Phone photo 2494

Tumwater, Washington

Phone photo 1113

This front license plate is all that remains of my beloved '96 Olds Ciera
Now it is displayed in memory over my garage side door

UML

UML was an online series I drew for OlyBlog from May 29, 2007 to Nov. 21, 2009. There were 37 installments, or "issues," I guess you could call them.

The idea worked like this: Our Washington State license plates (until recently) were issued in the form of number number number hyphen letter letter letter.


Here is my '96 Olds Ciera (with almost a quarter million miles!), the inspiration for the concept.

Whenever I spotted a fellow UML I would write it down. After gathering about 26 or 27 of them, I would record the sightings on a chart, like this:

Then I would remove the grid lines, allowing the dots to float free, thusly:

Then the dots would start to connect:


And finally the lines would form an image, which would almost invariably turn out to be a dog smoking a cigarette (or cigar):

In one case it turned out to a be a cat, but that was quickly undone and reformed into a dog. These sequences were all accompanied by text, which you can read on OlyBlog. Something happened to the graphics in the early ones, they need to be refitted. OlyBlog has gone through a couple major resets since they were first posted.

I'll skip the preliminaries and present here a gallery (in no particular order) of the final panels of each UML:

Phone photo 52

UML