A drawing I did on our last vacation. Nick’s Cove, just north of San Fran. Beautiful scenery.
This is a website everyone needs to know about. Graphing useless things is awesome and fun.
I’ve started a new blog to chronicle my noodlings, doodlings, and sketchings at work. Below are a few samples of what types of pictures I do when meetings get dull. Check out the blog here. Enjoy…
I can’t explain this picture, but I dig it. This was one of the first images I created in Photoshop (version 3 if you want to put a year to it). Enjoy…
You can learn strange things about yourself on the Web. My favorite thing I just learned… the distribution of me. I thought I was spread pretty thin.
Brent Otey’s distribution:
Another blast from my past. In my early days of learning Photoshop I loved to take random pictures and combine them into new ones. Occasionally I’d find myself making not just a new image, but also a statement. Your subconscious will do that, you know. Below is one such creation. Make of it what you will. I think it means something different to me than it did then, but that’s what art does, right? What does it mean to you?
Long, long ago in a university far away I had a class assignment to represent two different viewpoints on a controversial topic as drawn by M.C. Escher. Below is what I created. I found this digging around on an old computer the other day and thought, “hey, I still kind of like that.” So, here it is…
For many people a defining moment in their childhood is the day they learned Santa Claus wasn’t real.
For me it was when I learned that I wasn’t the target of an attempted kidnapping by Bigfoot.
Welcome to Camp Whatjusthappened
The story goes like this: I was five or six years old and my father, my brother and me went on a “guys-only” camping trip. It is one of my earliest, and favorite memories.
We camped in the woods next to a small stream. We fished for trout and I think my brother even caught one. At some point I fell in the stream and was certain that I was going to die. The stream was maybe two feet deep where I fell in.
That night we all sat around the campfire and my dad instituted the great and long lasting Otey tradition of making up a story and letting everyone tell a piece of it. I remember that in the story I got to be a knight who rode a motorcycle. Cool.
Anyway, we went to sleep in a small pup tent next to my dad’s mint green Ford. The tent was too small for all three of us to fit inside, so my dad slept outside across the front to protect us. All was well with the world from a six-year-old’s perspective.
And then…
The next thing I know I am outside of the tent, next to the stream. I can see my breath in the cold air. My heart is pounding in my chest. I’m still in my army green, feather-stuffed sleeping bag, but how did I get here?
Is that a shadow I see moving in the woods? Did I catch a glimpse of a face when I woke up?
Is that Bigfoot? Was he trying to kidnap me? He must’ve reached into the tent and pulled me out, but when I awoke he abandoned his mission and fled.
Suddenly realizing that I was in great danger I crawl awkwardly back to the tent. I fumble my way across my sleeping father and sidle up next to my brother, wary of any furry hands seeking to snatch me away to God knows where.
At least that’s what I thought happened…
Imagine that
Years ago I was looking through a photo album at my parents house and ran across some pictures of the camping trip. I point them out to my dad and ask him if he remembers anything about it.
“Oh yeah,” he replies and proceeds to share an anecdote or two and then says, “and one night you rolled out from under the side of the pup tent and I had to put you back in.”
Wait. I what?
But what about Bigfoot? What about the plot to kidnap me and bring me back to his lair and feed me to his smelly Yeti family? What about my lucky escape from crypto-zoological history?
That was all just my imagination?
Children beware
The magic of youth is precious. As we grow older we all know deep inside that the world view we had as a child was not right, but there’s something special to never clarifying exactly where and how it’s incorrect.
But even now that I know the truth, I still think that maybe, just maybe, my dad was wrong and that somewhere in the mountains of Colorado lurks an ape man who nearly stole a little boy one night years ago…
