 ©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.
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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
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. 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. January 2020 has only a few more hours to run. My studio-to-be is beginning to look like an attractive room. However there's at least one more lot of tradesperson's skills required before the fit out can begin. The new room is so close to being functional, and yet I still don't know when that day will be. No obvious answers came to me during my 10 days away, but I am still slowly chewing through the notes I took and something might emerge when that process is done. Between that and heat waves and renovations, the only character to have shown up with sufficient humour and interest to get the creative juices flowing has been Bishop Stumbers, and he has been greatly assisted by convoluted Twitter threads that would take far too long to explain properly. Palestrina is a really big name in sacred choral music, and has been for a few centuries. The music he composed for Christmas Day Mass is particularly beautiful and inspiring. (Hodie Christus Natus Est = Today Christ is Born)  So you want to take a group of twenty-something Australians overseas for a pilgrimage experience? Then make sure you plan your itinerary around access to good coffee, otherwise things can get quite messy. Provide coffee first; only then might they listen to your plans for that day:  Maybe this time next month, God willing, the studio-to-be will be fully functional, well worth the very long wait - and very conducive to producing new artwork. Stay tuned to find out.
2019 is about to end. 2020 is about to begin. Hopefully by the end of January the building project to transform a verandah into a studio, and the spending project to get sufficient computer grunt to make it function, will be complete. The 2020 Calendar featuring Socket Head came up well. This is the image for December that seemed to be most resonant with Socket Heads's lifestyle and character.  Then a relative who has recently taken caretakership of an extremely placid cat started changing its nickname from Kitty Kat to Hideous Kittyous - and that was too delicious a nickname not to inspire an image.  Would you believe Bishop Stumbers made a return appearance, pondering his New Year resolutions for 2020? He should have added in 'Keep Out Of Trouble' as well, not that he is likely to be able to keep that one.  In the first 10 days of January I will be seeking God about what He wants for me, and what He wants me to do in 2020. I would appreciate your prayers very much because at the moment I don't know where the way forward is, only the many dead ends where it isn't.
As promised, here are the images of religious inspiration from the past few months: The first one came together in Holy Week, just after the Lenten 40 Days for Life novena ended.  For this next one, my mother needed an image for an Instagram post, and described what was in her mind that would convey something of the relationship between sheep and the Good Shepherd.  Did you know that Twitter is full of very witty people? Well there's a bishop on there who inspired this image. It seems that he can misplace mitres and croziers and other items, but he can always post a fresh meme.  Said inspiration was heading off to Rome for an Ad Limina visit, and there was some very real concern that he might misplace something else. The feast of St Anthony of Padua, the patron Saint of finding lost objects, occurred around the same time. One thought led to another, and the thought of Frequent Loser points had the family in full blown mirth......  Then doing an image for the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus somehow seemed appropriate, and a good test for my widened collection of Copic markers.  There have been some new characters showing up in my sketchbook; a few of them may have graduated to finished artwork by next time. We'll see.
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