itesser ink: progress, uncensored

First, an addition to my last post:

Something that was a catalyst for dumping such a majority of my reading list was the sheer quantity of information offered by some of the art and design feeds. I had previously justified my subscriptions by saying, "I'm an artist, and I need lots of references to study style and composition and inspire my own development." And, true, those blogs were instrumental in helping me amass a visual library 40,000 images strong.

On the other hand, I'm like Mona in Figgs and Phantoms, knowing the contents of a library but nothing of its substance. My focus is so much on acquiring quantity I haven't put any time into grokking my collection or learning from it by adapting what's in there for my own art.

Unintended tangent: Ellen Raskin, author of Figgs and Phantoms (and The Westing Game, which I prefer) not only died the exact day before I was born, but also did the original cover art for another novel that made me who I am: L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time. I'd never claim in public that I was the heir to her spirit, but I might like to pretend it from time to time.


Intended tangent: In 2009 I'm going to try moving to a system of getting things done that does not put exact deadlines on personal goals. Instead of saying "accomplish X and Y every day", I want to structure time limits on my working hours each day. It's a subtle distinction to say "These are the things I have to do. I'm stopping work at n'o clock" instead of "These are the things I need to do by n'o clock", but I think it might work for me. I think it'll give me more freedom to relax when I'm having a bad creative day.

Those are my thoughts.

Labels: bonus post, memo, meta

I have no specific resolutions for the new year as it's bound to be one full of upheave and tumult.

That sounds gross, doesn't it?

Upheaval. Upheaval and tumult.

But something I am doing is making a journal of "found poetry".

I got a sketchbook for Christmas which was good because my old one was nearly full, but not-so-good because I've become a snob for uniformity and paper quality and this gifted one was not quite up to snuff. BUT I'm making the best of it and copying (by hand) poetry from the web that I like into this sketchbook. With proper credits, of course.

It's more paper for me to haul everywhere, but I'm looking forward to having a physical place to save good poetry from people I mostly read on my computer screen. :)

Labels: bonus post, poetry, projects

Reagan and I use "Coyote" and "Jackal" as affectionate nicknames for each other. In some doodles, especially my mini-world compositions, I throw in these angular stick-coyotes and -jackals. When they're not colored (ie: most of the time), the best way to tell if a given canine is a coyote or a jackal is to see if it has whiskers on its nose. If there are whiskers, that's the yote.



((If you find jokes funniest before they've been explained, here's the link at the bottom of the post. You can skip the rest. ))

I hate most pickled things. Eggs might be the only exception. But I definitely hate pickled cucumbers. It's a waste of a perfectly good fregetable.

A couple days ago Reagan was standing near me, holding a sandwich that had a pickle on it. We exchanged whatever words needed to be exchanged, I made a gross-out face in regards to the pickle, then he left to go to his computer. A second later the pickle smell hit me and I made another grossed-out face and comment.

Reagan says to me, "If I need to hide something from you, I'll just put a pickle on it."

Then I drew the above doodle. It makes me laugh like crazy.

Speaking of coyote-related things that make me hapy, I love The Daily Coyote to pieces. It makes me think of my husband. :)

Labels: bonus post, details, digital work, low hanging fruit, memories

#0 of not-a-series

Neil Peart

He writes most of the lyrics for RUSH, one of the few bands I've seen in concert.

Last night I was listening to music while waiting for sleep to overtake me. After a few epic, warming songs by Peter Gabriel (another lyricist and singer I love), I switched to some Rush (in Rio).

One of the songs on my mp3 player was The Pass:

(Live version below the lyrics. Both vids are in better quality on YouTube, and I find the album version to have very nice cinematography.)

The Pass

Words by Neil Peart, music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, originally on Presto

Proud swagger out of the schoolyard
Waiting for the worlds applause
Rebel without a conscience
Martyr without a cause

Static on your frequency
Electrical storm in your veins
Raging at unreachable glory
Straining at invisible chains

And now you're trembling on a rocky ledge
Staring down into a heartless sea
Can't face life on a razors edge
Nothing's what you thought it would be

All of us get lost in the darkness
Dreamers learn to steer by the stars
All of us do time in the gutter
Dreamers turn to look at the cars
Turn around and turn around and turn around
Turn around and walk the razors edge
Don't turn your back
And slam the door on me

It's not as if this barricade
Blocks the only road
It's not as if you're all alone
In wanting to explode

Someone set a bad example
Made surrender seem all right
The act of a noble warrior
Who lost the will to fight

And now you're trembling on a rocky ledge
Staring down into a heartless sea
Done with life on a razors edge
Nothing's what you thought it would be

No hero in your tragedy
No daring in your escape
No salutes for your surrender
Nothing noble in your fate
Christ, what have you done?

All of us get lost in the darkness
Dreamers learn to steer by the stars
All of us do time in the gutter
Dreamers turn to look at the cars
Turn around and turn around and turn around
Turn around and walk the razors edge
Turn around and walk the razors edge
Turn around and walk the razors edge
Don't turn your back
And slam the door on me

Labels: bonus post, favorite poet, music, video

Today is 2112. And winter solstice.

Live appropriately.

Labels: bonus post, memo

Very, very occasionally, I miss game design. Today is one of those occasions, when I got this email:

Hi there! My name is Josh, and I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that my girlfriend, our friends, and I had an absolutely wonderful time yesterday playing The Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men. Since our group involved a number of pagans and no kids, the story ended up being about saving Christmas from Fundamentalists, and Santa Claus with huge stag's antlers. Much fun was had by all.

If you'd like to see the photoset, it's here. Awesome game, and thanks for writing it!

I feel all warm and squishy.

Another email mentioned someone being sad that I had left game design, as he had just discovered my work recently. Internally I went through a list of half developed game ideas, wondering what could become of them all.

Now I can either do some drawing to remind myself (besides being physically disconnected from the community) why I left it behind... or I can play a little Warcraft and be nostalgic...

Labels: awesome, bonus post, game design, gingerbread men

It's odd. I'm not even that into Star Wars (saw the whole trilogy the first time in my late teens), but each time I see it re-imagined in a different style by an artist, I am immediately taken. First it was Bjorn Hurri's Steampunk Star Wars (C3P0) character designs. Today, however, I'm even more enamored with...

Baroque Star Wars. (Found via imgfave)



My new mode, when finding an artist or photographer whose work I dig, is to google their name and look for a blog. Not only does Mattias Adolfsson have a blog, but he updates it regularly! Daily, even, and always with artwork. He doesn't skimp on the image quality, so you can get a detailed look at his intricate and whimsical designs.

Enthralled as I was at discovering Mattias, I browsed deep into the archives and found this hilarious post: Really Useful Tattoos. I think this is my favorite of the bunch:



Last but not least, he posts video tours of his moleskine sketchbooks on YouTube. The quality isn't spectacular (lo-def), but the chance to browse unedited work is nice.

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Other neat links: Found on this photo collection of unlikely animal friendships... something out of my Cheetalope story?!?!



Reagan says it looks like the not-cheetah in this picture looks more like a goat than any antelope, and I have to agree. Still, highly amusing.

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Cuban-American papercutting artist Elsa Mora created these plant ladies that blow me away with their simplicity.



I'm shocked that she's not offering them on a set of notecards in her etsy shop!
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It's probably for the best I waited a while to write this post. Some of the links lost their luster. But one more.

More for the lol value than any artistry: 30 ways to be electrocuted. Instructional-type illustrations from Germany. Bre Pettis found and posted them.

It's was hard to pick a favorite to share with you here, but I did it anyway.



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If only to make myself feel better, here's a cleanly scanned version of the art I posted earlier.

Labels: bonus post, linx, scannies

Fellow bloggers, I know you're out there. I have a question to be answered.

How long after a post is published should the comment discussion remain active?

I know that there's no mechanical limit to how long a thread can be posted to, but surely there's some rule of thumb for the shelf life of run-of-the-mill posts. Sometimes I read posts two weeks after their publication, but feel conspicuous commenting, especially if I'm catching up for all two weeks in one day (perhaps not in order) and may be inclined to comment on multiple posts in the span of an hour or two.

So at what point is it strange to be commenting on old entries?

Or is it a matter of "who would ever refuse a comment?"

Labels: bonus post, question

Pre-post shout-out to Katie Cook. It's her birthday! Besides being an amazing artist, she's a wonderfully sweet and nerdy gal.

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After an early morning scare of "can he go tomorrow?"*, I spent the day blissfully escaping into tv, drawing, and Bradbury's quirky prose.

(*the answer was "no, there are still obligations to be concluded)

Yes, I'm 24, a fan of sci-fi and literature, and I've never read Fahrenheit 451 before. If it's any defense, I have read Something Wicked This Way Comes.

As I was taking care of some chores downstairs I was bemoaning (to myself) the fact that I don't have as much time to devote to poetry as I would like. After reading a few of the entries in the Daily Routines blog, I fussed about being keen to master both writing and art, but whenever I devote hours to the former, the back of my mind tells me I could be spending them on the latter. I was specifically thinking about poetry, and how it's been quite a while since I've been inspired enough to have a new poem flow out of me.

Then I made sandwiches, tidied up the kitchen, then came upstairs and fluidly wrote a couple dozen lines. Oh, the gifts of irony.

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Obligatory paragraph pondering my social relationships. Today is one of the days I feel like an alien when thinking about my friends.

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For some odd reason I really like the idea of titling poems with days of the week, months of the year, and times of day. Maybe it ties into my tendency to use poetry as a form of diary, but with mood, emotion, events, and details, I like placing them in a chronological context, even if it doesn't tie into an ongoing timeline.

I think it might be similar to this phenomenon: Recently I read or heard someone talking about going to visit a foreign country. (It kills me that I can't remember the source of this anecdote.) Upon their return, friends asked "What is Country X like?" and the traveler would reply "I don't know", as he could only speak to his own experiences in the country, which could not offer a reliable picture of what Country X is like.

The connection is that by titling a poem "Early November" when nothing in the poem explicitly implies early November, I'm casting the contents of the poem in an early-November sort of light. I'm not saying what "early November" is, just my experiences there. Then.

Even though I don't have a deeply personal relationship with seasons, or week-patterns, or even day-patterns, I like using those markers. Mentally, I'm perhaps one step and one leap from developing a concise plan and description for a (chapbook?) project using only hours, days, and months for tiles.

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I am enamored with the lines inside my tea mug. While they do indicate that it's time for my ceramic chalice to be washed, they're also clues to my drinking habits: evenly spaced rings marking the resting water level between each round of sips. The stains are darker near the top; more heat and resting time when the tea-level is high. When I'm down to the last third, sometimes the tea isn't even lukewarm, and I lose interest.

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Dammit. Long post. I guess I'm back to normal? Unfortunately the net is not being normal. *is afraid to attempt posting*

Daily poem and art to come in a separate post so I can close firefox to play with digital paints.

Labels: bonus post, details, memo, poetry

Today marks seven years of bloggity goodness. Three thousand three hundred and sixty six posts spread out over two sites and eleven projects. Wow. Nearly 2500 of those were on LiveJournal. Take that as you will.

Here's that very first post, no editing or alteration. *cringe*

12:10 AM, 30 November 2001

*sigh*. . . for the past two days... I have beeen haunted. Maybe the story starts before that, but the "haunting" is what has occcupied much of my mind since then.

It's a litttle strange to walk downstairs in the midddle of the night, turn on a single light, and seee someone you hardly know sittting at your kitchen table. I had beeen reading East of Eden, as my boook report was the next day, and I decided to make myself something hot to drink, hoping it would keeep me awake a bit longer. So... my book was laying open on the counter, I flippped the light switch, and there he was, as casual as can be. He said to me, "You said you wanted to talk to me. So talk." It was a litttle freaky, since his appperance was alll in my head, but I answered. The words started, and I told him some of the thoughts in my mind. I don't think if this person had actuallly beeen there he would have stoood for it, but the version in my head merely sat and listened.

Freaky, I say. And that's not the end of it. This acquaintence of mine didn't go away. In a chair in my rooom, in my truck as I drove to schoool, walking me to classs, nearby as I sat to eat lunch...

He's not a ghost, and I don't get creeepy feeelings when I "seee" him, but it stilll seeems right to calll it a haunting. Or else I'm totallly crazy.

L&L,
me

*raises tea mug* Here's to another seven years.

Labels: bonus post, memories

Top of the pile today, the high holiday of consumerism for our religion of capitalism, is making art with kids.

Last Thursday was my second day in the classroom talking to 5th graders about drawing. In the 30 minutes I have, it's hard to slow down and really teach. As exhilarating it is to get out there and impression young minds, I tend to worry I'm doing it all wrong.

I spent the first hour and a half putting together individual sketchbooks for the kids




And bound a few of the extras as proof-of-concept that, should a kid exceed the bounds of their first sketchbook, I would be able to collect multiple volumes together in a single compendium



Stapler binding for the win!

The first page has chatter about drawing in the form of Frequently Asked Questions [img]. The last page has suggestions for How and What to Draw [img].

What I wanted them to take away from the lesson was the value of quick, light lines. I demonstrated by doing rough gestural drawings on the whiteboard, and instructed them to do four in pencil and four in pen, to try different mediums. When our time was up, I collected their sketchbooks and spent another ninety minutes giving individual comments and suggestions via sticky notes.






This coming week I have Monday and Tuesday available, we'll see what my mom offers me. It's pretty clear to me that some time with basic anatomy would be well spent, I'm just not sure how to do it. Reference photos and sketching each one twice while talking about it? My mom suggested that I give more time for individual demonstrations to sink in.

I think my main talking points will be

+ Identifying the torso-shape
+ Head/chest proportions.
+ Doing those things in life drawing

The handout will also include notes on shoulders and spines, plus some fresh drawing mantras. (ie: "draw what you see, not what you think you see")

More about how awesomely productive today is, plus your daily poem/sketches after I make all those things happen.

Labels: bonus post, drawing class, photos

I haven't been posting, or doing much useful internet at all, for the past couple days due to high concentrations of congestion and low concentrations of sleep.

Most of my time is spent wishlisting kitchen gadgets, watching old Marx brothers comedies, and blowing my nose. The only drawings I've done are in my tiny blue sketchbook.

Did pick up a shiny new phone yesterday to replace the one that went missing Monday. This one has a camera, bluetooth, and a picture of a jackal as the wallpaper.

I could have scrounged and such to keep posting, especially since I'm not so ill I have a fever, just obnoxiously distracting amounts of congestion.

Will be back when I can breathe properly.

Labels: bonus post, excuses

In 2001 or so I saw a short on Cartoon Network's O Canada and while it impacted me deeply, I managed to not take note of the title. It, along with Kenna's Hellbent video got a shout-out on my "quests" page on the very first website I ever had.

Tonight I started searching again, and after finding this description on the teleportation page of TVtropes

A Canadian cartoon, spotlighted on the extinct Cartoon Network show O Canada investigated the philosophical issue of teleporters. In it, a scientist shows off to a crowd a teleporter that functions by making an exact copy of someone elsewhere then destroying the original. A woman in the crowd, horrified by this, suggests to the scientist that he test the moral ramifications of the process by stepping through himself, and delaying the destruction of the original by five minutes. Thus, the scientist has an exact clone. They find this wonderful and exciting, until it comes time for one of them to be destroyed, whereupon each claims to be the copy. After the issue is resolved and one scientist is zapped into nothingness, the scientist changes his mind about the usefulness of the teleporter. The woman feels guilty for possibly impeding scientific progress, and atones for this by stepping through the machine herself, claiming that her new copied self is free of guilt for what her original had done.

decided to Ask MetaFilter if the hivemind knew the title or director. I get insecure about asking stupid questions, though, so held off and tried once again to see if my google-fu could pull me out of the jam.

Lo and behold! The next search got me a result of "I think it was called 'To Be'" and two searches later I was at an IMDb message board that not only confirmed the title and gave me John Weldon's name, but included a youtube link:





It's a philosophical 10 minutes I happily spend over and over and over again.

And me helping the internet?

I went back and added John Weldon's name and the title of his short to the TVtropes page that mentioned it. :)

Labels: bonus post, excitement, memories