in preparation for the next session. For the comic strip, I will give you each of the four parts separately, and then how it looks as a whole.     Each of the parts took many days to complete.  But I am very happy with the completed outcome.
Much of what I have been working on during July hasn't been finished yet, so I have decided to share with you a bit of a ramble through my sketchbook instead. The first one is a series of sketches of Bishop Stumbers from which I started building an animation. That animation is far from finished, but there is a draft version of it on Instagram (@cavanaghcreative). In it you see Bishop Stumbers walking along engaged in social media activities on his phone, until he walks into a wall, recovers, and continues tweeting etc.  The second one is of a coffee addicted robot, or coffee-bot.  The last one is a new character in a classic heroic pose.  I've also been working on a 4 part comic strip, but it is only about 70% completed. Each part is 3 panels wide. I'm currently wrestling with how best to share it online because Weebly displays vertical and square images much better than horizontal images.
Since April 2020 the regular emailed newsletter has been in hiatus. For the last few years the list of whom we send it to hasn't been growing, in fact it has shrunk a little due to deaths here and there. Given that no one has been asking why it is missing, it seems to be the right decision to let it lie fallow for a while until there is a good reason to re-start it, eg some very positive news to share. |
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