mortmere

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Two duckies (at least) in Fraser's office in Strange Bedfellows. I have a vague memory of seeing one on someone's desk in the squad room, too. And possibly another time in Fraser's office, somewhere on Dief-level.

Due South Fandom! It's been said before that there are rubber ducks in multiple episodes of season 3, but I wonder if they're hidden in every episode? Please tell me the episodes where you know there are ducks, I'd like to see :D

#due south #rubber ducks #Fraser kept some of them

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Another few seconds of MotB appreciation - I find Fraser's little leap here insanely attractive. It's just beautiful.

(I wasn't completely sold on due South until I got to Mountie on the Bounty. It had been slashy fun so far, sure, but now it was slashy fun on an epic scale with an age of sail vibe, and for me as a Hornblower and Aubreyad fan that made all the difference. I also appreciated the music, because the song in this scene with its wistful chorus and tin whistles reminded me a bit of a 1970s hard rock classic I love, "Nantucket Sleighride" by Mountain (which is also a shipwreck song!). I didn't know then that "32 Down" was Paul Gross's own song. But as this episode was the turning point for me, I soon learned that and about a million other dS factoids. Still having fun!

Okay, Ray's little landing roll just before Fraser's pretty leap deserves its own gif, too. Their movements here are the opposite of the heavy wet drag from my last gif, they're smooth and light and graceful and I love them to bits, though I almost get motion sickness from looking at these gifs. :D

#due south #benton fraser #ray kowalski #ds30below #my due south observations #my fandom history #episode: mountie on the bounty

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@eaion's wonderful "Draw due South From Memory" drawing challenge for @ds30below nearly made me despair after the first hour and a half when I tried to make realistic color portraits of the characters without looking at any reference pics (it's hard, it's fucking hard!). I got as far as the Rays in that time, and they weren't co-operating. So, a change of strategy was needed: black profile blobs! ("They're called silhouette portraits, Ray.") Compared to the first effort, this felt super easy and comfortable. I'm pretty happy with most of them, though for some characters, I had no memory of their profiles at all. (Stellaaaaaa! She looks more like Susan Sarandon here.)

As a bonus, here are my first attempts of Fraser and Dief, because they're okay-ish. Dief is always okay, his face changes in canon, so anything wolfy-cute and fluffy goes. :P

#due south #due south fanart #draw due south from memory #ds30below #my art

[mortmere]

Aaaaaaa! I love this! You did so good, you definitely can draw! Your Dief is the happiest animal that ever lived!

I challenge everyone to do this! I confess I'm absolutely terrified to attempt it myself, but I made a promise and I will do it! I will! (Phew, it's too late in the day to do anything about it right now... :D )

Hi Everybody! :D

So I saw this meme here on Tumblr from another fandom, where you draw characters from your favorite book, show, movie, etc., FROM MEMORY (you are not allowed to sneak a peak to the original source) so I thought it could be fun if we do it with Due South. ;D As you can see above I absolutely can't draw, but it's not the point. The point is having a good time. :D So you can do this digitally or traditionally (like I did), with colors or black and white, with any art technique. You can be brave! :D (I decided to post mine for this exact reason: it doesn't matter how ridiculous you see your drawing, it would be still better than mine.:))

You can dowload the template from this link.

#due south #art challenge #scary but fun

[mortmere]

I don't usually pay much attention to the stunt guys doing their work, but this one is fun because it's a continuous shot that starts with the stunt guy and ends with CKR (I didn't even notice the switch until I was going through these scenes for my RayK apartment post last week). So, CKR had to hide in the back of the pick-up truck, and when he's climbing up from there, I think you can actually see a little glimpse of the stunt guy rolling off the truck bed. Glamorous television work! :)

#due south #ray kowalski #callum keith rennie #and his stunt guy #my due south observations #ds30below #episode: spy vs spy

[mortmere]

A less celebrated moment from Mountie on the Bounty. I'm ridiculously fond of this short clip - I guess because their struggle to haul Ray up to that first step looks so real - damn that gravity! (And bless those days when actors didn't have to look like they spend all their free time at the gym!)

#due south #benton fraser #ray kowalski #my due south observations #ds30below #mountie on the bounty

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One thing I haven’t seen much (or maybe at all?) in @ds30below is fanart recs! I get it, it's hard: I’ve tried compiling some themed art rec lists for the fest, but there are just too many wonderful things out there! So I thought I’d list some ways to find dS art at all, old and new, for the History week. Sadly, a lot of our fandom’s earlier art history is scattered all over barely functional old websites, if not lost completely. DeviantArt’s search has gone crazy - I can’t find the old dS stuff there anymore. A lot of the older (and even not that old) works on AO3 have broken image links, because image hosting has always been a big problem for fan artists (but not anymore: now there's https://images.squidge.org/). 

That said, where to find due South fanart?

Those old personal sites - if you can find them AND if the images aren't broken. Here’s an archived one where at least the wallpaper section still works (Nicci's art is F/K and some are NSFW).

Please, if you know other old or archived sites like this where the images still work, post about them!

The media files for the dS zines on Fanlore are a treasure trove, because there's a gallery view - check especially the files for slash zines, that image gallery has two pages.

Of course, the “Art” tag on AO3 has plenty of treasures (direct link below). I confess I haven’t probably looked through all of them myself yet! I recommend starting from the last page so there’s more new-to-you stuff unless you’ve been in the fandom for ten years or more. Don’t be disheartened by the broken image links, there are so many that do actually work.

Check out my sideblog, Due South Fanart Appreciation - there's also some older stuff there if you browse further. If you use Tumblr on a browser, the Archive is a nifty way to get a kind of a gallery view of the blog, though it only shows the first image in each post and does a disservice to artists with multipart works. The browser version also allows you to use the Tag list - it takes a while to load, but if you have a favorite artist/character/ship, you can find the relevant posts easily). 

I hope you enjoy the stuff you find in the above links - and if you find something you love, save the images, they might be gone tomorrow!

If you want to keep up with new dS fanart even from outside Tumblr, I also compile monthly art digests for the ds_noticeboard community on Dreamwidth:

I'll keep on trying to make those themed art rec lists! And more art, too. <3

#due south #due south fanart #fandom history #ds30below #fanart appreciation #art recs needed

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Snow Dief with a... snownut? A very untasty snownut, because he hasn't eaten it yet?

This is possibly the last snow we'll see here before next winter, so I seized the day. :D

PS. I love the less obvious types of fanart we've seen in @ds30below so far: avocado seed turtles, an amigurumi Dief and now a snow one, embroidered fanart... A challenge here for you artists and non-artists alike: make dS fanart out of some random stuff at hand! Re-enact scenes with stuffed animals? Write favorite lines with Smarties? Something completely different?

#due south #due south fanart #diefenbaker #my art #ds30below #snow

[mortmere]

Can Love Save Due South? Hell yeah. Watch Mountie on the Bounty.

(A quick and dirty MotB edition of that Victoria TV Guide cover, for @ds30below.)

(This is not a correct portrayal of their height difference. :D Though he does have a small guy energy, Ray is probably standing in a hole here.)

#due south #fraser/kowalski #benton fraser #ray kowalski #my art #manip #ds30below #red ships and green ships

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My one wish for the @ds30below History week is that someone would find this Entertainment Tonight segment, probably from March 1996, where Paul Gross prepares for his role as Ms Fraser and put it online.

This still from the video is from an old post by the wonderful @fuckyeahpaulgross, who sadly appears to have left Tumblr. Maybe they had the video, maybe they only had the screenshots - but someone somewhere must've had it and that gives me hope that it's not lost forever (the stills look like they're photos of a television screen, so the video most likely never was in digital format).

So, dear fellow dS fans, if you know anyone who might have this Holy Grill of dS interviews or know something more about it, please ask them! (Personally, I just contacted Entertainment Tonight about it, hoping they might put it online to celebrate the dS anniversary. Lol, we'll see!)

#due south #benton fraser #ms fraser #paul gross #television history #ds30below

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"Puppy Interview" by Mortmere

If due South was made today, we might get to see a puppy interview with Paul Gross and Callum Keith Rennie! (Draco isn't allowed to join them for puppy safety reasons.) BuzzFeed does these interviews where celebrities are playing with rescue puppies while answering questions, and the results are often hilarious and, above all, incredibly cute. So let’s at least imagine the scenario where our guys do a puppy interview. These puppies are Samoyeds, just for maximum fluff.

The background is pink because I got this idea when I watched Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer's puppy interview for their gay history drama, Fellow Travelers, and used a screenshot from that interview as the base. And anyway, maybe the pink fits: imagine Paul going on and on about how homoerotic the new season with the new Ray is going to be and how sexy Callum is, like he did in that magazine interview back in 1997.

Obviously, it's Paul doing most of the talking here - that wouldn't change. Too bad they did so few interviews together back in the day, and even fewer are now available online. Maybe someone will unearth something nice for the @ds30below History week?

#due south #due south fanart #benton fraser #ray kowalski #callum keith rennie #paul gross #my art #fraser/kowalski #ds30below #puppy interview

[mortmere]

My big post of RayK's apartment got so BIG that I couldn't handle it here on Tumblr, so I put it in a new Wordpress blog! :D I guess that's kind of a sister blog to my shinventory.wordpress.com blog that's all about Starsky & Hutch, but I doubt I'll use the dS blog for anything more than this post. I hope the post works as a resource and/or inspiration post for fic or art, or is just fun to look at! I also made a Drive folder for the photos from the post. Enjoy and let's continue the @ds30below fun! (Or, I go to sleep now, lol.)

#due south #ray kowalski #chez ray kowalski #my due south observations #ds30below #props to the props department #finally its D-U-N done and so am i

[mortmere]

More bar decor from Ray Kowalski's place - he has a 1960s tabletop jukebox, a Seeburg Consolette. A fun detail: it's made in Chicago!

As I'm going through the stuff in Ray's apartment, the scale of his private bar set-up is starting to upset me. The four-person bar counter, the pool table lamp above it, the jukebox, the darts board, all the little pub/bar/diner paraphernalia...

Did the apartment have that bar counter and stools and lamp when he moved in, or did he go to a lot of effort to create this particular environment just for himself after his divorce so he could... invite some of his so many friends over for fun social nights? or sit by himself and drink/not drink without having to feel lonely and out of place in public...? Oh, Ray...

(Yeah, I'm on vacation doing the grand tour of the Kowalski residence, lol - there's a big post with lots and lots of pics coming up as soon as I get everything organized... I'm still stuck in the Character week of @ds30below! But this is all good reference material for anyone who writes/draws Fraser/Kowalski, so I'm prompting everyone to make use of these canon details in fic or art.)

#due south #ray kowalski #my due south observations #chez ray kowalski #ds30below

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Ray Kowalski's pub decor! Ray has these two bar towels on his kitchen/bar counter, and I was lucky to identify them both as items made by Pub World, a company that specialized in this kind of "breweriana". The light colored one says "Dirty Dick's", and the red one says "The Happy Drinker" (I only figured that one out after checking if it could be another Pub World bar towel - bingo!).

But oh, the lost opportunities here! As I was searching for red bar towels, one that kept coming up said "Stella Artois" (a Belgian beer brand), another "Relax with an Otter" (this one was newer as it had an url for the brewery). But even with Pub World's English themes, I wish they'd used the ones with Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper, or the golf themed one that says "The 19th Hole" (CKR is an avid golfer). Or, lol, why not the one that's all about "Big Ben"...

#due south #ray kowalski #chez ray kowalski #my due south observations #ds30below

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Ray Kowalski has a real turtle, and then he has this carved wooden turtle sculpture that's seen in Spy vs Spy and Ladies' Man. It's a very particular type of turtle sculpture, but I don't know the origin (yet?). You can find many of these (similar shape, often different color or size than Ray's) for sale mostly in the US. Sometimes they're described as Mexican, so they might have been souvenirs from Mexico (but Ray has his before his poncho-buying trip!). The oldest I've seen look like they could be from the 40s or 50s, but then again there are very new-looking ones that are made somewhere in Asia. Whatever the origin, the turtle sculpture is a lovely detail in Ray's apartment. And Dief and the turtle are getting along just fine. :)

Here are detail photos of a very similar turtle. At their best, these turtles have a very happy expression, and this is definitely one of those lucky ones!

#due south #ray kowalski #my due south observations #turtle #chez ray kowalski #ds30below

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Ray Kowalski's parents Damian and Barbara Kowalski, for @ds30below character week!

I collected some pictures from the actors' younger years, so we can imagine what Ray's family looked like when he was growing up. Clare Coulter's black-and-white pictures are from 1977 and the color ones are from the movie By Design (1981, available on YouTube). Dan MacDonald's pictures are from the television series Strange Paradise (1969-1970, available on YT) and from the movie The Neptune Factor (1973, available on YT). Dan MacDonald died last year, age 89. Clare Coulter, 82, is still acting.

I like to think Ray's parents were both born circa 1938, so they'd have been in their early twenties when Ray was born, and 86ish today (if fic writers let them live!).

And then, of course, here's their boy, from teen to 21.

According to the official Due South website, Ray has an "extremely succesful brother". I'm glad that's all we ever heard of him in any official context.

#due south #ds30below #damian kowalski #barbara kowalski #ray kowalski #callum keith rennie #clare coulter #dan macdonald

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@syrupmap’s video clip from the early S2 episode Bird in the Hand (screenshot above) reminded me of an important fact: that plaid shirt right there is the exact same shirt Fraser lends to Ray Kowalski in Asylum.

#due south #ds30below #my due south observations #benton fraser #ray kowalski #fraser/kowalski