You know what it's time for. You know what went down this weekend with the rabbit and the eggs and whatnot. It's the best time of year, party people, because the Shatner eggs are back. And it's a good haul. That is all I have to say about that right now.
Figure 1: This decorative egg tribute to William Shatner was made using two different dyes and a Sharpie marker.
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Figure 2: Bill Shatner. If you don't know, you don't know.
Enlarge Photo Labels: images, Shatner, weird
Several years ago I painted Shatner. It was my first oil painting. As of right now, it is also my only oil painting because I can't find the larger one I was working on after this one.
Figure 1: Shatner. Oil on canvas. 8 inches by 10 inches.
Enlarge Photo It may or may not shock you at all after viewing these images to learn that I don't know how to paint. In order to paint Shatner I had to transform myself into a human ink-jet printer.
First, I took a plain canvas and drew a grid on it in pencil. I don't remember, but I think there were about fifty columns and maybe sixty rows, something like that. I numbered each column and row so that I could address any particular cell in the grid.
Next, I found a picture that I liked on the Web of Golden Globe award-winning actor, author, musician, entrepreneur, and philanthropist William Shatner.
After that, I wrote a small application that chunked up the image I had of Bill Shatner into a grid of fifty rows and sixty columns, to match my canvas. The application averaged the numeric value for the gray shade in each cell on the grid, and assigned that cell a number from 0 to 7 according to the average gray value, 0 being black, 7 being white, and everything in between a shade of gray from darker to lighter.
I imported the output from the chunking application into Excel, and the result was that I had a grid of numbers that corresponded to the blank grid on my canvas.
I mixed up on my paint palette six shades of gray and I squeezed out some black and some white paint, too. For my gray shades I made and printed out a grayscale standard that showed me what each of the shades of gray, numbers 1 through 6, should look like. That way, if my paint dried and I had to mix it again I'd know which shade should go with which number.
From there I just had to paint by numbers, column after column, and watch Shatner's face emerge from the canvas.
Figure 2: This is a magnified view of William Shatner's face.
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Labels: images, Shatner
On Easter I went over to my parents' house. They had an Easter egg hunt for the kids and then after that we all decorated Easter eggs.
I made an egg that was a tribute to Golden Globe award-winning actor, writer, entrepreneur and musician William Shatner.
Figure 1: This is an overview of my Easter egg. Note that the beginning of the word "Shatner" is visible in this photo.
Enlarge Photo I dyed my egg purple using a water-soluble dye. Before lowering the egg into the dye solution, I made the inscription on it using a clear wax crayon. I wrote the words: "Shatner Golden Globe" on the Easter egg.
Figure 2: The "N" in "Shatner" is more visible in this photo. The hand that you see here is my own.
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Figure 4: I wrote "Golden" on the egg to signify William Shatner's Golden Globe award-winning performance as Denny Crane on both Boston Legal and The Practice.
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Figure 5: I am very happy with how this egg came out. It is probably the best egg I have ever made.
Enlarge Photo I wasn't sure what to do with my egg, and I thought some people might get a kick out of seeing it, so I decided to sell it on eBay. I listed the egg, with the pictures of it you see here, with the following description:
Thank you for your interest in this one-of-a-kind piece created by the internationally little-known multimedia artist and writer Scott Boyan.
This beautiful work has been created in the folk-form style known as "Easter Egg." The base medium is a white hardboiled egg. After boiling, the artist carefully scribed the tribute text upon the egg's surface using a clear wax pencil. When the inscription was complete, Scott Boyan dipped the egg into a solution of water-soluble food dye and water for a period of nearly five minutes.
The result is a stunning and unique purple tribute to renowned author, entrepreneur, and Golden Globe Award-winning actor William Shatner whose effigy serves as a personal talisman and spirit-guide for the artist himself.
The inscription reads: "Shatner | Golden | Globe" which at once summarizes several facts surrounding the creation of this piece, including the fact that the piece is a tribute to William Shatner and that William Shatner has won I think at least two Golden Globe Awards for playing the same character on two different shows.
Bid soon and bid high for this stunning and unique piece worth as much for the artist who made it as for the artistry itself, and worth much more for the man who inspired its creation.
Good luck on this auction. I sincerely hope that you, personally, win this piece.
Scott Boyan
I thought the people who might be most interested in something like this would be William Shatner fans, since the egg says Shatner on it, so I posted this to the discussion
forum at
WilliamShatner.com:
I don't know if anybody is interested in this, but I made an Easter Egg as a tribute to William Shatner. It was the only Easter Egg I made this year. I don't care if you bid on it or not, I just thought somebody might get a kick out of seeing the pictures of my work.
The egg did not go over well at all on the William Shatner site. The people there got mad because they thought I was trying to scam them in some way. One woman wrote:
That guy is a CHEAT and a CROOK.
She decided that based on the fact that she noticed that the only people who had bid on my auction were my friends and family. I explained to the nice people there at William Shatner's site that my auction was only a joke, and that I didn't expect anyone other than my friends and family, particularly my sister-in-law Beth, to bid on it. Things settled down and I ended up making friends with the people on the forum.
The auction finally went for about $20. My sister-in-law was definitely in the running for it, but she was edged out by my friend Nathan who lives in Hawaii. I packaged up the egg as carefully as I could before sending it off to Hawaii. Nathan received it intact a few days later and this is what he had to say about it, reprinted without permission:
Fabulous prizes!
That Shatner-egg was so thoroughly packaged, I bet I could have stomped on the box without cracking the shell!
The purpular sheen is compelling, but the bonus prizes put this egg into the stratosphere of spectacular eBay victories!
included in the package were several unexpected bonus features:
- innumerable foamy crunch-snacks (non-delicious)
- several representational card-board abstractions representing the essence of Shatnastic Eggnittude
- CompUSA gift card, which must be activated before use
- 2004 National Parks Pass (nontransferrable)
- corrugated box receipt (valued at $4.28 USD)
- several important phone numbers (including an ambassador!)
- my favorite Japanese gum mantra
- a signed original yellow sheet by the artist
- gravy
- an enigmatic statement
- some sort of a death donkey
- a reminder to call Barry (probably about his memory vitamins)
- and best of all, my old friend GHOTI fish!
It's been a long time since I seen me that GHOTI fish.
A couple of funny things about that are 1) the CompUSA gift card actually had money on it, but I didn't tell Nathan, and 2) it wasn't a "Death Donkey" at all, it was a pale unicorn and the name it said on him was "Death."
In the end everything worked out. The William Shatner folks ended up not being so irate, Nathan liked his egg, and all was well with the world.
Labels: Shatner