Jury-rig Icarus

Dinglehopper

2012-01-23T16:42:00.000-06:00

I hate The Little Mermaid.

Really, really hate the damn Little Mermaid. She is the anti-Belle (who reads, fights wolves with a stick, helps her dad with inventions, risks her life for her family and ends up winning the best library ever) and the most spoiled, entitled little brat to ever risk her family's lives, sell her soul to the devil, nearly kill her father, shirk her duties and do all this stupid, self-destructive stuff for a boy she thinks is hot.

Seriously. Ariel can go to hell. Worst role model ever for an already shallow, entitled generation.

But the dinglehopper...I always admired Scuttle's totally baldfaced approach to made-up facts and faux-intellectual explanations. Not that the "I don't know so I'll lie even more confidently" approach is one I fancy, either, but anyone who took advantage of stupid-face Ariel's selfish vapidity was good in my books. So, a jillion years ago (two), I drew my own mermaid in the more traditional, lure-men-to-their-horrible-deaths variety, and equipped her with her own dinglehopper for nefarious purpose.

After I got back from Virginia (where I had doodled a few mermaids (and a T-rex), among many other fun things), I scanned the image lineart and played with it in Illustrator (my first time using it...a bit of a learning curve, there) until I got this.

Then I coloured the scan of the lineart using my hastily scrawled notes in the bottom of my original (and a side doodle from Ward, who was helping me think of a possible art-nouveau tie-in), since I wanted something with a look and colour that hearkened a scorpionfish (specifically lionfish), suggesting poison, display, and stabbing death, and

...

then totally forgot about in favour of that other mermaid I did, I think right before I started the blog. This one. Watercolours for the second time ever. Lots of fun, though. I was happy with my experiment.

And I always planned on doing something with dinglehopper lady, but never did. Until now.

So, this project was a complementary, split-complementary or tetrad scheme, and it turns out a blue-green mermaid has the split complements of orange and red. Creams and browns are shades and tints of orange, and pinks the tint of red. My original was a straight-up complement of blue-green and red-orange, and I only changed it slightly in the painting.

Basically, I pulled up from my email that old Illustrator lineart and tweaked it a little, fixing some errors and making it generally a little better. Then I printed it a bit bigger and tried the sizes out on the light table until I got the composition I wanted, and then traced the outlines onto a paper, which I glued to a board.

And then I painted it. Acrylic washes, acrylic painting and a bit of pencil on top. This is, of course, a bad cell-phone picture, and a bit distorted. But I don't have a scanner set up yet, so you'll have to deal. The painting took a while, but I'd basically already done the same piece before, so it wasn't nearly as hard as having to come up with a concept sketch and work from scratch. Plus, I finally got that mermaid painted. So that's cool.

Backlogs

2012-01-07T16:56:00.000-06:00

I'm just going to spam a bunch of projects in the next week to try and give some idea of what I've gotten accomplished last term, and hopefully I'll finish before I start classes again the week after. We'll see.

Today's update: colour media class.

I don't think I've put up anything for this class yet, so there will be a lot. First few projects we're skipping, as they were exercises, basically. So we had a monochrome, a complementary, a transparency, a plastic colour and an emotional colour projects.

Monochrome: I did purple, since the laser picture from earlier showed me the nice skin tones purple can provide, and it's a great colour for darkness and shadows. So this is purple, red-violet and blue-violet, with some red and blue just a bit for emphasis. I wanted it to look a bit more N.C. Wyeth, but it was not to be, thanks to my not-very-strong painting-people skills.

The sketch looked really good, with the shoulders more clearly pressed back against the wall and the strain in the posture a lot more visible through the legs and feet and also in the face and neck, but covering all my lines made it really hard for me to re-create the original idea without more reference sketches. It also needs more red cast against the close walls. So, anyway. Here is is in a terrible-quality cell phone picture. It wouldn't fit on a scanner. Sorry. Acrylic on paper, by the way.

Complementary is going to be the next post, because I'd started a draft for it a week or two again and never finished. It has a backstory, see.

Transparency: This was a Photoshop project, and everyone else did glasses and vases and stuff, which I thought was boring.

So I made a neat background of stone textures and digital paint and cut cracks and rune shapes into it, then built a bunch of interesting stones through coloured and textured layers all stacked on each other with different transparency options. Each gem shape also distorts the ground below, which probably took the longest, since I had to cut out the shape below each facet and transform it to show the right refractions. All highlights are actually an image of the moon, spread across the surface the way real highlights are. Took forever, but looks neat, and Micheal was pleased that I'd picked something totally unique for the composition. And I was pleased, because screw vases.

Plastic colour: This is just a way to describe the way colour tends to be brightest closest to the light and the observer and both dull in chroma and tend toward a midtone in value. On a large scale, this is called environmental perspective (It's why hills tend to seem greyer as they recede toward the horizon) and on a small scale it's called plastic colour. A lot of people did portraits for this, because portraits are a good way to show the relatively even tone of skin in the lights, shadows and reflected lights on a face.

I made my neutral tone by painting a layer of midvalue green over the whole board and then painting my flesh tones over it. In the highlights, I painted the warms thicker, covering the greens, but in the shadows I let the green show through a transparent warm wash, and it worked really, really well. I'm pretty happy with my first real portrait. The lady here is Boss Lady, the owner/manager of Pegasus games, and I used her face a few more times last term. None do her justice, I'm afraid, because I'm not a real artist yet. Also acrylic on paper.

Emotional Colour: Last assignment is also of Boss Lady, in a combo of acrylic on board and Photoshop. For some reason, up close her face looks great, but the further away you get, the more it looks like a goblin. I'm so sorry, Lory. You are much prettier than I paint you. Also, again in painting, the body stance got all messed up. In subtle ways, mind you, but subtle differences are huge in figure drawing. This is two paintings, nearly identical, with the only difference being colour choice. The first is basic paladin, illuminated by the sun, with a broad spectrum of colours (showing that there is a bright, white light source) but a dominance of gold and purple. Pretty much all the skin tones are golds and purples, as well.

The second picture is darker, obviously, and I killed nearly all the red with a cold, greenish yellow light. Her face is even more devoid of reds and is all yellow, green and blue. Blah blah she's evil now, guys, see what I did thar?!! Ok. Good. Moving on.

Except I'm not, because this was it for colour media, except the piece I skipped earlier. So, productive. Lots of good use of colour for me, because I'm good at stuff.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

2011-12-09T16:06:00.000-06:00

Dec 6, 2011
Brandorf:
So I've got this file, which I agreed to printout and color.

My immediate thought was to turn him into some sort of cheery christmas Cthulu, but I was wondering if you had any ideas.

KypAelfgar:
Well, if Elder gods aren't your thing, and you don't feel energetic enough to draw a skeleton inside or, say, one mittened hand clutching a candle toward the now-gaping, melted mess of a chest, and little Xs for eyes, there's always the famous "Put all clothes on the wrong way" idea, wherein he sits on a hat, has a thousand mittens sprouting from his head like cancerous hair, etc.

Brandorf:
I like the cut of your jib.

Dec. 7, 2011
KypAelfgar:
Sorry it's big. Forgot to resize...damn projects have ruined me for huge fucking files.

Dec. 8, 2011
Brandorf:
I love you.

-----
Well, loyal reader(s), you have no excuse, now. Click, print, colour, then show me your results.

Storybored

2011-12-02T17:19:00.000-06:00

Twelve panels of my own life to display to the class? It was a narcissist's dream come true, because really, my life is so damned interesting and cool that I already have this urge to share it with everyone, and now I was being told to do that, specifically. A day, perhaps, is a limited time-frame in which to share all the facets of the incredible, jewel-like entity that is me, but I faced that challenge with my incredible resolve and set off to draw myself, at least several times.

The first day was spent simply noting the things I did in my normal routine, so I could paint an accurate picture of my time. Depressingly, despite all my slightly blurred recollections of supermodels and truffle oil, I found that I just rode the bus an awful lot. Also, mirrors. My gods, I stare at myself a lot. Any reflective surface will attract my attention and hold it for at least a few seconds of admiration and possible eyebrow waggling or winking. It's not that I think I'm the hottest thing on earth, mind you. It's just that I am generally prettier than my surroundings. Like, you know. The bus. Or some cars. Or anything else reflective and not already owning a pair of breasts.

But I digress.

So, a storyboard with just all scenes of me checking myself out was considered, but eventually abandoned, mostly because I figured I'd get annoyed trying to perfectly translate my lovely face to marker a dozen times, with diminishing success. So in my storyboard, I only check myself out twice.

I'm not going to bore you with the details, loyal reader, because they all boiled down to listed stuff, narrowed down, thumbnails drawn, photos taken, more thumbnails drawn, lightly sketched, drawn in marker because I suck at it most. I did go over the panels with a bit of white charcoal and some black pen, but otherwise that was it. For the whole thing. I totally forgot about captions until day of, and thought of borders too late, as well, so there are some hastily scrawled and partly legible things on.

Poses were hardest. My favorite panel, here, is a composite of three or four shots, and that was one of the simple ones. The rest, I must say, are varying degrees of suck. Part of it is the distortion on my camera lens, partly it was never having used markers, and partly it just took so damn long that I ended up half-assing the last few.

It ended up being classic and kinda boring. I didn't realize the extent of the freedom were would be allowed in both inventing and exaggerating scenes, but I've never been very good at pushing those boundaries, either. I tend to draw what I see, and do it very well, but making something deliberately exaggerated always was the same as deliberately wrong for me, and it's an annoying hurdle to get past. So although I tried to make things look interesting, by denying myself exaggeration I ended up having a less-interesting set of images than others. Mine was apparently a "classic marker comp. This is what storyboard artists used to spend all day doing," and although that was said with an approving nod, it still seemed a bit dull.

So here they are, and I'm sorry for the terrible quality. No working scanner, as yet, so these are bad call-phone pictures. You know, like everything else on this site.

Soon

2011-11-23T14:54:00.001-06:00

I'll actually put something up here. It's been busy.

Illustrious

2011-10-06T15:43:00.000-05:00

Chris Gargan and Jim McKiernan, the instructors of Drawing For illustration, are very intelligent, eloquent, skilled and sarcastic as anything, which allows me the delightful dialogue of good-spirited banter. For example, during figure drawing class, Chris was reiterating the asymmetry of individual limbs, as the musculature is not evenly distributed around the bones, and finished with the oft-used comment, "I'm just sayin."

"So, Chris," I asked innocently. "How many years of teaching here does it take before you devolve into nothing but a series of catchphrases?"

"I don't know," he replied. "How many years will I have to repeat them before you'll actually follow the instructions?"

And so forth. Despite appearances, we get along well, and I'm always delighted to be in the classes. Chris goes on tangents, but they're always interesting and informative. But it's an incredibly hard class. Drawing for Illustration is one of those classes that my mother would always describe as overflowing to fill all the available time; I'm about to post the first project and there have been two others completed since then, and all have involved a lot of labour and effort.

The first project here was a series of four paintings based on sketches of three objects. I had a cracked glass candle holder, a strappy gladiator sandal, and a huge abalone shell. After some (not enough, according to Gargan) sketches, I settled on some designs and got painting with acrylic washes.

Each painting began with a photocopy spray-mounted to a piece of illustration board, then one or two colours put down over the page to kill the white. Once dry, I started painting in earnest, adding first transparent and then opaque layers and detailing everything with coloured pencil. I've had a good deal of practice with acrylic, but this is pretty much the first time I've used washes. There was a bit of a learning curve, but I enjoyed them a lot, since they dry faster than watercolour. I worked on all of these simultaneously, since each had a lot of drying time between washes and layers of paint and had to dry quite thoroughly before I could lay down pencil. But this is the order in which I finished.

First painting: a vehicle. Stacked tealight holders plus the hole pattern of the abalone made this sketchy and totally non-functional submarine. Washes of yellow ochre and blue gave the water depth and a definite sense of up and down, and reds added richness to the submarine's metal. There are a lot of subtleties of shading here which aren't well replicated by a crappy cell phone picture, I'm afraid. I'll be scanning these soon, I hope. We'll soon see if my found scanner works.

Second painting: a lifeform. The shell, through marvelous transformations, joined forces with the skeletal shoe for the hedgehog-armadillos and pile of bones. This desert was washes of burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and some purple across the top.

The mesas are red wet brushwork, and I like them more than anything else in this picture. The environmental perspective turned out really well. I ought to have made the hedgehog-armadillos bigger and all the same size, though, so that instead of a happy little family frolicking on the shade of some bones it could be a batch of delinquent children playing under the bones of an ancestor, and I think I should have gone for stronger shadows.

Third painting: an article of clothing. I drew the shoe as spines around a woman for the first sketch and a scale armour suit thing with the second, and decided the best idea was to combine the two for ultimate hotness. The references I used had very short legs, and I didn't really correct for it because I'd been working for about 15 hours at this point.

She got a purple wash, because purple is still a believable skin tone for humans in cold lighting or in darkness, and it also makes a dark but rich background. I made the lights blue and red and put in lasers because Colen suggested "put in lasers." I tried to make architectural shapes and I ended up hating the result, and the blue glowing wall panel forcefield thing looks pretty uninspired, but I do like the hall of lasers. It looks very lasery.

Fourth painting: a building or city. This one was also the shell, originally, and the Umbilical is made of the shoe spine. Although it's the most complex picture, it's actually this finished because of an accident. I'd done my gold wash, put on some liquid masque (rubber cement, yo) and put a purple over it half-wet, so it had a lovely streaky, woodcut-like appearance with a lot of granulation, which is a non-blended mix of washes that displaces colour into little speckles and textures, giving you a visual mix instead of a physical one, like pointillism.

It looked great until I spilled a bunch of my dark purple paint over it, obscuring a big patch of the neat texture. So I had to darken everything, leaving almost no texture behind, and with that glossy near-black acrylic it only made sense to make everything else nice and finished, too. The city is mostly green and has a miniature star in the centre, around which the cropland curves for the most light.

I painted the city inside the globe and then covered the asteroid with clear acrylic gel, which is very thick and dries with most of its texture intact, and I made all kinds of spiky brush marks with the stuff. I let it dry and then painted washes over the asteroid, giving it a great rocky look. Then I added the Umbilical and some white stars, and went to bed. Right before class I suddenly remembered to put the white highlights on the Umbilical, and then I turned it in.

Class started, we did other things, and finally started the critique late. We only got through a few people, so we handed in our work to be graded over the weekend and started to head out when Chris grabbed mine and held them up over his head. "Hello, guys? Hey. I just wanted to let you know that this is what you're going to be competing against for the rest of the semester. I suggest you keep that in mind for the next projects."

"You utter bastard," I hissed, as a slow wave of classmates flooded over to my desk, to offer grudging accolades and death threats, in equal measure.

So I successfully set an impossibly high standard for myself and also managed to gain the hatred of my classmates in one fell swoop. It's certainly set the tone of the class for me.

lolcatz

2011-09-20T14:19:00.000-05:00

I'm doing a repackaging assignment, which is boring as anything, really. But I picked a pet toy laser pointer, because it was something to play with in class, which is my criteria for most assignments. Additionally, my selection gave me the best idea for a logo EVER, thanks to the truly inspired Saturday Night Live sketches.

Behold!

LASERCAT.

Love it. You just wish you'd thought of it first.

It figures

2011-09-08T15:36:00.000-05:00

Illustrative Figure Drawing class is fun so far. We've had two classes and I think I'm going to learn a lot. Unfortunately, the pictures are NSFW, so I'm not posting them at the mo'. Instead, I'm going to show you a few stupid things I did for no credit whatsoever.

First is, I think, a brilliant self-portrait, done for one of my two classes that I have back-to-back in the same classroom, with a ten-minute break between. I think this was done for the first, and since I have the same instructor in both classes I filled out the second sheet in as many other languages or alphabets as I knew. At the end I'd gotten desperate, having used up Hebrew and Elvish and Futhark and Aurebesh right away and exhausted Spanish and Latin as my backups. There's L337 at the bottom of the page, and Elvish again, and then just some calligraphy. It all started because the very first question "who are you?" just begged for the Tetragrammaton, and after that it was a free-for-all. But that's not here, because I don't have a picture of it. This one is, though.

I think it's a fine likeness.

Then there's the second picture of the day, which John requested during colour media in-class work time. "Paint me something cool," he suggested. "I'll give you a dollar."

"Ok," I agreed after no deliberation whatsoever.

We both turned back to our work, and then he turned back and added, "But do it fast. I'm not very patient."

Three minutes later, I handed him Monochromatic Red (Yeti In A Slaughterhouse). He was pleased, but has yet to give me a dollar. You may be able to guess what colours I had left, and I succeeded admirably in using all my leftover paint and thus saving myself the trouble of cleaning off my palette.

Off to do catch a bus and do more homework. I'll have to talk about the homework situation another time.

And a year later:

2011-09-05T19:17:00.005-05:00

I will finally have pictures up of the blue baby dragon. That poor project got picked up and put down more times than a midget at a weightlifting exhibition, and the long drying times for layers of acrylic and epoxy and plaster and things made it that much slower. The damned egg was layer upon layer of acrylic, painted on and left to dry over about a week, if I recall. You can look at pictures of the early steps of baby dragon #3 in Tree of Knowledge and Feeling Blue, if you are inclined to search the archives ... blogger seems uninterested in letting me link to the pages.

Egg and dragon were finished ages ago, as dedicated reader may remember from last fall, but it wasn't until class ended this spring that I got around to an art day with Ward, where I finally made a sculpey and super sculpey base for the dude. I wanted a spring feel, since it was still spring at the time, so I made a base with super sculpey flowers and rushes growing over it and a shallow divot for a pool of water. I also sculpted a boatload of other things, both sculptures and mock-ups, but those are, at the moment, unimportant (mostly because I don't have a good, shiny picture of them). You can speculate at your leisure.

The damn thing also fell over on the way home in the car, snapping off a few blades of grass. I did not repair them.

After several weeks it was primed and ready to sit on my table for a few more weeks until I had time to sit down and paint it. With my trust acrylic gel matrix and traditional pile o' crap to mix into it, including sand, paint, glitter, crushed glass, and a dozen things I forget, I whipped up a bowl of nasty-looking goo and pebbles and blobbed it all over the base for a muddy, wet look.

Hey, pop quiz: what's brown and sticky?

A: Nicki Minaj
B: A stick
C: Poop
D: This bowl of goo

Answer is of course E: All of the above. Anyone who wrote that in gets five points.

If you look at the big version of that picture, you'll see my little piece of test plaster painted with blobs of the stuff. It dried perfectly, gorgeously muddy, so I painted the base with it and all the plant/flowery things with other things that were less muddy. I carefully arranged pebbles in clusters around the lip of the pool and around the different plants and let it dry overnight. Then I touched up all the mud and painted a thin film of translucent blue in the bottom of the pool.

After that had dried for a few weeks, I finally got around to mixing up a batch of epoxy water. I filled the pool with it and let it ooze down the sides to give everything around the water a wet look, and then let that dry for about three weeks. Finally, with typography class done, I finished the last step of gluing on the ladybug and pouring the plaster into the egg with the baby dragon. Once finished, it was only a few short weeks before I finally remembered to have Patrick take a picture of it, so we made another ghetto soft box and shot the damn thing.

And here it is. Click for large images. That is a command, not an instruction.

Come Thou Font of Every Blessing

2011-07-27T18:17:00.000-05:00

If everyone could turn in their hymnals to page 467...

Man. I wasn't even raised on hymns, but some things just stick in your head forever. The intoned phrase, the opening chords on the organ with an indefinitely held fermata, so no one actually knows when to start singing. One or two people start, and everyone else kinda trickles in on the first three notes, and generally there's a 16th note lag behind the beat through the whole verse until the end chord, which, of course, has a fermata, and it all starts again with the next verse (verse 1, 3 and 4).

This has nothing to do with my project. It's just amusing to watch a whole giant room full of white folks awkwardly trying to sing a song older than their country at a tempo so slow it becomes soporific and puts half the congregation to sleep by the chorus. Eddie Izzard's take on it makes me laugh every time, so you should watch it. Laughter, as we all know, makes boring blog posts seem funnier, even if unrelated to the post.

Anyway. Now for the boring bits.

Font Foundries are companies that create or collect fonts and publish, distribute, and sell them to the general public. Many foundries put out folded-up newsletters to design studios which showcase certain fonts in a series or style and have a poster on the reverse side. If it was unclear where I was heading with this exposition, our assignment was to invent a font foundry, pick some related fonts off these internets, and make a poster. One side would have the 6 fonts and ordering info, and the other side would have an image directly related to and/or using the selected fonts. This was, in the examples we saw, built out of text or other simple, Illustrator-built images incorporating the text, which I didn't want to do.

I picked handwritten script fonts and did some research on Victorian-era love letters, even finding some helpful transcriptions that I copy-pasted into documents. I took a total of 6 letters or parts of letter and converted them into each of the 6 fonts I was going to showcase, adjusting the spacing and leading to make the lines less consistent and add to the illusion of a handwritten letter. Then I printed several copies of each letter on a laser printer (VERY IMPORTANT STEP, GUYS - inkjet ink runs like mad if you get it wet) and weathered them by soaking 'em in tea for a bit, then tossing them in the oven to dry.

As we all know, the flash point of paper is Fahrenheit 451 (-ish, plus or minus a lot depending on the paper, but still a nice number), so at about 200 degrees F it was in no danger of burning. The heat does give the paper a nice crackly feel and saves a lot of time that you otherwise have to spend waiting for paper to dry, which is almost as boring as waiting for paint to dry. Pressing barely-damp pages fresh out of the oven under a stack of books and paper towels helps keep them from wrinkling too much, in case anyone else gets the urge to try this technique.

All this I do for you, imaginary reader.

So, at this point, Patrick and I headed to the condo basement and set up the writing desk, and I spent a while adding Victorian-y props to it. I wanted sealing wax, but didn't have any, so I found a nice red crayon to match the candles and melted that with the lighter.

It worked like a champ; I was pretty pleased. I used some necklace bits for the seals and they ended up looking perfect. One of the necklaces was an actual Egyptian cartouche, but I don't think you can see it in the final. Since I'd made multiple copies of each letter, I was able to pick the best for display and use the others as prop paper, stacking, folding, or sealing them to make the desk look well-used.

The set-up took a while, but the final still life looked great. I took out my grubbiest and oldest pen, filled a glass jar with ink, lit the candles and laid out each of my six letters. The foundry name came from Nate, who, when asked "what should I name my font foundry?" replied "Fontaine" and then went back to playing Bioshock. There may be a connection there, but I can't imagine what. If you look very closely at the stuff on the desk, you may see a little porcelain pendant, which is actually a tiny china painting I did back in middle or high school. Bit of trivia for you, there. I got skillz.

Once everything was finally set up, Patrick took a crap tonne of pictures. We used the candles and indirect lighting to make it all quiet and moody-lookin', and then picked out the best one. A few simple edits in PS later and I had some nice, big tiffs to use for a poster. For the other side of the poster I made some paper texture in PS and, in following with the love letter theme, put each font its own "page" with a lot of overlapping edges and stuck a nonsense but old-timey pangram at the bottom of each font page. I put those over a wallpaper texture I found, and also used a single element of the texture as a watermark on the mailer bit in the corner.

Here's the final, front and back. Click for hugeishness.

Cover Girl

2011-07-22T00:21:00.000-05:00

When we got this assignment, I started grinning and the grin stayed for most of the project. Put yourself, it explained, on a magazine cover, and make up some articles about yourself to feature with your picture. Technically, we found out, we could use someone else, but my rampant narcissism never even hinted at that possibility. It was baffling...talk about some else? We were to use Esquire Magazine for our basic style, which also had vector art of its header readily available, but it didn't seem right for me.

I picked the picture first and then everything else really just picked itself. This is one of the coolest pictures of me I have (thank you, Patrick). We did have to use an interesting text style that overlapped our image somewhat while still remaining legible, which is not a feature of Gothic Beauty magazine, but whatever. Horns and corsets aren't really a staple of Esquire.

I had to build the headline from scratch, which become much easier once I finally figured out what the font was (Black Chancery) but still didn't end up perfect thanks to the annoyance of edge effects on the letters. But eh. For the requirements of the assignment it worked fine, so I went with it. There are only two fonts used, with the exception of the header and bits and that stupid word "magazine" which are some avant garde font thing. It seems kind of a jarring font choice for a magazine about Gothic Beauty, but mine not to reason why.

For some reason, all the black of the border and text is a strange grey in the PDF that I converted into my PNG for posting. I'm not sure why.

Here are some actual covers so you can see how mine looks in comparison.

S#!% on a shingle

2011-07-21T23:38:00.000-05:00

Not going to bother with any details here. Got a menu text file, made a menu. Mine had the coolest fold style in the class, even though the rest of the design was pretty uninteresting. The folded one here is my crap mock-up (one of many...took forever to get those folds measured out perfectly), because I turned in my nice ones. Both, by accident. It's too bad, because the folds on those were nice and sharp and perfect.

Also, the colours on these menus are off...the red sidebars aren't this bright, but instead match the red everywhere else. But screw it. I lost a good half my files via flash drive issues and I'm not spending any more time right now making them again, since I have other things to do, dammit. It's also funny that half the class knew was S.O.S. as a food stood for and half had no clue.

Storyboardin'

2011-07-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

To break the unbearable monotony of multiple projects mostly involving soft returns and clicking buttons on the InDesign toolbar, we got to actually MAKE some integrated design things with movie titles and colour and images and any type styles we wanted and everything! It was about as exciting as finding a desert oasis with not only a fresh spring but also a doughnut tree and a traveling burlesque troupe, let me tell you.

We even got to pick our movie. Obviously, those with bad or non-existent title screens were best, giving us a lot of indie and lower-budget fodder to use. As a design class in Madison, everyone is a little bit hipster anyway, so it was unlikely we'd have all picked summer blockbusters. But of course someone picked Requiem for a Dream, and someone picked Wristcutters, and a few people had french films, and a few more had hilarious B-movies. One had Elvis and samurai, for reasons never satisfactorily explained.

I picked Equilibrium, which, if you've never seen it, is a generic distopian future with a monolithic and fascist government which suppresses all emotion through drugs and 451-type Firemen, a ragged but inspirational underground which tries to save art and passion (via acting bohemian, I think), some guys with a sweet and nonsensical martial art involving guns, Christian Bale, and a lot of blue filter.

Someone last semester had done a godawful job on an Equilibrium storyboard and I figured it'd be nice to be compared to something that was really that awful...I could only come out looking better, even if I died mid-project. It was...all these primary colours, right? With...bubbbles? And not much text at all, and I guess the bubble colour things were behind glass that was starting to crack? I guess? As a metaphor it's pretty weak, and the colours and bubbles were so totally wrong I had to wonder if they had ever seen the movie.

Not that the original is much better. It has a voice-over talking about WWIII with some stock footage from WWII of grainy atom bombs and Stalin and stuff. There's a bit with a second of the Gun Kata, but it's not worth the rest of the crap intro. It's so generic and cheap to begin a movie so dependent on style.

The movie posters and DVD box both have the word Equilibrium in caps with a strange letter Q that is perfectly symmetric, and makes the whole word look like it's balancing on that Q tail. So I wrote a bunch of human-y, emotion-y words on index cards with ink and charcoal and scanned them, stole some textures off the internet (free ones, not actually stolen), found some nice, futuristic geometric fonts and made a picture of a bottle of the drug Prozium in Photoshop.

Then I made a Photoshop document with about 50 layers which I turned on and off to make the different frames. I used the voice-over at the beginning as my guide to the frames, so words appear as they are referenced, and scroll across to make the big pile of emotionally charged bad things which are then balanced by the tiny bottle of Prozium, then the word becomes the balance point. It's all very deep and stuff, I'm sure, but mainly it just looked really cool, I thought. I had fun with the colours, too. The gold and the blue-grey are basically the only colours in the whole movie, so I used them at the end to transition to the opening scene, where a bunch of blue-grey hippies get shot in the face.

And everybody liked it. Go me.

I'm throwing them all at the end here so you can see all the frames...this is how they appeared on my final storyboard sheet, since no-one really wants to click on 16 different frames. I know I don't.

Modicum of boredom

2011-07-21T13:36:00.001-05:00

This project was REALLY boring, so I'm not going to make you actually read about it. Basically, it was formatting body copy, which is not terribly interesting all by itself (although having nice-looking copy is very satisfying, and the work isn't awful...more mindless than anything), but when you add to it the 7 other pages of identical, terribly edited text, it gets a lot more tedious.

Now, I was lazy on mine (by which I mean efficient for a change) and used the same background and headlines for all my pages. I was forgetful on mine as well and forgot to put the damn magazine name/page number on my main page template, which means it's not on any of the pages. It's going to reflect badly on my grade, but I noticed about ten minutes after I turned them in, which is a bit too late to fix errors. Argh.

There were 8 in all. Flush left, justified, 2 and 3 column, with and without pull quotes, but I'm going to just show you a few because DAYUM. I know you won't look at them, and I can't blame you. I really don't want to look at them ever again, either, so we're square. Mostly because of the typos, really...I wanted to re-write this thing so badly, but I wasn't allowed. Sentence fragments, no real organization, ugh. Godawful. The editor in me wanted to murder someone. The designer in me made the editor in me shut up and just do the damn thing. I anticipate some friction between those parties in the future...

Come Together

2011-07-21T13:10:00.000-05:00

There really isn't much interesting to say about this stuff, so here's just a quick run down. Next project we had to make a big version of the words and stuff them into the same basic layout. Woot.

It was much easier to do when the word was on its own line, for obvious reasons, and adjusting the leading to make everything visibly match up was the whole challenge of it. It has been voted as everyone's least favorite project, incidentally. My files got lost the last day of class, so I threw these together in about 4 minutes during the exam.

Next we stuck all the words together into a big word pile using different sized words and 90 degree increments. It was, like many things in the world, tedious and annoying, but I liked making my two letter I dots met up. That was fun. I actually make about 6 of these and picked the one I liked best, which didn't take way too much time or anything. It was a hell of a lot more fun that the big word, that's for sure.

Lastly, we made it into a thingy, um, a magazine spread with stolen body copy and photos off the internets. This is pretty much how we do everything in the program...as long as it's not portfolio work people turn a blind eye. So sorry, internet, for stealing these images and this article. The version I turned in, I think, had the two body copy collumns lining up, but I also did that in school on the last day, so I don't have those and I have no inclination whatsoever to remake them at the moment. Sorry.

Buggre Alle this for a Larke

2011-07-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

Buggre Alle this for a Larke. I amme sick to mye Hart of typefettinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke.

Anyway. If you haven't read Good Omens, go do so. I've got a loaner copy floating around somewhere.

I just finished a 6-week Typography class, and it went by very quickly in the manner of things requiring lots of hard work and not much time to do it. I'll be posting, again, a bit quickly, since I would like to move on to other projects while I still have a month of non-school time. So, this is the first and second assignment.

The first was hand-letting type using a blown-up photocopy and tracing paper, which does wonders for making you really see the details of letters. Once the letters were traced, which took this side of forever, we copied the traces and arranged the lines.

We had to figure out what spacing looked best on our own, with no computer intervention, and all of us ended up with similar patterns of letter, word and line spacing, introducing us to the joys of kerning and leading from a very intuitive standpoint. I would wax poetic about what a great project this was for introducing us to the world of letterforms and placement, but it was also bloody tedious and made me want to commit murder.

After this phase, we took the same quotes and created them on the computer, using the ubiquitous Adobe programs to fiddle the letters and lines around to match our hand-lettered pages.

Turns out you need a lot of fiddling around to make everything line up properly, which was, again, the point of the exercise. Then blah blah put them next to each other for contrast blah.

Gotta catch a bus. No funny bits this time.

Amber

2011-07-18T12:08:00.000-05:00

Slightly better pictures of the book cover. Hooray!

Judging a Book by its Cover

2011-06-28T17:05:00.000-05:00

Is damned easy when the cover looks like this:

Yeah. That lime green cover, that odd man with jeans on and crazy eyes and an utterly useless knife and a silly goatee and no shirt (of course, thank you, Boris Vallejo) and an animate cloak which may be floating about his neck in an attempt at strangulation, those odd cat things that appear to be growing from the earth, that odd background of not-quite cave, not quite trees, that godawful wood-look italic font for no damned reason. It is pretty hideous.

So I made a new one, and am going to give you thirty seconds worth of how because I am not modifying a billion trillion files to make them viewable in a browser.

I measured the dust jacket, made a file, did some stuff. Background image fractal stolen off the internet (sorry, internet, I lost the credit info), cards handmade in illustrator and Photoshop, Corwin is lots of stock photos (as are the worlds he inhabits on the cards), Picture of Zelazny uncredited, but came 'shopped with the yellow pendant (which I fixed), text and stuff all from the book cover (thus the hated ellipses freaking EVERYWHERE; I wasn't allowed to edit it) and edited by me in a hurry, printed out, stuck on the book, viola.

It is shown here twice...I made a mock-up jacket, found an error and fixed it on the new one, so the old one's just kinda chillin'. There's also the Prydain book I loaned John for his project, in all its pink glory.

And I have, if you like, a quick 'n dirty jpg of the unfolded cover so's you can see it in more detail.

Mona Lisa Smile

2011-06-28T15:44:00.000-05:00

In Design Fundies our final project was a poster for an imaginary art show at a real gallery. The art show had to feature a particular era of modern art (basically arts and crafts movement and onward) and had to be done in the style of that movement. So, for example, a constructivist poster would follow the style of that movement, with bold colours, prominent use of red, geometric shapes and an industrial feel. I got started making my thumbnails for this movement and then discovered no one had picked Dada, so I did that instead.

Let me elaborate slightly on my decision. It was a huge challenge, since I absolutely hate total, useless abstraction...without form there is no function. I hate art that exists to mock, or that sacrifices its inherent integrity in order to make a point, usually by ignoring craftsmanship and skill in favour of shock value or pop reference or heavy, obvious metaphor.

So you can imagine my love of Dada. It's asymmetric, destructive, random, deliberately obtuse. It's a mockery of art and a deliberate move away from technique and into showy, angry nihilism. Dada brought us closer to things like cubism, which I really don't like, collage, which is simplistic and useless, really jarring and awful performance art and music, and such artistic wonders as the urinal with a pretend name written on it and the Mona Lisa with a mustache drawn on and an the acronym LHOOQ underneath which, when read slowly in a french accent, means something like "she is hot in her ass/other lady parts."

Woot. A bunch of kids hiding from WW1 in Switzerland, kids younger then many of my classmates, made a whole art movement dedicated to being a bunch of twats. I'm sure they'd be equal parts appalled and delighted to see their deliberately anti-aesthetic work featured in honest galleries across the globe.

So, I started drawing. Out of all my ideas, though, and there were many, many thumbnails, I kept gravitating back to my first, which was the Mona Lisa with the mustache, upside-down and with the art exhibit as the mustache. Adding some collage to the corner gave me a place to put info and a balance to the piece. I made a prototype on plain black and white paper, ended up flipping it sideways, and started on the final.

I found the highest quality picture of Lisa I could and cropped her down quite a bit, so her face nearly filled the 11x17. Then I made a few pages of the text I would use, some spares, blocks of colour and old paper textures to use for the collage assembly.

The rest of the process was really just the tedium of cutting and pasting things. Big blue letters spelled DADA down the side, while I used marker and white-out for her gloriously curled mustache. The collage assembly took most of the time, since it had to be chaotic but still legible...we couldn't sacrifice the information in order to preserve the style, which makes sense, since that is really the whole point of making a poster for something.

Even once the collage was pasted down and dry, I still had hours of work ahead of me going in with coloured pencil to simulate oil in order to bring out the letters. For example, putting a hint of blue next to an orange word makes the orange stand out, and layers of subtle colours kept lights from being too light, darks from being too dark, and kept the eye able to move across the page in a functional way. I was really proud of it, and even happier when Ribble lauded it specifically in the critique.

Sadly, I have no good picture of the final. I was busy with, you know, the end of the year and all, and then never got around to it afterwards. One of these days I'll add one, for real. I did just put in an edit with my Letter D final piece, so it's not completely far-fetched to think I might, someday, add this.

I still hate Dada, in case you were wondering.

Skellingtons in the closet

2011-06-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

Heightened drawing. This one actually kicked out ye olde skull with horns in my end-of-semester drawing portfolio. It is sideways, but I like it that way. Has a weird, alien look to it, I think, like a big scary bug or sommat.

Can't Stop the Rock

2011-06-28T14:46:00.001-05:00

And I am running out of rock puns pretty quickly.

This will be less process-intensive than most, since I'm going to be doing a lot of things as quickly as possible. There were several final projects I haven't talk about, including a Burnie's Rock Shop sign redesign, an art show poster and a book cover. There was a storyboard advert project for concept but I never got a good picture of it, and it was mostly just me and John trying to see if we could take the product Pots and Pans and the target market Fishermen and see if we could put in a bikini girl for no real reason (answer: yes). It is to my credit that I became known as the person who knew how to draw boobs, right?

Anyhow. I'm going to talk briefly about the Burnie's sign here, but it lacks a picture of the final piece, so that's a bit crap. Very quickly:

Thumbnails, lots, small foamcore mock-up. Big pieces of foamcore, cut into at least 5 layers. Maybe it was 6? I don't recall. So a lot of tedium there, making the 3D sign, painted with textured paint to look like an interesting thing. Took about three full cans to cover and fill in the letters. Cutting those words out was a drag, since I had to cut down to but not through the bottom layer of paper, which made me hate this project so fast...

Then the shining glory of this beast: I cut out like a hundred million shapes out of foamcore, meant to represent crystals. To make them crytal-y, I took tissue paper and glued it in strips to the foamcore pieces, which basically ruined my life. Glue stuck everywhere: to my fingers, to the loose pieces of tissue paper, to the other crystals, to the floor, to the scissors. Everything. And it took forever, which in retrospect I should have anticipated, but I am the eternal optimist which means I am rubbish at guessing times and prices.

Once the bits were dry, I trimmed them, added coloured pencil, and attached them with tape, glue, and toothpicks in a radial pattern, making shorter and more upright layers as I went, and finishing it off with some crystals in the corners. The colours turned out as bright as I'd hoped, so at least I was right about the end result of my clever method, but I doubt it was worth all the hassle.

I turned this damn thing in three days late and still hadn't finished it entirely. The carved words so lovingly wrought basically don't show up at all against the intensely bright foreground, and I didn't notice looking at it from ten feet away at the Boy's house but on the wall at school, twenty feet away, they vanish entirely. If I ever do anything with this again it'll be to fill those letters with poured paint (I tried brushing it and it did not work at all) in some bright colour. I haven't even taken the damn thing home yet, since it's huge and bulky and fragile and I take the bus and walk most places.

So. Project and post #1 done for this batch. I'm going to do some stuff and then proceed to project two.

Forgotten, but not lost

2011-06-28T09:49:00.002-05:00

I still have some of last semester's end-of-year projects to put up and I'm in the middle of an accelerated typography course, so there will, at some point (soon), be updates. Maybe this afternoon, even. We'll see.

Risqué Business

2011-05-03T21:31:00.001-05:00

As the semester wears on, I find myself growing a bit burned out. So when interactive gift cards were proposed for Concept Development, I decided to do something fun. I toyed with some Halloween Express-type gift cards, initially; making sketches for stick-on masks, props, and outfits to be attached to the Trick-Or-Treaters on the cards, but I had this other idea in the back of my mind. I joked about it, made a few sketches, and decided against it.

And, after watching people snicker at my dismissed idea, I changed my mind.

The business I chose was Selective Video, which is a 24-hour porn/toy/novelty/smoking supplies/lingerie store with two convenient locations in Madison (one near Todd Drive on the Beltline, and one off HWY 30). I proposed this to my teacher, who grudgingly agreed, on the condition I did not use actual nudity in my images.

So, I drew up some thumbnails. Winking or kissing lenticular (cards with the lens top to make a moving picture) cards, pinups girls, stripping models and curtained rooms. I ultimately decided for the Peep Show idea, and started working.

Now, just so you know, vast amounts of research were needed to make this project. Hundreds of poses to dig through in order to find the right position of the torso, hundreds more to place arms, or just get an overall Peep Show feel to my work. This mostly boiled down to web searches and model websites, and going to google with phrases like "hot girl covering boobs with hands." Needless to say, my research was the envy of my classmates, who were annoyed they hadn't picked a topic involving naked ladies.

So, research done, I made a torso in Illustrator, coloured it very simply, and made a background. The card needed a holder, so I designed a holder, front and back, and got everything printed out. Sadly, I don't have the files on this computer, or, more accurately, I do, but they're in a format I can't read, so you'll have to get photos, instead.

Then came assembly. Cutting out and gluing the back piece was actually really annoying, and made me late for an awesome concert (also, both of us not actually checking to see if we were going to the right theatre was a bit of a setback. I am SO PRO). Patrick brought his lovely laminator over, thank you Patrick, and I cut out and laminated a few gift cards. The holder got some felt curtains over the window and I realized about then that I ought to have put the company name somewhere BESIDES under the curtains, and that open spot felt really empty. Ah, well. Nothing to be done for it...it was Easter, and not many printing options.

Then, my final little touch for the cards - scratch off paint. I'd mentioned this in class, and Beth, the instructor, thought it sounded like a great idea. "That's really clever! What'll you have scratch off?" she asked, innocently.

"Um," I replied.

"Oh. Right, I just saw your sketches. I don't want to know."

So! I made scratch-off paint, which was just a mixture of acrylic paint and dish soap (2/1 ratio). I painted a circle over the card value, which blobbed under the stencil, so I let it dry and scratched it off...success! Inspired, I painted on a pleated skirt and a new circle and let them dry while I tried to find some good glove pictures.

This ended up being such a goddamned thorn in my side. I wished, at the end, that I'd never ever had the idea of gloves. Ever. a brush and some globby paint isn't the best way to render hands. I painted over and over and over, scratching out neat edges and then accidentally scratching too deep, trying to make a huge mess of paint into a neat line with a brush on glossy plastic. It was a nightmare. The skirt took me about fifteen minutes, and the hands took two hours.

The worst part about 'em was the fact that I'd made some adjustments to the torso earlier so it would read better as a line drawing...they were now a liability, as they affected hand placement, and made them not-quite-anatomically-correct no matter where I put them. As a solid colour, the paint made solid shapes and silhouette where value would normally distinguish details and edges, and getting hands at three-quarters or 1/2 profile to read as hands was virtually impossible. So I ended up cheating, and made the hands in a nearly front view just so they'd be freaking recognizable as hands.

Then I went to bed.

Heightened awareness

2011-04-26T13:28:00.000-05:00

Heightened drawings are just drawings on toned paper, usually in lighter colours. I did a few charcoal and white charcoal but I liked this one best. I think it looks neat, for a basic drawing exercise. It'll make good filler until I have time to finish another project.

Come To Sunny Senegal!

2011-04-19T12:32:00.002-05:00

Dear Livejournal,

Life sucks. The kid next to me on the bus was listening to some terrible pop music and I was all like, dude, I can't hear the sound of indie thrash death house metal synth-prog on my iphone over your buzzing headphone background noise. It's ruining the sound quality and leaking through my noise-canceling headphones. And he was like, what, man? His shirt was soooooo two months ago, too.

No, kidding. No LJ drama from me today BUT I do have a bit of whining to do. See, we had to make a travel poster for Intro to Comp Graphics in the most irritating manner known to man, which I will now describe to you.

So, we had to find a picture; either our own or one we had permission to use, and put it through a lame Photoshop filter to make it all shape-y. I picked a picture I'd taken in Dordrecht of a big neat church that we didn't get to check out because it was closed and we got tea, instead. Then we were to throw it in Illustrator and trace the lines to make it vector, blow it up, and make a poster around the image. As usual, I was half listening, half working ahead, thinking "Man, how much easier could this be? Live trace this sum-bish and DONE," when I heard something that made me look up.

"Anyone here know what livetrace is?"

I raised my hand.

She gave me an almost apologetic look and continued, "If you use it, you will fail. You have to use the pen tool to trace your image. Every line and every colour shape."

Buh? What? Really? SERIOUSLY I can't use the tool DESIGNED TO DO WHAT WE NEED TO DO?

Nope.

So, crushed, I started the incredibly tedious process of tracing all the lines (note: that is MANY LINES, since each tiny little patch of colour had to be traced, and I cannot emphasize this enough, individually), cursing and grumbling. And it got worse. I quickly gave up on the image...the bricks and my perfectionism combined to make me crazy, and after over a full class of work I gave up on that and moved to a new picture: the underwear tree. Magg took it when she lived in Senegal on one of the few occasions she and some friends went to a place with actual water and stuff, and they hung out in a waterfall and left the swimsuits out to dry on this tree. I like this picture quite a lot, so I used it.

Threw the filter on, stuck it as a template in Illustrator and started over. I had to work at home on this, since I'd missed a class and change with the new image, and I was an hour or two into the mind numbing work (but with company, anyway, so I didn't go mad) when two things happened at once: First, the computer crashed and second, I realised that in all the chat I'd forgotten to save.

BAM so now I was even more behind. So, instead of finishing early and having time to tinker, I ended up having to work on it in every subsequent class, using the full two plus weeks of allotted in-class time and finishing my final print about five minutes before class ended the last work day before the due date. Took it home, mounted it, had it ready by class time because I am cool like that. Hero John lost some hero status by not coming to class to entertain me even though he'd finished a week early and would have had nothing to do, but Matt, when he came to class, was almost amusement enough, since he was even further behind than I was. As usual. Sorry, Matt, but you are rubbish at deadlines.

Luckily, I'd come up with a nice, simple design for my poster, and it only took about three hours of fighting with InDesign to get it to work, because I kept using the wrong select and had to play with text for ages before I got the shadow right. then the initial print was waaay too dark and I had to go in and change some colours...the monitor display shows in pink what printed red. Ugh.

Right now there's only five up in the hall between both our classes, and mine is one. Go me. But before I start bragging too much, let me show you what Lauren did. If I do some of the top work in the class, she's the one who will ALWAYS make something a little better. She's amazing at everything she makes, and I want to feature some of her work here at some point just to show how second in the class compares to first. Like, 'member my ATAT cutout image? She did a receding line of peublos cut into in the side of a mesa with like 11 layers or something equally crazy, and it was PERFECT. Here's what she made:

Yeah. Miskatonic U, ya know, from Lovecraft. It's hard to see, but if you click on the image you might be able to see; in the corner there's a pair of little red eyes. There are tentacles in the original file, but the printing darkened them so much they they're simply invisible against the rest of the shadow.

Just LOOK AT THAT. The detailed bricks, the flowers, the clever and silly idea, the text placement. She WINS FOREVER.

------

Oh, one last thing. In class Thursday, our instructor started our by saying, "You're going to hate me for this..." and then proceeded to demonstrate livetrace. Yeah. The thing we weren't allowed to use on the project. "I wanted to make sure you got tons of practice with the pen tool!" she explained, as if that diffused the ire. Anyway. The end.

Inkling

2011-04-07T22:53:00.001-05:00

We just started using pen and ink, and I recalled hating it in the drawing class I took at the U. I don't remember why...probably because I was crap at it. There's no erasing in ink, and I don't like that. It's also why I rarely use watercolour or other transparent media. Pencil is loving and forgiving and very tactile; you can smudge it, lift it, blend it, erase it. But ink is heartless and doesn't forgive, and leaves indelible black lines on your white page. You can't make a perfect gradient with pen and ink, either, but rather suggest it with two tones, which I never liked.

But, here we are, and I am going to do it because dammit.

Since it's a new medium for me, I'm actually showing you my sketches. This is not the usual blog fare, but they looked interesting and I wanted to share.

Toys are the standard simple objects, so here's a car thing. I started out with a light blue pencil laid down underneath for the basic shapes. The initial ink outline sketch on this was TERRIBLE, by the way, but going over it a few jillion more times helped. I wasn't expecting the nib to be so skittish, and it was not keen on helping me make straight lines for a while at the beginning. Oh, you wanted that PARALLEL? Ha, I thought you meant TOTALLY RANDOM. It's still a problem for me...the longer the lines, the less control I have over them.

Which is why this one worked a lot better. I still tend to scribble rather than draw neat parallel lines for shading, but I've only just started learning how to sketch, dammit, and I'm not going back to tediously technical quite yet. But this is mostly short lines, and you can tell I do much better on the finer areas. Less chance of the pen catching the paper and veering off towards Mars. I did muck up the values on this one, so the legs nearly match the sheet, which is also much too dark. I call this one "Skellington with a vase in a chair with a sheet on (the chair, not the skellington)" but it didn't fit on the page. I like the composition of this still life...I dunno. I think it's neat. What d'you think?

Geared Up

2011-03-31T22:30:00.018-05:00

Man, it's probably a bad thing my dad reads my blog. An email from Brandorf had a pun comic, and the last word, Oedipun, was defined as the realization that a pun is so bad, you've become your father, and this describes my own reaction to my post titles. On my knees, shaking my fist at heaven, screaming KAAAAHN as we all remember Kirk doing in Wrath of Kahn, even though he didn't do that at all.

All that was my long-winded and evasive apology for this and all other terrible wordplay. Now onto your regularly scheduled programming, which is me makin' shit.

So. Here's what I got. There were only two pieces left for the nine-square grid: the Found Object and the Illustrated/ Illuminated. For the Found Object I went on a hunt across town, looking for Ds, parking, running around and taking pictures. There are a lot of half-circles in the world, but that's not quite a D, so my journey took me up and down East Wash to bridges, archways, basketball courts and bus stops. Out of a bunch of pictures I found a nice half-dozen good ideas and picked my favorite. It's the archway in a strip mall over, of all things, a Dollar General. Yeah, I'm all class, I know. I emailed it to John, my eternal hero, who printed it out for me and brought it to class.

The Illustrated letter (I decided against traditional illumination because ANNOYINGLY COMPLICATED, I thought to myself, naively) stared life as a Deconstructed letter, but, as I mentioned in the last post, it wasn't abstract enough. "I was thinking, though, about maybe making it a base for my Illustrated letter," I said, and Mr. Ribble replied, "You know, I was just thinking the same thing." It was already painted, and I loved the shape of it, so I traced it again and came up with two different ideas for an illustration using a base form of that shape.

Then, following in the footsteps of the Renaissance Masters, I posted both of them to facebook and took a poll of my friends to see which they liked best. I got several votes for both, three for the dungeon one, and seven for the gears. So gears it was.

I drew it on Bristol and started painting in acrylic, which I ended up really, really disliking. So I borrowed Nate's nice Prismacolors and Maggot, my loving sister, ran me my watercolours. The acrylic bases of bronzes and pewters made a nice muted background, which I wanted to be slightly designed but very simple and dark. I added lots of coloured pencil as I went along to give each scrap of metal a different colour and texture: adding rust to panels, giving shape and depth to the worm gears and joints, placing a reddish light source in the upper right and a bright, radiant blue light source from the two canisters. I outlined each shape in graphite as I painted in order to retain edges and help differentiate the darker shapes, and it helped a lot.

I did the gears in watercolour for a richer, deeper colour and painted washes over the acrylic, which I smudged and brushed into shapes and streaks, and I used very thin coats of blue and grey to make the canisters and the light from inside. I nearly forgot to add rivets, but added them last with thick dots of gunmetal model paint, making the whole thing even more 3D. No big secrets here...just fiddled with it until it looked right. That's why I liked mixed media so much, I think; you can use nearly anything that looks right to make your effects; you're not limited by the restrictions and flaws of a single medium.

So this guy here is the final piece. The flash on my phone washed out the colour, so I fixed it in PS a bit. I think it's pretty neat, and only took WAY TOO LONG. I'm going to guess the final took about five or six hours for a 4inch square of paper.
I then got to class, got the photo from Hero John, put it all together to make something that resembled this, but looked nicer, since every square was the same size and neatly measured along a perfect grid and the blacks weren't washed out by flash, etc. It was pretty neat, overall, although I may be the only person who enjoyed the assignment, judging from the rest of the class response. Ah, well. I'll try to get some pictures of more of the projects if they end up displayed somewhere.

EDIT

I have an actual photo of the final piece now, as opposed to one assembled in Photoshop. Go me.

Seven of Nine Ds

2011-03-30T23:18:00.009-05:00

This deliberately deceptive post will NOT be referencing that, hot, hot Borg lady and/or any of her physical characteristics that could be described using only letters. Well, except for this paragraph, I guess. And, now that I've mentioned her, I've just gone a done a google image search for her, just because DAYUM. You should go search. Go on. Search. Takes a second. Go.

Fine, here's a link. Jeeze.

I am actually referencing, those of you who are still reading and not oggling Jeri Ryan in lingerie, a project for Design Fundementals. It was theme and variation on a letterform chosen from a hat; mine was D. We had to make nine versions of it in nine styles: Enlarged/Cropped, On Black, Repeated, Blind Contour, Brushstroke(s), Deconstructed, Collage, Found Object, and Illustrated/Illuminated. This part will deal with the first seven, since the 8th and 9th were done last, and the 9th was quite a bit more complex than the rest.

First off was a stack of photocopied letters in assorted sizes, followed by a mound of full-size thumbnail (is that contradictory?) sketches for each of the first three pictures, as I tried to work out scale, placement, typeface and case of each letter. Then I mentally picked out my best two, asked Magg and Colen their favorites, and picked the ones that overlapped. This is because I have become wise and learned and have decided that other people have good ideas sometimes, and not at all just because I wanted to show off my industrious work and my pile of clever things to an audience.

Anyway. Aside aside, the first three and numbers five and six all were done with an ultrafine sharpie and a combination of gouache and ink to make a super smooth, super matte black to act as a stark contrast to the white paper. I drew up the finals using tracing paper and inked them with marker before delicately painting them with an ink-gouache mix. It did dry pretty smooth in most places, 'cept where I messed up and put it on too thick. Being a perfectionist, I painted my ink as close to the lines as possible, so the shapes are pretty damn even. The Repeated D violated my self-made rule of three repetitions MAX and took a lot of unnecessary time. Looks neat, though.

Next up we had the Blind Contour (draw the lines of a shape without looking at the paper) letter, which I blew up and traced on bristol, keeping the lines true to the original. The Brushstroke took pages of bristol practice sheets until I found one that had the perfect, free-yet-graceful style to it. Deconstructed letters were to be disassembled and reassembled in an abstract but recognizable way, and my first one was, as pointed out by the great John Ribble, Not Abstract Enough. It looked more like a D with neat stuff stuck to it. So I made a new one over the weekend by taking a handful of letters and cutting them radially from a single point, glueing them on to a sheet, and tracing/painting that. For the Collage I bought a motorcycle magazine and made a neat base of skulls and flames, over which I made the letter out of wheels and bars.

As of yesterday, only these seven were completed. The Illustrated letter was in progress and the photo was taken but not printed. However, these are stories for the next blog post.

Here, if you still didn't google Seven of Nine, is a real link. And you should be ashamed, you lazy, lazy reader.

Good things come

2011-03-30T22:43:00.011-05:00

In small packages; at least they do if your assignment is to reduce excessive packaging. Which, incidentally, mine was. We had to start by buying an over-packaged thing, which is silly on several levels...why buy a thing for a package, and especially a wasteful package you're only going to use for demonstration and throw away? Broke as I have been and practical as ever, I rummaged in my closet instead until I found a this three-pack of toothbrushes Magg and I grabbed on sale a while back. Frugality, people; it's like being miserly but spelled differently.

Boring thumbnails, blah, made a very crap prototype out of a sheet of paper glued double thick, then finally had enough info to make my real mock-up. I cut away most of the old package, since all you need to cover is the head, really. Some packages have little holes to feel the handle, and this is really not that different, but, you know, uses half the paper and a third the plastic.

I used bristol board for the paper and stole the plastic piece off my actual package. Most of my classmates did all the lettering in Illustrator, but, having no printer, I opted for the thing I could do at home. Grabbing my trusty ultrafine Sharpie and some scotch tape, I masked out edges with tape, marked them off with the ruler, and hand-lettered all the words/images on the front and back of the package.

It took FOREVER. All the measuring, and the re-measuring, and then careful lines, and the re-measuring, and did I mention my circle templates aren't quite perfectly circular? and swear, and fix them, and re-measure...I follow the rule "Measure twice, cut once" to the letter, and, as a result, had a devil of a time making sure everything was perfect. And, of course, it wasn't perfectly perfect, but by this time it was crazy late and I still had to add the plastic piece to hold and protect the toothbrush heads.

The plastic piece, sadly, was a bit short, since the original package was wider and had an extra few mm of plastic on the sides, removed in mine. So, using fine-cut scraps of plastic and superglue, I painstakingly (and painfully, since I think we have previously discussed my ability to glue my fingers to other fingers) built up some sides for the plastic and, hours later, slid the toothbrushes in place and glued the plastic bit to the paper, where it neatly covered up half of a word. But dammit, it was late and I was tired, so I left "Bonus!" under a layer of plastic and went to bed. 'Sides, the REAL plastic would be clear there and allow viewers to see the words, so it's totally ok.

Dammit.

The First of Many

2011-03-30T21:35:00.003-05:00

I have been a negligent blogger due to lots and lots of projects, and it'll just keep getting worse as semester progresses and the projects get more and more involved. As a result, there will be more updates like these...lots of things in quick succession. I'll try to keep them bite-sized for my less attentive readers. There will also be many pictures.

This me-as-a-Saint-Patrick's-Day-person-by-drawing-on-my-face-with-Sharpies-to-amuse-a-friend post is short and ridiculous, since I think everyone needs a ridiculous thing sometimes. If you would like, bookmark this page and refer to it as needed to allay any tl;dr in the near, Jury-rigged future.

So happy late Saint Pat's day, and enjoy the rest of my longer posts.

Brave New World

2011-03-09T16:04:00.008-06:00

It has such gadgets in it!

So this here is an experiment to see if I can update my art blog (this thing you are reading) from my shiny new cell phone. More importantly, I'm seeing if I can add images, 'cause if I can that would be hella leet. I'm like the future with my data pad and my reader. The future does have anime hair, kids! Tell your teachers.

It's been a busy several weeks for me, with school, starting work, and protests every day or two. I made some signs, like you do, and Maggot and I went downtown and waved them in a very static and uninteresting manner. They were really excellent signs, though. Specific yet mild. Thoughtful yet simple. And, best of all, carried by two non-slogan yelling, educated and attractive young ladies (one of whom, possibly me, may have had marker on her face. But it was CLASSY marker). It was a good time, but a lot of time, and despite seeing Mr. Ribble at the capitol with a sign of his own, I doubted I'd get off turning in late work with the "At a protest!" excuse.

Anyway. So for the other ATAT assignment, our instructor (the aforementioned John Ribble) asked for a picture with multiple planes/depth of field going back in space, like a landscape or something representing distance. I, if course, chose to show size, depth and scale with ATAT Walkers, you know, like I do. So I took a screenshot from Empire with my trusty but agonizingly slow computer, printed it, enlarged it and started cutting out foamcore. This, for those not in the know, eats a metric ass-tonne of Xacto blades, but it was pretty simple going, if tedious. I cut out seven-ish layers (I could go check but I don't wanna) and a few snow speeders, cut out a bunch more layers NOT FOR MONEY FOR A CLASSMATE AT ALL and then learned the glorious thrill of painting with gouache.

Gouache is basically watercolour pigment from the tube...opaque and thick and super saturated. It also dries in seconds if undiluted and is therefore a royal pain to use for actual painting. I officially hate it...I went from clean lines to impressionist blobs pretty quickly, partly out of impatience and partly out of necessity. As in it was necessary or I'd have broken all that crap in a fit of pique and then felt really, really silly. Gouache is also, I may add, outrageously expensive for the tiny bits you get. I ran out of white and was too busy being broke and pouting to get more, so I scraped all I had onto the boards and spread it as thin as I could until every bit was covered.

A lifetime later, I lined up the layers and slotted them into a black base, and stuck the snowspeeders on long pieces of foamcore with toothpicks (thank you John and your mess of masts) and glue and stuck them into background layers through holes I cut for that specific purpose. I finished about ten minutes before the dude date and the glue was nearly dry when I handed it in. So, now for the fun bit...can I submit images from m'phone? We'll see in a moment.

Not the easy way, I guess. Drat and blast. Time for the old-fashioned Hook-Up-Phone-To-Computer method. Also: I am ret-conning the first image where it belongs, because the narrative amuses me in my feverish state and I don't wish to change it at one in the freaking morning when I'm sick and tired. So, final piece goes here, after the colon:
And now it's time to sleep off the last lingering protest cold.

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US

2011-02-20T16:48:00.006-06:00

This phrase just celebrated a twentieth birthday not too long ago, and ten years as an internet meme. We are all very happy for it, I'm sure, but that's not why I selected it.

I've got two assignments this month which incorporate Imperial ATAT Walkers, and, oddly enough, it was actually a coincidence and not related in any way to the "Stop the Imperial Walker!" signs carried in our protests. They're based on a design I can't find at the mo' (made by, I hear, one of the design instructors at MATC) and are a very popular meme. If you're reading this near the published date, I suggest you look it up and see how many different variation there are of this idea. Answer: lots.

No, I chose ATATs because I like them, and Star Wars, and Empire Strikes Back, and Hoth, and snow, and cold things. In fact, back in my long-lost days of youth, I went by, erm, Hoth, to a very small and select group of equally dorky people. >cough< Yes, so indiscretions of youth aside, when I heard we had to do a Photoshop involving at least thee images, I knew what I wanted. There's a picture on the book of faces of me eatin' a sandwich on a snowbank, and I really wanted to put it on Hoth. So I did, with help from the internet and an impossible-to-find National Geographic article on Antarctica (I needed a scanned imagine from a magazine for at least one of my pictures).

I chose All Your Base because I've spent literally hours trying to get screen caps of ATATs from Empire for my second project, which took a lot longer than it should have because of glitches, program freezes, and VLC forgetting my key shortcuts for screencap every time I had to restart it. It is, after all, as clumsy as it is stupid. After the fifth or sixth rendition of "Imperial troops have entered the base! Imperial troops have entered aakkkxxxsshh..." it's been stuck in my head, and All Your Base Are Belong To Us followed as a natural progression.

So here you go. Project the first of me with an ATAT walker. Yaaaaay. Project the second will come when I finish it. I'm a bit behind on homework because I've been out protesting this last week, so I'm trying to catch up today, since it's freezing rain out anyway and not really good for protests. Pictures of me with signs and facepaint will be up at some point for your viewing pleasure.

The Ants Go Marching

2011-02-10T23:10:00.006-06:00

Or "How Many Ants Does it Take to Replace a Lightbulb?"

So this Concept Development project is much more specific than the last. As a mock Target advert, we had to follow the guidelines laid down by Target dictating ad colours, logo use, and a few other details. Additionally, all the adverts were to be cleanly executed and illustrated with no text and one product at an exaggerated size, either large or small.

I picked a CFL bulb, because they are all relevant and crap, as well as being easy to recognise and probably pretty easy to make big or small. After reviewing my thumbnails, I went for the following design, since it has a nice bit of whimsy to it that I really enjoyed. There was a fun one with hot air balloons and a really slick cityscape one with the bulb looking like the space needle, but this one was too much fun to pass up. Plus, I think it's a bit more innovative.

CLICK PICTURE FOR HUGENESS! So this is a collage on a piece of toned paper sprayed with black paint. I used the leftover sprayed paper to make the tunnel walls and the printer paper from the overspray to make a gradient around the lightbulb. I made the ants of Target logos, each one painted in acrylic, and at 56 ants that's 168 big white circles with 336 rec circles painted inside them. At this point in the story, my tendinitis started acting up like mad and I gave up for the night. Then today, after some ice for my poor hand, I finished up by putting in the lightbulb in white paint and pen.

So, what do you think? I'll be replacing this image with a scan, hopefully.
EDIT: replaced!

I can has...

2011-02-08T14:35:00.001-06:00

A Zazzle. Check it out. I've only put up two designs so far, but more will come. BUY MY THINGS OR SATAN WILL EAT YOUR SOUL (probably not actually true).

A Weighty Subject

2011-01-25T21:06:00.006-06:00

Puns. They are the bane of my childhood, the curse of the dinner table, the right hook you never see coming and you're powerless to stop. They end conversations and friendships in icy silence and are almost universally viewed as the lowest form of wordplay, unless you're really clever about it, in which case you get the envious groan.

So in Concept Development, the most technically elementary of all my elementary classes, we are making faux-ads for real companies using two objects combined into one. Selected from a hat, each slip of paper had a name and one of the two objects we had to use for every picture. From 24 thumbnails we worked down to three final ideas, and then we had to come up with slogans and make full page ads blocked out with the layout of image and words.

Slogans are hard, kids. Staring at a piece of paper mumbling about seemingly random objects makes you sound a bit schizophrenic and a lot ridiculous. And my company was Weider, which makes exercise bowflex-y equipment, I guess? The object I had to use was a dumbell, which is a hard freaking object for making other objects. Ok, sure, a straight thing with two other things on the end. Great. But making them obviously a dumbell while also making them part of another thing is goddamn hard.

But slogans are so much worse. Everything sounds trite (which it is) and usually uses cheesy wordplay and/or awful puns. It made me wonder, as I stared at the white paper in a cloud of sharpie fumes, how people in marketing live with themselves. I'd be reading a magazine, blissfully unaware, and then I'd turn the page and see my ad, staring me in the face and making an awful pun. Waiting and watching with malicious eyes. Smirking from a glossy spread of now-discarded ideas and whispering my own terrible words back at me in mental echoes of what I should have written. And I'd pull away from the leering page, turn it as quickly as possible, and vow to never buy either that magazine or that product ever again.

Hyperbolic? Maybe. Maybe it was the marker fumes. But regardless, it was an unpleasant thought.

Anyway. The first ad I have here is one that I hated but nevertheless scored really well with everyone else. So I went with it for the tiniest ad, to be put on these internets, since it is obvious nerd fodder and pretty recognizable even in mini form. Adding Star Wars/Princess Bride/Star Trek/Monty Python to anything is hella cheating, but I went with popular demand. So yeah. See, the weights are the handles for the lightsabers! It's...not even remotely clever. I'm sorry I made it.

Next up is an even flimsier piece of "wordplay" for a concept I really liked, actually. I thought a juxtaposition of two things totally different in connotation would be attention-getting and interesting, while still being a legitimate purpose for the product. All my brainstorming ideas for the thumbnails had involved some words lists in categories: Sports! Strong Things! Manly things!!! Healthy things! Ballet is a sport, of sorts, and certainly a physical activity, as well as being basically the go-to place for graceful, controlled movement. Well, that and Tai-Chi, but whatever.

Last up is my favorite concept and no attempt at wordplay whatsoever. Trite seemed liked the simplest idea, so trite is was. I had a cool thing I was going to do with a big ticket coming off the end of the billboard, but I thought of it at the end and couldn't make it work. Oh, well. Whatever. I made these with freaking marker. It's not like they're real things. But I thought the idea was pretty clever, and so did everyone else. Because, you know, I'm clever.

Anyway. Look, an update. Now off to do more homework.

Back to School

2011-01-20T14:53:00.003-06:00

Graphic design classes started for me a week ago, -ish, which is why I find myself using a mac to make this little blurb. Lucky for me, I lack Patrick's innate Mac-ruining skills, and not only has no smoke issued from this machine or sad sounds emit thus far, but I really like the interface. Yes, yes, I'm a trendy art hipster, so shut the hell up.

So, I have classes four days a week, so my other things go on the After Homework/Weekends back burner, but anything neat I make will go up here, as well as any projects I get around to finishing. Enjoy my sweat and labour, like you do.

Feeling blue

2010-12-08T11:44:00.006-06:00

There is a conspiracy in the world to keep me from getting anything done. There must be, since I'm surrounded by things specifically tailored to make me completely unproductive. Beside the frequent insomnia (which must be from stimulants in the water supply), I now have silly toys, wonderful books, and a Nook preloaded with over fifty books. BUCKYBALLS AND A NOOK GUYS how will I get anything done ever again?

Despite the distractions of exhaustion, registration, job hunting and my Nook (Colen and Patrick are the best friends of all time), I managed to paint Menace. The coat of white had gone on too thick and cracked, so he spent quite a long time soaking in a little tub of solvent (while I was out of the country, actually), and once I got home I spent an hour or so carefully scraping and sanding the paint off the poor dude.

Once he was dry I covered him with a base coat of blue acrylic whiiiiiich... I really hated, so I reprimed him black and started over. I really like black as a base, since it keeps the dragons from being too cartoonishly bright. I went to Ward's house for an art day with clay and paints in hand, and as we chatted I painted thick dots of white, blue, and silver acrylic on the dragon for texture, made two new pairs of horns while the paint dried, and then washed Menace with a few layers of blue paint.

Once home again, I painted bright silver down his spikes, nails, and eyes and let him dry overnight. The last step was to make some wings for him, which I did with some fabric and toothpicks, coated with liquid latex and enamel paint. Once everything was dry (which took a while; latex and enamel are not the fastest), I had the lovely fun task of actually trying to attach the wings, which was tricky, and I glued my fingers together a few times. But eventual success was mine! I think they look pretty snazzy.

The colour of these last two is a bit off, since I was quit close with the flash. It's not quite as bright a blue...more saphire-y. But it's good enough until I finish everything and get the real, Patrick-taken pictures.

Meanwhile, the egg is drying and might take an irritating amount of time. I'll probably cheat somehow.

Back to art, but I'll leave the Nook in range, just for the challenge.

Ebony and Ivory

2010-11-30T18:10:00.004-06:00

Otherwise known as "Tell me which of these looks cooler."

As usual, any comments, suggestions, etc. would be great before I try to kick these babies into production. In other news, the Boy is makin' fun of the post title, and I am still crap at Illustrator.

EDIT: I've added colours by popular request. Let the voting re-begin!

On a Scale of One To Adorable

2010-11-23T23:59:00.004-06:00

This guy is like a billion Arbitrary Units of Adorableness. Sorry it's taken this long to get him up here, folks; he's been done for quite a while, now, but my computer died and I have not yet brought it back to life. On the downside: no posting or t-shirts for a bit. On the upside: more time for traditional arts.

Here's more Baby Dragon #2 aka YAWN from a couple different angles!

Sad T-shirts For Priveledged Youth

2010-11-16T15:04:00.011-06:00

While I was waiting for the enamel paint to dry on my sculpture yesterday, a process known by man to take about as long as fossilization, I decided to do some work on an older project in the hopes of creating a Thing People Will Buy. So, with that goal in mind, I decided to work on this guy for a few hours. He's one of a set of Sad Stickmen I used to doodle at work on bits of scrap paper, and he seemed like he'd be the simplest to work with.

I'd like to note that this is me being pragmatic and responsible...I need money so I'm going to draw stick people. In my head it makes logical sense, honestly.

So I threw the little dude into Photoshop and made some adjustments. Flipping the picture horizontally gave it more of a timeline; thickening and stylizing the lines gave the subject some depth and a bolder shape; changing the sizes of the individual parts of the picture fixed a lot of the compositional problems and made a nice t-shirt image box sort of shape. After a lot of trial and error and cleanup, I opened Illustrator and made a quick trace just to catch any stray pixels and tweak the edges a little. I probably would have done more if I'd remembered how to use Illustrator, but it's been so long I really have no recollection at all, so I said screw it and left it as-is.

So now he looks like this. I dunno, is he t-shirt material? No pun intended, of course. Any design input would be great, too, since it's not exactly my strongest point.

These poor, sad stickpeople. I really give them terrible lives.

Additionally, a few of you might (if you're very lucky) have seen this shirt, which I made for my friend Brandorf a few years back. It was stencils and spray paint, and I'm pretty sure I got the line from him (though he has been known to quote many sources; he'd have to tell me if it was his idea or just something funny we found).

Anyway, I love this shirt and wanted to make more, but obviously hand-lettered ones are both too special and too labour intensive for the less-cool folk of the Basic Internet. Besides, I'm lazy. So this afternoon I took the original stencil for the raygun, painted it black for contrast, and scanned it. Thus I now have a lovely raygun image waiting oh so patiently for the day I decide to teach myself Illustrator again, which will be sometime after the heat death of the universe at this rate. Any takers for tutors?

If you three readers have any cool ideas for Things That Should Go On Shirts, tell me and I'll see if I can make them happen. Hell, even lame ideas will be considered.

Care and Feeding of Your Succubus

2010-11-12T11:58:00.010-06:00

Nearly the entire month of October was spent traveling; my sister Maggot got married in Senegal. There were incidents and accidents, of course, but it was a grand time overall, and I abandoned her to the tender ministrations of her new husband for a week and came home about a week before Halloween.

Anyone who knows me, which will be everyone reading this blog, will understand the implications of this statement. Simply put, it means no Halloween costume, which has been my defining gimmick these last many years. From my Taran of Caer Dalben costume in middle school to these crazy pieces of Star Wars work, I have always had the Coolest Costumes Ever for someone who's not actually a costumer. I got in the newspaper with my blue twi'lek one year, before I got the colours quite right, because they probably thought I was the Diva from Fifth Element. Basically everyone thought so, anyway.

So the point is that I love costumes; both the making and the wearing. So last year I undertook a crazy project to make some prototype bat/demon wings, and ended up with some incredibly flexible, fully articulated wings on a nifty harness, which I wore out a whole two times before I broke some wires and retired them for a while. It was quite a complex enterprise, and the amount of work seemed tragically unequal to the payoff, so I decided, somewhere in Sweden, that I'd reuse them this year in a new and exciting costume. There were very few plans after that, but I have an entire closet full of random gothy gear, so I was not terribly concerned.

So, I had to mend the wings, which was tedious and I may have cheated a little, which is NOT IMPORTANT since you don't know how I made them in the first place. That would take a whole blog to detail, and I've got no pictures of it. I quickly found some black clothes and my corset, deciding on a succubus to counter my generic vampire/demon/bat whatever from last year. And then, as always, it really came down to the accessories, which are my favourites anyway.

The main detail piece was the horns. In the bat wing links, you'll see a little pair of silvery horns on my head, which I bought at a convention a while back. Of course, a succubus needs something more notable; more dangerous and more enticingly alien, so using the small horns as inspiration I busted out the Sculpey clay and got to work. The first pair looked like these, with holes shoved through the bottom with a pencil for the laces, but they broke in the oven due to lack of supports or framework, and put me back at square one.

Luckily, the next pair (to which I'd added internal wires and foil for structural support) turned out quite nicely, and I liked the new design quite a bit. They cooled and I painted them with black primer and a really slapdash drybrushing job with gunmetal model paint, and got some shoelaces for them on my way to my friends' party. They aren't as nice as the shoelaces on my current pair, but people in a hurry can't be choosers, as they say. On the pictures, you can see the missing tip of one horn where I kept smacking it getting in and out of the car all weekend. The horns are quite tall and heavy and just the right height to constantly hit to roof of the car unless I have my head at about a 20 degree angle.

I actually got more comments on the horns than any other part of the costume. Not bad for a few hours' work. Sadly, that means the amazing wings didn't get as much love as I'd hoped, which is very annoying.

The other useful piece of detail was the fangs. I've been using my sister Danielle's idea for years - you take fake fingernails, file them down to points, fit them to the gum line and adhere them with nail/super glue. I put white, textured nail polish on the backs and an old slightly yellowish one on the front, making fangs that looked very convincingly like my real teeth. They did, however, give me a bit of an overbite and a slight lisp, which was apparently very funny, and it was obviously impossible to eat or drink anything. I found them quite handy when I went downtown to Freakfest with Kare-Bear (dressed in my old Elf costume) and drunken louts tried to look at her; I'd flip a wing between them, very suddenly, and snarl with a mouthfull of fangs. They'd jump every single time; I think no one quite expected the wings to do that, and the teeth were very realistic. She, by the way, didn't want to call me a demon, so she instead called me the Human Jabberwock. It's true, however, that the wings and horns are very Jabberwock-ish.

Of course I have pictures of the full costume to show you! What a silly question.

Geode-Graphic

2010-09-08T16:28:00.007-05:00

My desk is back to its ground state of happy disaster, which pleases me. There's nothing like a cheerfully busy mess to remind me that I'm back to work. Unfortunately, the dishes and laundry are also messes, and don't have the emotional tug of creation to motivate me to do something. Even more worryingly, we're out of paper plates. Is it classy to eat with your fingers? Is it practical? These are real questions I have.

This picture is not exactly an accurate representation of my desk, because Baby Dragon has been sold and shipped out to Kentucky where Ann and Chris may even mow be opening the brown paper packages with not-very-reckless abandon.

Today I checked the crystal growth in the egg I will call Geode (for very obvious reasons). All the solution had evaporated, and I sprayed the crystals with the first of many, many coats of clear spray and some iridescent enamel left over from the fairy wings. Hopefully this'll keep the crystals in good condition while I work, and, if not, I'll pretend it was my idea all along to make kinda smushed crystals and only my loyal blog readers will know the truth. All five of you. You won't tell, of course.

Next, I took a bowl full of crushed glass beads, black embossing powder, bits of mica, grit, glitter and other small shiny things and mixed in some clear acrylic gel and paint, very much like I did for the black granite egg. Once it was the right consistency and texture I painted in on the outside of the egg, which is currently drying, and some small bits of crystal-coated eggshell. I'm terribly impatient and I keep wanting to go fiddle with it, which would probably be catastrophic, which is why I'm updating right now.

I really miss my camera phone. This big, clunky old Pentax just doesn't have the same heart or love of colours that my old Sony phone did. But it does a basically ok job in natural light, so it'll have to do until the new baby is done and I can coerce Patrick to ghetto-macro-soft-box the whole thing. Now off to mail off another thing and then go to work. And speaking of mailing, I did kind of a cool thing with the wrapping for Baby Dragon et al, and I think I'll keep it going. If you want to know what my little gimmick was, I guess you can just order your own thing and find out.

Etsy shop now open for business!

2010-09-03T17:42:00.002-05:00

And here it is!

Anyone who reads my blog has probably seen it already, but whatever. Now there's a link right here. I threw the banner together last night out of sketches, and while it's kinda ugly and took waaaaaaaaaay too long (still not great with Photoshop, kids), it's functional, and that's what we aim for, yes?

Enjoy!

Out of the Long Silence

2010-08-31T15:27:00.005-05:00

Yesterday was a flurry of effort and experiment, many of which have yet to offer complete results. Waiting is a tricky thing, but I can't rush some of these. Crystals need time to form, paint to dry and epoxy to cure. But I got some things accomplished.

Baby Dragon #2 (I really need to name these kids as a shorthand. Any ideas? The Boy and I haven't even named Cute Baby Snake yet, so we're clearly not the best people for the job) who will be known as "Yawn" until a better name is suggested, came along with me to a Magic the Gathering Tournament in the Twin Cities last weekend. As the other nerds took their backpacks and pulled out decks and dice boxes, I took my backpack and pulled out paints and brushes and a little tupperware containing Yawn.

The air crackled with nerdiness, but to my surprise everyone was clean and focused, and I had basically no interruptions while players played and I painted. A few people stopped by to see my work but for the most part the groups traveled with flailing gestures and play-by-plays and not even a side glance at the table. As a pretty girl, I felt a bit deflated by the total lack of attention, but as an artist and spectator I got a lot done and had a great time.

The first day I painted the inside of Yawn's huge mouth and his tongue, which had become detached at home. I used lots of dark reds and blue ink washes, with bits of light pink or bright red for texture and highlight. Next were the eyes, painted gold and bronzy green, and the last part of the night was spend on scales. Lots of scales. Hundreds of scales.

I started with the top of the head and painted a pattern of thick white scales, loosely based on the scale pattern found on snakes or small lizards but modified because I couldn't remember what they looked like exactly. I rationalized this by reminding myself that dragons wouldn't have the exact same pattern, anyway, and proceeded to the neck and spine, and then moved the scales around from the spine to the sides and around the shoulders. This gave me a nicely balanced and ornate-looking pattern of bright white on the black background, easy to see by the light of the Food Network.

The next morning I took the thoroughly dry Yawn and washed it with some translucent greens, which showed up as an intense emerald against the white and muted the black lines. For a bit of shine, I added some of the bronze as a highlight on the face and neck, which totally obliterated all the scale details and made the whole thing look homogeneous and boring alone the spine, and totally defeated my idea of having the spine and head have the most contrast. So, taking my detail brush, I painted dark green around each scale, which took forever, but it was a lot of fun to do all the tedious work and watch the scales pop into definition.

Finally done, I set Yawn to the side and idly sculpted a turtle-looking head and neck and some other random things, including a Good Luck Jackalope. GLJ was a powerful talisman and helped Lodding win all the subsequent games, and also rode the escalator with us, but was smushed for transit. I'll make another.

Anyway, home, clear coat, and photos. Here you go.

Placeholder

2010-08-30T14:44:00.003-05:00

The hand is better enough to start working again, and I've painted Baby Dragon #2. Pictures soon, although, I must warn you, my lovely phone camera broke (the rest of the phone broke simultaneously) and so I'll have to scrounge up a camera for the update. He needs a topcoat, and I've got an egg drying right now for him along with some salt crystals on the bookcase and a few molds fresh out of the oven.

Even more over the top and possibly impossible ideas for this one; I couldn't sleep last night until I'd filled a sketchbook page with scrawls, doodles, and underlined notes that I'm sure are cryptic to everyone else on Earth. Al least, I hope it's cryptic, because it'd be a bit embarrassing to have someone actually look at my thought process and realize most of what I think is nonsense, gibberish, or hilariously hyperbolic.

Anyway. More to come, but for now: ARTING! kthxbye.

This more than momentary fear

2010-07-23T03:39:00.003-05:00

It's going to be a time for wrenches in works in terms of creating. I go back to work full time next week in order to replenish my savings and repay Maggot, and that is a cruel thing to do to the art I was just beginning to enjoy. I'm not stopping, of course, but it was a heartbreaking moment when I decided I had to put art on the back burner again. I'll have to work extra hard to make the time for it, but at least I know that I've had this momentum before, and I can work it up again.

I also have tendinitis, not badly, but enough to keep my right hand mostly out of commission for art things for a few weeks. I'm even typing this left-handed, which is taking forever, by the way, so feel free to take a moment to contemplate my dedication and shining inner strength (FYI, if you want an autograph it'll be pretty illegible). An inspiration to us all, my biographical movie will say.

But seriously, I am terrified. My hand has been acting up for weeks, but it's really hurting now. Easy to treat, easy to fix, just leave it be and don't use it too much, but it brought to light my deepest fear: inability to create. A friend of mine was an illustration student; now after carpal tunnel she can barely even sign her name. Sure, Beethoven went deaf, but I have no decades of sculpture to match his decades of composition prior to his deafness.

What if I hurt my hand? My eyes? My joints or nerves? What if Something Happens?

It's taken my whole life to find out what I want to do, and I never knew until now just how much creation has become my focus and passion. My once-idle art has become the one things I can't live without.

The Tree of the Knowledge

2010-07-17T01:24:00.002-05:00

I've decided, after yesterday's rash words, to take the spurned Sculpey back, but in a limited capacity. I can't afford to waste Super Sculpey on dragon bases, so the regular stuff will always have a home. Also, in related news, I seem to always spell "Sculpey" wrong. The "e" looks so excessive, really; "y" is perfectly able to carry the vowel sound on its own. But I digress from the real point of this, which is to show you What I Made At Ward's House.

These.

Two baby dragon busts and one snake with an apple in its mouth. Now, technically the snake is Snake Mark Two, since Snake Mark One lost its head in the oven, alas. Ward made a lazy-looking dragony snake with one sprawling arm and one curled, almost furtively, around an apple. The lidded eyes aren't as malevolent as one would expect, and not quite devious, either. We commented on the allegorical images, and the necessary limbs of apple-proffering, and I decided to solve the apple problem by making a cute, attentive snake, helpfully offering the apple in his smiling mouth.

Look! I brought you this apple! It's the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil! It's super tasty! I picked it myself! It'll make you really smart! You'll know Good and Evil! And knowing is half the battle!

GI JOE!

I painted The Serpent today, because I needed to paint something and I haven't decided on the colour schemes for Dragon Babies 2&3 yet. Black and green go well together, and you can't see it, but the apple has some really lovely colour detail on it, I promise. There's yellow and green showing through the red on the one side, all streaking and spotty and textured and apple-like. It needs to be glossier, but the clear spray should help that.

Backing up a bit, yesterday was mainly Baby Dragon day. You recall all that fighting with Sculpey I did? The reworking and the wire stabs and the swearing and the annoyance and the general discontent? The way it glued itself to my fingers and itself and the table and everything else and drooped and sagged and held fingerprints like a forensics lab? The days it took to make something as simple as a tiny, blocky Baby Dragon?

Super Sculpey has none of this. I made two dragons and each took an hour/hour and half to sculpt; smooth, detailed, and much sturdier, looking more like a resin cast than a polymer clay pile of semi-worked goo. The feel and texture are very similar to resin, and it was almost breathtakingly easy to make compared to Cute Baby Dragon. Which is good, because my big concern was always the sheer amount of time I spent on the dragon itself. I simply couldn't make it time effective before.

Now, I think I can.

So there's Yawning Baby Dragon and Menacing Baby Dragon (who will be trying to intimidate a ladybug in the final, I think), both filled with a lot more detail and personality than Cute Baby Dragon. They also have much bigger heads, but I still think that will work fine for my needs. I was able to give them tongues, teeth, and eyelids for extra expression, and Menacing Baby Dragon will have wings over his wishbone skeleton. I'm really looking forward to painting them.

Anyway, painted a bottom coat on these kids and will start working on the real paint once I pick their eggs and colours. I've got a chart soft of thing with types of dragon (chromatic and metallic) and the types of egg they might have, and it sparked some really excellent ideas. At least, I think they're excellent, but I might just be a huge narcissistic nerd with a dragon obsession and a grandeur complex.

We may never know.

I can hardly wait

2010-07-15T23:56:00.005-05:00

I want to show you what I made at Ward's house today but it's too dark out to take pictures with my cell phone. Let me just say that I have officially broken up with Sculpy for its pink and non-sticky old sibling, Super Sculpy. It might be weird for a little bit, but Sculpy is just no good for me anymore. I'm excited for my new polymer clay relationship, and I just hope Sculpy doesn't get too jealous.

Hopefully I'll have pictures tomorrow.

Happy Birthday, Baby Dragon!

2010-07-09T17:31:00.008-05:00

I woke up late with a facefull of congestion; a great start to any day. Megan came over this morning (read: early afternoon) and finished painting her Genestealer miniature while I finished the last Dragony details on the little guy. I ended up putting the shell chunk on his tail, though, because it covered up his super happy eyes and face, and I couldn't stand him being so hidden. I unglossed the shiny Very Small Rocks® and shined up the gold foiled Very Small Rocks® and fiddled until the base looked the way I wanted, then poured a little extra plaster around the loose tail and spent a ton of extra time cleaning the extra plaster off the dragon and grumbling.

I finished quickly; there wasn't much left to do, and then got set up helping Patrick with his ghetto DIY cardboard macro softbox, which was cobbled from a medium box and some tracing paper. We shot lots of my old pottery from school for sale in these lovely internets, and eventually we shot the baby dragon and the finished genestealer.

Patrick cropped and edited all the pictures and stuck them on my computer while I made some stir fry with raspberries, blackberries, and some tasty nuts. Colen was finally over at this point and we fed Cute Baby snake one triple amputee dead baby mouse and one normal dead baby mouse and then took out Ka, my favorite, who crawled around for a while until she decided to start chewing on Colen's arm for no apparent reason, at which point I detached her carefully, chastised her ineffectively and put her back in her enclosure. She left him some very attractive tooth marks - full top and bottom rows.

Then I came online and posted some stuff. And that was my day.

Yep.

What?

I didn't show you the dragon yet?

Sure I did.

Didn't you see it?

On Patrick's monitor, right there.

See it?

You want a bigger picture?

Come on. I've done enough for you.

Really? You feel that way?

Ok, here it is. But only because you asked so nicely.

Walking on Eggshells

2010-07-09T00:19:00.007-05:00

This is the worst part of every project; the moment where everything is nearly done and any mistake would be catastrophic. It could be swinging an elbow and spilling water across your painting, or accidentally deleting a file or a tedious layer, or tripping and watching your freshly fired pot slip out of your fingers, but there's always an infinite number of little things that could go wrong and ruin everything forever. As I've worked this afternoon, feeling damp shells bulge uner my fingers, or waiting impatiently for things to dry, I've thought of most of those infinite ways and envisioned very realisitc scenarios in which I do one or more of them, shattering my little creature and, with it, my dreams.

Which is why all the pieces are safely put away and I'm typing, which is only in 2736 of the scenarios, vs. fiddling around more, which is in basically all of them.

I spent the morning (read: early afternoon) with Rodey at his friend's house, where his friend's wife very patiently posed for two hours as we did some sketches. Mega thanks to Trina (tell me I remembered her name right) for letting us distort her body and give her terrible, monstrous features with paper and pen.

My pictures tend to be locally proportional (the arm is perfect and well formed and 10% smaller than the perfectly proportioned hand while also being 10% bigger than the anatomically accurate torso, etc. The effect is a Frankenstein's monster of well made but totally unrelated parts from creatures of arbitrary sizes, all stuck together at the seams) so I was pleased that our model didn't end up with noodle arms or tiny, doll-like hands. In fact, I did pretty well for someone who hasn't drawn a live model since 2007. The time flew past, and I didn't even notice the arm cramps until later.

This evening was productive as well. Made a Sculpy egg base and stuck Very Small Rocks® to it, baked it and painted it black. Stuck some bigger rocks to it in the handy bigger rock holes I'd thoughtfully left in the clay, then took some more Very Small Rocks® which had been painted black and rubbed yet more gold foil on them and glued them between the existing Very Small Rocks®. Lastly, took a few tiny eggshell fragments and glued them to the base as well in order to make the relationship between the base and the hatchling a little more dynamic.

While the clay was baking and cooling, I mixed up some plaster and filled the bottom of the egg with a funnel made from tinfoil. Then I got clever and tinted the plaster dark grey and poured a little more in. Sadly, I added too much water so it'll take a lot longer to set than I'd like, forcing Baby Dragon to wait another night before completion. I'll also have to add a bit more plaster tomorrow, since the tail ended up facing the wrong way and I had to fiddle with it, pulling it partway out of the wet plaster.

In other news, I've got auburn hair at the mo', since I am planning to dye it bright red. But it's been well received, so I may keep it for a few weeks, although it pains me greatly to walk into a building and get a total of zero stares or disapproving glances. I saw a girl with bright fuchsia hair and thought to myself, hey, she's cool like me, and then I remembered my boring hair and felt a little sad. Colen likes it, though, and his opinion trumps. I'm just not used to any colour that might be found on the head of a normal, non-irradiated person, but I can be consoled that the blue and pink still manage to show through. My green roots are quite fetching.

True colours

2010-07-06T15:34:00.006-05:00

My devoted readers, MonkeyKing, Maggot and Wardocles, you've followed my struggles and travails and I feel I should reward your waiting with poor quality cell phone pictures. You are so blessed, as am I for your diligence.

Baby Dragon is painted, finally, and I'm glad I started over. The new look fits him well and, better, fits his fragile shell. Over the black paint I painted oblong spots in regular sizes at irregular intervals, bronze and a gold base over which I put red. Then I took black and a superfine brush and divided any that were close to make scales and picked out a pattern on the top of Baby's head. It's a nice contrast to the black background, and a lot less work than painting every single scale.

After the paint was dry, I put some tacky glue on all the orangey gold bits and added gold foil. So his fingers, eyes, horn and tail tip are all very shiny, and I rubbed some extra foil on the ridge of his back and head. I covered those with clear enamel for extra depth and then sprayed glossy clear coat on his back, leaving his stomach mostly matte.

With the intense red and gold against the black, he's much more vivid and interesting than before. But just to be sure, I put him in the egg...

He's adorable. Lookit him hiding in that eggshell. Super cute.

Next step: mounting the egg and securing Baby Dragon. But today I left my car windows down in the torrential rain, so I'll be delayed, I think.

Forward two steps, back one

2010-07-03T15:24:00.005-05:00

When you think of Wisconsin, you think of cows, cheese, and fields of gently waving crops (in fact, I just ate some five-year cheddar and butterkase for breakfast). Perhaps our lakes and fishing, or our deer-filled woods, where food walks on four legs as long as you're a good shot. Often our cold winters come to mind; bitter winds and frozen wastelands with bitingly cold winds howling across the frigid snow.

If you're from Wisconsin, however, you know about our constant humidity. Near-tropical weather couples with clouds of visible moisture, keeping us indoors unless we want to lose our body weight in water. Walking outside it like being slapped in the face with a wet blanket.

And it's been playing havoc with my painting timetable. The spray paint is affected less by the humid air than the clear coat, but it still dries better in dry air.

Two days ago, on the first not-horribly-humid day in ages, I sprayed Cute Baby Dragon's red and shiny egg with clear spray to make it all lacquered and cool. If you spray clear coat in humid weather, I've learned, it'll get cloudy and NEVER DRY. Poor Rupert learned this the hard way, and he's still sticky to the touch a year later and his tacky body is covered with an adhered layer of dust, making his dead arms fuzzy and clogging his poor exposed brain. Poor Zambie guy. Obviously, I don't want Cute Baby Dragon to suffer the same fate, so I decided to paint him with model paints and forgo the clear coat by adding metallic paint instead of foil.

So I re-coated him in white primer and got to work. Yellow base makes for the vibrant, healthy red, so I painted him yellow and then put washes of blood red paint and ink over, just as I'd done on the egg. One he was painted a solid red, I stole some of my friend Megan's gold (she was over at my house, using the sunlight to paint Genestealer minis for the game Space Hulk) and mixed some bright metallics for highlights. Speckles are a cheap and easy way of making scales, which is really the most tedious part of making anything reptilian. I always give up after less than a third of the scales and find some way to cheat. I put dark bronze on his belly and neck and put gold highlights on his back ridge along with gold eyes, horn, and claws.

After this, we called it an afternoon so we could go back to Megan's and play board games, and I left baby dragon to dry.

He was sitting there this morning (this afternoon, actually, since I fell asleep at about 10 am), shining subtly in the sun and clearly waiting to be placed in his glossy egg. So I placed him inside it...

and was really disappointed with the result.

He's certainly very pretty in his own right, with his warm colours and happy smile. But he seems so pastel in his bright red and gold egg, as if he doesn't belong inside it, and I had to decide: take him as is, or paint over him and start over, wasting hours of work?

I repainted. He's primered, again in black, and I have some excellent ideas for details. I'll have to paint and then wait for the weather to hold for a clear coat, but it's the trade off I'll make to ensure I get the right result.

Off to paint.

For Monkey King

2010-07-03T04:10:00.002-05:00

This isn't exactly it, either; I'm just playing around. But it's closer to what I was thinking.

Wake Up, Chalice: blundering my way through Photoshop

2010-07-01T16:21:00.012-05:00

Many moons ago, when the world was new, I drew this lovely picture at gaming on the back of some scrap paper or a character sheet or something. It's a strange, pathological thing, but I tend to draw people having bad things happen to them, and Chalice is no exception. I was reminded the other day of my half-pretty-face-half-rotting-skull pictures, or my dagger-stabbed-through-an-eyeball series in my notebooks. In retrospect, I think I was a little deranged. But anyway, content and disturbing implications aside, I drew a picture, and, later, tried to colour it.

And I got this. Painting even the most translucent of layers covered all the linework and made it all a homogeneous blur. Sure, I could have painted it from scratch, but I wouldn't have been able to use my lines as reference. And I couldn't figure out what to with it, with barely functional Photoshop knowledge. I mean, I got Satyr done, but she's messy and simple and, really, needs some cleaning up. I painted her with a mouse, which is my excuse for just slapping the last few bits together and saying "screw it" to my carpal tunnel, but a lot of the problem was my lack of training.

Anyone who knows Photoshop will laugh at me, but I was reading a nifty book about dragons from my cool aunt, stuffed with little colouring and drawing hints, and I found my answer. Multiply. I'd never known about multiply. I mean, I only barely know what levels even are, let alone how to use them. Everything I've done has been dicking around until I find things that work or do something cool, and I've still barely scratched the surface. Sometimes I google tutorials, but I really don't use the program enough to get to know all the bits.

But after using these new tips on Muhammad, I thought I'd have a go at some older pieces to see if I could get some more practice. And, in about the time it had taken me to give up Chalice the first time (which was more hours than I'll be admitting), I'd gotten this far.

Encouraged, I got more work done, adding a decent background and simultaneously clearing up some confusion about her position in space. Every layer is set properly according to its content, mostly. I'm still a huge newb and kept putting things in the wrong layers and making life difficult for myself. But I kept working and went from that to this in only a few more hours!

(You know people who do speedpaintings and are like "yeah, this one I went a little overboard and it took 20 minutes instead of 15" and you're like "holy crap, I couldn't do that if I spent MY ENTIRE LIFE working on it and I hate you!" and then you go and cry? Yeah, I hate those people, and making a project like this in only 4 easy installments of 2-3 hours each makes me hate them so much more)

Well, I finally finished, after way too long, and I think the end result is pretty nifty. What do you think?

Masqerade update - photos found

2010-06-27T02:44:00.007-05:00

From Jason Kauffold's Flickr album. From left to right it's McGeorge, Maggot, and me, in our masks, wings, and other finery. We're so pretty, no? You can find the bigger picture here, which gives a little more detail.

A quick little bite - Mini Muhammads

2010-06-25T18:22:00.004-05:00

These were my backup Draw Muhammad Day dudes. I drew the big versions on graph paper during gaming one night (thanks Paisley for your Zingg design graph paper pad!) and made these in MS Paint and Photoshop, one pixel at a time. This is my first ever pixel art, and I'm terribly pleased with myself.

I did this instead of cleaning today, FYI.

A tasty filler

2010-06-25T14:25:00.006-05:00

I've been helping my little sister move in with me for the last week, so I've got no new art at all. But I do have a few pictures of my friend Sara and I making a Rice Krispy treat castle.

Because we're that cool. Buttered cups and tupperware made the castle and tons and tons and tons of icing, sprinkles, gummi bears, etc. made it that much better. The mashmallow dudes didn't work at all because I made the icing glue too thin and we didn't want to wait hours for it to set. So they fell apart a little.

But it was still a great castle. Very tastefully decorated. Subtle is the word.

As we posed out marshmallow men they broke into pieces, and we felt momentary sorrow for our lost soldiers and giant princess, but quickly recovered enough to make yelling death noises and spray red icing all over the dismembered dudes.

There you go. Gotta go get some cleaning done.

I thought fairies did nice things, like granting wishes.

2010-06-16T13:45:00.015-05:00

Shows what you know, don't it.

My small sister Maggot stopped by my house, and I took the opportunity to steal the wings out of her trunk. There were three finished sets, all a little ragged and worse for the wearing. The two smaller sets had wire loops to go around the shoulders, and the bigger pair just wrapped the wire around the neck. Probably not super safe, but I wore that pair and I'm used to chokers, so it wasn't terrible. They sometimes required a sideways amble through doors, and we jostled a lot of folks with them, bending tips and tearing cellophane.

Sadly, I still have no pictures of the full outfits, so we're going to just have pictures of me in my pajamas, mmmkay? Cool.

The wings are a little bent, and the wind was strong, and I was holding a baby dragon covered in primer in one hand, so the wings are a little bendy and warped in the pictures. Pretty much every time I'd get them out properly, which takes about half a second and a wiggle, the wind would shove one of them over and I'd have to jostle them back in place.

Sorry for the squinting. I'd just gotten out of bed. Yes, at noon. Don't judge me.

Masquerade

2010-06-09T19:07:00.016-05:00

About two weeks ago, a local group of Madisonians held a Labyrinth Masquerade as a fundraiser for a friend. Labyrinth as in the movie, complete with David Bowie and Sarah lookalike contests and a lot of stuffed tights. My sister Maggot called me up during our planning process and suggested biting fairies as our costume, so I got to work. With about 4 days to work, I planned out one mask for each sister (three; there were supposed to be extras but to say I ran out of time is an understatement) and one pair of wings for each. Easy enough, right?

Ha ha, I'm so hilarious.

Anyway. Let's put my obvious stupidity aside for a minute and I'll tell you what I made. Two of the three masks were built from scratch and the third was a feather mask from Pirates of Penzance with some alterations. Why did we have masquerade masks in Pirates, you may ask? Not important.

Ok. So the first mask was made from scraps of an old thrift store purse, already gutted to make Kare-Bear's bandolier for her Star Wars costume a few years ago. Super glue and spray adhesive tacked the seams of the two leather scraps I used, hiding the edges and sticking it to a piece of black craft foam. It's very simple in design, because making a real fake leather mask would have been arduous beyond belief. Then I decorated the eyeholes with strips of copper-coloured plastic lanyard, superglued in place, and a bit of paint for highlights.

Lastly, I wrapped coloured wire into little loopy decorations and simply fed them through the eyeholes, bending them to make them stay in place, and throwing down some extra superglue, just to be sure. I also discovered that the wire I'd bought was wrapped in thin foil, which tended to peel away from the edges, and was also thinner than I thought. Balls. So that didn't work super well. Brandon made some ear loops for it while I was freaking out over the wings, but that's later.

The second mask was a little more complicated. I cut out felt and soaked it with black liquid latex, and filled it with stuff while it was drying. Glass beads, fine sand, glitter. The side pieces have some tulle over the felt for a slightly different texture. Once the mask dried, which took over a day, I seriously just glued stuff to it. Jewels and jeweled stickers, painted foam, and, eventually, feathers, and then I just glued the mask to a foam base.
I did also add a little paint to the mask for highlights. Colen punched out the sides with my leather punch and threaded cord through it and then wrapped the ends in wire, which looked quite nice.

The third mask was a feather thing in green, blue, and purple. I made some changes; painted the eyeholes, added paint and peacock feathers, and fixed the broken string with a paperclip and tape. But I haven't got any pictures of that mask, since McG has it. Maggot has hers, too, but remembered to take pictures last time I was at her house.

The wings, now. That was brilliantly stupid of me...brilliant because the idea was perfectly innovative and stupid because I had no time to do what I needed to do.

For the skeleton I used thick wire, bent into curlicues by me and Brandon. Each wing was one big "C" shaped piece, curled in on itself at the edges, and two smaller "C" shapes. The wing membranes themselves were a particularly inspired piece of work...I sprayed a piece of cellophane with iridescent paint, clear paint, and then stuck it to another piece of cellophane while the paint was still wet. So what I got was thicker, clear-ish, iridescent pieces of cellophane that I could cut out and tape to the wires.

Let me give you some context, now. At this point it's a few hours before the Masquerade, and I have a total of ZERO wings done. My friend Brandon's in town to visit for the first time in a year and a half and I'm busy being in costume panic mode, having him and Patrick help me with stuff, and I end up having to skip his welcome back dinner. I grab the masks and he and Patrick help me shove everything I'm working on into a trash bag, and they drop me off at Maggot's house, where I realize...

I don't have the wings. They're at my house, still in the bag.

So now I'm freaking out even more, so Maggot gives me a glass of bourbon and we wait for George to get there. She does, we tell her the news, we deliberate over the possibility of skipping the damn wings, we decide not to, we go all the way to my house with all our extra clothes, makeup, masks, and anything else we thought we'd need. Then we all frantically work on things, taking turns to get dressed and made up, tacking things together out of pretty much nothing and using duct tape anywhere we could get away with it. So, anyway, back to the actual method.

The plan had been to fold pieces over the wire and stick them there with the paint, but the curls and bends made that tricky, so I just painted tons of panels in advance and cut them out, mounting them inside the wires with tape. Then we ran out of tape, so I dug up some packing tape and we used that. Some pieces were skipped entirely, so two of the wing pairs have only two sets of curlicue wing pieces instead of three. They're tied together with wire, hastily, and I did tear some holes in them in the process.

Back to context. We're late already...doors were open at 9 and we're meeting someone at ten, and we leave my house around that time or a bit after. I'm in the car, desperately wondering what I'm going to use to hold the wings on. We're putting on shoes, latching corsets, and drinking some terrible concoction out of a mug. At the club we finish putting on shoes, Maggot changes shirts and I tie her corset, and then she tightens mine. Then the wire comes out of the trunk and I loop it through the wing centres, wrapping hooks around the shoulders. We put on the masks, adjust our hair, tuck our IDs in our clothes, and go inside. Ten thirty five or so we walk in the door, and the rest is history.

This link has a picture of our abandoned wings that someone took at the Inferno sometime after we took them off to dance. It's the only picture I have of them, since they're still in Maggot's trunk. I didn't want to steal the image without permission, so go look, and look at some of her other pictures.

I'll try to update soon with the rest of the pictures.

Well, aren't you just the cutest little thing?

2010-06-03T13:26:00.009-05:00

Yes, yes you are.

Cute baby dragon has survived his second incarnation and was purified with flames yesterday. I was smarter this time and made the hands, arms, body, and tail separately and joined them together at the end. Actually the tail is still detached, making it easier to place around Baby Dragon, since I'll be filling the inside with plaster anyway. The Sculpy gets really sticky, so I had to work a piece and then let it cool for a while before working it again, which was a bit annoying and a lot tedious but I persevered.

Regrettably, the fingers kept breaking off the hand, and I eventually just gave up and left them seamed and ugly because I was so sick of Baby Dragon's crap that I was feeling the urge to squish and make new again. To compensate, I plan to spray him with some thick acrylic on a non-humid day (I learned my lesson from Rupert the Zombie, who is still sticky a year later) and do some preliminary painting over that, which will, I hope, add a little more security and hold to those aforementioned fingers.

The egg he's hatching from is one of the more boring eggs; it's the one I'd painted inside with gold iridescence, but the outside is just yellow under red ink. Nothing fancy. You may also notice that Baby Dragon has no wings, and that's because making those was a huge pain in the neck. Baby Dragon two will probably have them, but I'll have to work something out and add them post bake.

Honestly, I really hate Sculpy. It gets sticky and soft and unworkable so quickly, and is really quite fragile. since it doesn't dry, per se, it retains fingerprints that I'd buff off of real clay while it was leather hard, or sand when it was dry. Technically you can sand this clay, but it's annoying, and I'd rather polish it before baking to keep from having to sand, anyway. If any of my three loyal readers have any suggestions, I'd be delighted to hear them. I'd like to make casts, but I've no idea how.

As soon as I get some pictures, I need to show you what I was working on between this post and the last one. Maybe some fairy wings and masks, perhaps. Maybe super cool ones. Who knows?

Tool User

2010-05-25T18:44:00.003-05:00

This is just a quick post to say that those little dental flossing tools are great for my little sculpture. Baby dragon is in the process of being re-born, but you'll have to wait a bit.

Draw Muhammad Day

2010-05-24T14:03:00.003-05:00

I participated in the surprisingly popular Draw Muhammad Day, and unlike most participants depicted the Prophet in the least offensive way possible. Scrolling through the pages of juvenile, reactionary crap (where, I may note, I did not feature my art, because of all the juvenile, reactionary crap), I was a bit disheartened that my own work seemed to be in the top 1% of quality and insight. which is telling, for a rushed, flawed, lifeless and simplistic drawing.

Anatomically it's mostly alright. But the poses are dead and uninteresting, because, for lack of any source images really whatsoever, I was forced to use myself, holding poses and not able to interact with anyone else. So each person is really just a person that happens to be positioned near another person, and no one is interacting.

The colouring/shading is a different story. I decided early on to give each person a slightly different skin tone, and this was the worst idea I've ever had, I think. The amount of colour and shading needed to make three different colours of skin, realistically rendered and with a consistent light source (with, remember, no source images) would have kept me up most of the next day, and I said bugger it.

Linework kept me up until 7 am the 19th, and I finished the botched colouring at about the same time on the 20th, skipping most of my shading plans due to my exhaustion and overall disappointment with my handiwork. I submitted it to my main facebook page and went to bed for a day or two.

So here you go.

Chalk City

2010-05-18T17:37:00.011-05:00

This is going to be image heavy, but that's fine, right?

It was a nice, misty day, with periodic drizzles, and I walked to my friend Ward's house with a bag full of pens, papers, and chalk. I got there and we set to work, making some sketches for our chalk art of the day. Now, the ground was damp and the rain was very fine but steady, and we had our doubts about the chalk, but a few sample marks showed up bold against the sidewalk, so, paper in pocket, chalk in hand, we set out. Young Charlie stayed behind, since he was playing the Starcraft 2 beta and I would no dream to tear him away from such a thing.

Ward stopped in the small sidewalk in front of his house and began sizing up the area, but I stopped him. "Not here. We'll never have room for everything on this tiny patch of concrete."

He nodded. "Where should we go, then?"

"Let's go to Cannery Square," I suggested, weighing our limited options. Neither of us having a car, we had to walk ourselves, our chalk and the laundry basket of circle-making to our site, and the Square was close, public, and deserted.

Ward hesitated. "Is that legal?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. It doesn't say No Drawing With Chalk anywhere." Laughing, I thought about the police station across the street from the Square, and the bored SP cops. If they didn't notice, and we drew our huge mural right under their noses... "What's the worst they can do, tell us to stop? Let's go."

And we went. There was a big flat square, but it was next to the fountain and the wind blew jets of water across it and over it, making a big puddle. The cobble paths were narrow and uninteresting. But the short cobble path intersected another in a big, cobblestone circle, and there we had our canvas, ready made for a cosmology.

In the centre I laid out the planet and the altered oroboros, with the ethereal mass around and the two suns, moons, and planets. The damp cobbles took the chalk smoothly and darkened the colour a bit, which negated some of the pastel quality of the chalk.

Meanwhile, Ward drew four winds coming in from each cobble path, each direction having a season and a face. Again, the wet chalk blended nicely, and made for smooth and precise shading. After an exhausting amount of effort, we decided to bite the bullet and add the stars and tentacles to the outside rim of the circle. Because we're masochists like that. My earlier jumping around had worn out my legs so much that they were shaking by the end of the session, and I could hardly bend over to add sucker to the tentacles.

But it was all worth it, when we finished the bizarre universe. Even as we admired our work, we were already brimming with plans for Next Time, chattering over each other and waving expressive, excited arms.

I made my family come out and see my cool thing, and we fetched Ward's son to take a look as well. All in all, it took us about two hours, and as Ward mentioned, "The last half hour or so was mostly self-congratulation, anyway." Patrick came, failed to take pictures, and I took as many with my phone as I could. And it was a lucky thing we did.

In the spirit of installation art, is was gone by the next evening.

I limped over to the spot, my leg cramped and stiff from the day's work, and saw nearly no trace of our art...only a few faint circles from the black chalk remained, and no telltale rivulets in the cobbles from rain runoff. It was washed clean, probably by a pressure hose.

And I was super bummed, but not terribly surprised.

So I hope you enjoyed the documentation of our biggest project to date.

Rest in pieces

2010-05-13T16:21:00.002-05:00

Baby Dragon passed away after a courageous fight with my clumsy fingers. He was a week old. He may be reanimated in the future, but with some drastic modifications.

In a related news story, I stabbed the hell out of my thumb with several baby dragon neck support wires and am currently sucking on my bleeding thumbtip and whimpering.

Hatching

2010-05-07T16:21:00.005-05:00

So I've got the inside of an egg painted with superfine iridescent glitter and then overlaid with that wonderful iridescent paint, and I must say it looks pretty cool. The outside's not painted for anything yet, but one thing at a time. Anyway, I made this because I had a bit of an idea.

Cute baby dragon!

Sculpy and wire, unbaked, very rough, and I don't know what I'll use for the wings. But I think the idea has merit. Going to smooth it out and see if I can make a passable baby dragon out of it. I'd like to be able to paint the outside of an egg, crack it, paint the inside, make a Sculpy dragon, bake it, pour plaster into the egg base, put the dragon baby inside, let it harden, paint the baby, and mount it one something so it stands.

Because everyone wants a cute baby dragon, right?

Between a rock and a hard place

2010-05-05T15:39:00.010-05:00

Yesterday's egg was a black dragon egg, and I've always loved bright red detailing on black, which is probably why I gravitated towards red hair and black clothes and gothy nonsense in my school days. Obviously I'm past that now, ten years later, and I certainly am not wearing a pinstripe goth minidress and white fishnet shirt with blue and pink hair while I write this post, because that would be SILLY. Silly is not something I do.

Right, all blatant lies aside, let me tell you what I did. Well, first I cleaned like a bugger, because my workroom was a huge mess and I had every single art thing I was using piled on my desk in a huge heap. There were bits of dead leaves on the floor from last year's plants and a veritable carpet of paper shreds from the shredder. So I moved some stuff, put up a shelf, and all that jazz.

Also, I hollowed out some more eggs, made a delicious ginger stir-fry with one and brownies with the others, and started fiddling more with egg interiors. But we should talk about the finished eggs, because I happen to have pictures of those.

I sprayed the egg with black primer and then set it aside. In the palette I dumped a bunch of super thick acrylic gel medium, some black acrylic paint, some black embossing powder, ultra fine red glitter, and tiny glass beads and mixed it into a nice cement paste, which I kinda splatted onto the egg. While it was still thick I stuck a few tiny red gems into it and tucked a bit of acrylic around them. The huge peaks of gel media cement dried quite a bit smaller and tighter to the egg, since acrylic shrinks a lot, and neatly trapped the gems inside. It also nicely muted the glitter, while letting a little red show through.

Next, I mixed some iridescent medium , a bit more glitter, and red acrylics to make a metallic colour for details. I built up a few smaller round bumps of it and brushed a very subtle layer over the peaks. It retains a lot of texture now that everything is dry and the red accents catch the light.

I'm really quite happy with this one...I'd wanted something that looked like garnets trapped in stone and I think I got something very close to my mental image.

Off take pictures with Patrick and then paint more eggs. Insides, this time. And after I buy a bit of wire, I'll be trying to make a hatching baby dragon out of Sculpy. I probably should change; this dress isn't really practical for painting. But no one judges me here...

EDIT
By request, this is my gothy pinstripe dress.

Bronzed Adonis

2010-05-04T16:31:00.007-05:00

My bleary eyes are free of glitter, finally. I say that, of course, although I can see the tiny metal flecks gleaming in my lashes and tear ducts, waiting in the wings for their one shot at that unique glory of leaping into my eye and splashing around like they're having a glitter seizure. Those jerks.

Got some bronze model paint and drybrushed my green egg, as carefully as possible, and then washed some darker green and a little bronze over it to bring out the contrast a little more. It kept a really nice weathered metallic texture to it, and made the bumps and ridges look much more intentional, as I'd hoped. I think it looks pretty good, but that might just be me. I also got the wash paint all over my fingers, but that was nearly entirely intentional. It just doesn't feel like a day of work unless my hands get dirty. 'Course, there's still paint and glue on them from yesterday, but that's not the point. The picture doesn't quite get the colour, which is a tiny bit more gray (like, say, tarnished bronze), but does well enough, I think.

I hollowed out another egg today, and it went much easier now that I've learned the secret, which I will now share with you. Make a bigger hole in the bottom. Ta-Daa! The new egg is drying on the wire and I've got a few ideas batting around for it.

Glittering eyes

2010-05-04T11:07:00.007-05:00

Here's a picture of the same eggs again, because I think it does a better job of showing the colours, and my phone was being unusually cooperative with the detail. Now onto the update.

That oblong egg sanded down nicely and I painted on Elmer's glue veins, let them dry, and started in with the acrylics. This, in retrospect, may not have been the best idea, because I'd forgotten how acrylics hold brush lines, and I'd also forgotten how quickly they dry, and I'd also forgotten how wobbly the base was, and the base for this egg in particular, since it was too long to allow the wire to pass all the way through. I'd actually plastered over the other hole because of this fact. So, instead of getting a nice, leather-sheen silk-smooth egg, I got one with weaving lines from a suddenly spinning egg, brushstrokes, and little bumps from a few flakes of drier paint that had mixed in with the lovely acrylic green-gray. It still looks nice, mind you, and the brush strokes are much diminished by cautious painting and some clever washes (which also, as I'd hoped, separated out the colours a bit, giving it a slightly more interesting surface which cannot be seen in the picture).

Meanwhile, between coats of paint, I'd been dabbling with my broken eggshell fragments. Tried adding tiny glass beads to clear acrylic gel on the outside, spray-painting the interiors, spraying with tacky glue, and adding very fine glitter. This taught me, in order: use tinted acrylics and other texturisers so it doesn't like like tiny caviar smeared across an egg, masque the egg well so you don't end up with overspray on the outside of the shell (but Krylon satin white is the perfect colour for the inside of an egg), use a glove to hold the egg because Tacky Glue overspray NEVER COMES OFF (I told people at work that I had leprosy), and very fine glitter will get, literally, everywhere.

It'll get in your eyes and mouth, fill your eyebrows, hide in the carpet and stick to your towels. It will adhere to the slightest surface (like, say, and arm covered with Tacky Glue overspray?) and cling like a barnacle made of magnets of crazy glue. It will catch in the slightest breeze and go places you'd rather it didn't. It'll lurk in the corners of your eyes until you sleep and then lacerate the bejeebus out of your corneas. It'll appear, as if by magic, every time you blow your nose for the rest of your natural life. It even makes tinier, baby glitter, which covers you like a fine, sparkling mist, and gets you more Twilight references than a person can handle in a lifetime (1). Glitter is called the Art Herpes for good reason. It's easy to catch, easy to spread and impossible to get rid of. I'm sure someone in Antarctica just woke up with a piece of glitter on their face and is wondering why.

So I have the craft equivalent of STD in my eyebrows until further notice. Hooray.

Teaching my grandmother to suck eggses

2010-04-29T01:30:00.000-05:00

It's been a few days, Patrick, I know, but in my defense I used them to make cool things. So there. Also, I needed to make brownies and wander around in the woods a little and play Arkham Horror with a few friends.

I find it a little strange that my dad isn't following my blog, by the way, but that's a topic for a different day.

So eggses. I've got another done. That masque I splashed on it made lots of nifty warts, so that worked well. I sprayed it with white primer and silver paint, and simultaneously sprayed the majority of my hand. I thought about putting the little stand on cardboard and spraying it that way, like I did with the first egg, but then I thought, nah, this way is hella more efficient and I'm lazy. So I held the stand and just moved it around to get the spray even. I didn't want a super high silver gloss, because I figured it'd be annoying to paint over.

Then on to the acrylic paint base. It started out as swirls of blue and indigo and then, layer after layer later, they kindof got covered up a little, as in you can't see them at all at this point. I covered it with lots of washes of purples mixed with an iridescent medium that's supposed to be for watercolours, but the art police haven't found me out yet. Then I put some glue on it and attempted to add some silver foil. And I did! I added tons of foil. To my fingertips, primarily. Some of the acrylic wasn't totally dry, either, so the glue peeled some of that up and stuck it to my fingers as well. So, annoyed, I moved on to some light drybrushing with silver paint, and did a great job mostly except for the bits that smeared all over because I wasn't being careful. I swore and let it dry.

Meanwhile, I've been working on this excellent oblong egg, sanding it down with fine sandpaper to make it as smooth as possible. I'm going for a more leathery lizard egg for this one. I doodled some ideas for it at work today.

Home again and finished the egg with some more washes and touch-ups, and much more cautious drybrush while I watched Hogan's Heroes some more with Colen and Chiz. The silver is more subtle but shows nicely through the acrylic washes. I took the picture next to egg #1 and actually got a better picture of it this time. Now I just need a better picture of egg #2.

Egg #3 has a bit of glue drying on it now in the shape of veins. We'll see how well it dries. I tried to make the veins with masque but the brush would catch the drying masque and peel up whole sections and it was just too freaking infuriating to get it almost done and have the whole thing peel up in chunks, so I gave up and tried plan B, which is Elmer's.

Note: the whole time I was writing this post, my king snake, Ka, was crawling on my head and shoulders and it was a bit distracting but mostly really unbelievably cute. Colen kept trying to keep her away from me, but she'd extend her entire body out of his hand to lick my face. At one point, she crawled around my fingers and I was typing with her head about an inch from the keyboard. She's pretty much the greatest snake in the world.

Something I didn't know could happen

2010-04-25T12:17:00.000-05:00

You know, I've been considering myself a bit of an egg-emptying expert these last few days. After all, up until this point in my life, I'd hollowed out at least five eggs using the pin-prick-and-blow-your-face-off method, and that puts me far and above the average population of the modern world who have probably hollowed out somewhere around none. But it seems I may have overestimated my skills, because I've been learning a lot of annoying life lessons. There's the simple things, like making sure there are no hairline cracks before you begin, and even if you can't see any fractures you should keep checking just in case, because they're there anyway, and they sometimes make a little odd feeling against your fingers right before they split, so watch out for that. Common sense, really. But there are meaner tricks.

Apparently, if you blow too hard on eggs trying to get all the goop out, and you do this too many times, you can put little tears in that cheek skin that connects to your teeth. Aaaaugh. It hurts and stings! <---Elf Only Inn quote. I miss that comic. Back on subject, I got the really nice oblong egg hollowed out and set to dry without breaking it or filling my face with egg goo. Sadly, it's still pouring rain, so I won't be able to paint today, but I also won't be able to hollow out any more eggs due to those pesky cheek tears.

In case you were wondering, this is what I normally look like. Well, the hair is pink and purple now, but you get the general idea, right? Cool and artsy, with cool, artsy hair and super stylish good looks? It's all right, I'm a narcissist, so I don't need to fish for compliments. I already know how great I am. Well, after blowing the center out of an egg, I look a little bit more like this.

KILL IT WITH FIRE!

So, since I have no cool progress to show you, here's a picture of my cool work area full of junk. See if you can find both eggs, three snowflakes, a ruler, a green crayon, a picture of a mermaid, and my ability to organise my stuff.

The dragon eye postcard is a work in progress, and has been for...a while...and the cool postcards are cool postcards with snowflakes pasted on to watercolours with that tub of clear acrylic gel. The little tubes are watercolour paint and the big tubes are cheap acrylics and the wooden box is very old oils. So there you have it! A bunch of my things laying in a heap! Glad to be of service.

Of all the days to have no Mormons

2010-04-24T23:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I attempted to drill and drain four eggs, and smashed all but one into my flushed and inflated face in the attempt. Gave up, swore a bit, set up the good one to dry, did laundry. As I transferred armfuls from washer to dryer, I pulled out the one pair of delicate underwear and, for lack of a free hand, hung it around my neck. My washer is close to the front door, and I started glancing toward it, suddenly feeling a little silly. Along with my new necklace and red face, my eyes were bleary, my hair was light-socket frizzy, and I was wearing some of my less-flattering pajamas. And through this realization my only thought was: Oh, man, I really hope some Jehovah's Witnesses or something come door-to-door, because that would be hilarious!

Just then, there was a knock at my door, and I could just see two figures outlined against the light. I panicked. I stepped to the door, stepped back, and then army-crawled under the level of the door window until I was out of view. Silently, I actively pretended not to be home until they got bored and left.

Ha, no. That didn't happen, although it would have been super-perfect, and I'm sure that's what I would have done. Taken the undies off my head, anyway, but probably hidden from the Jo-Hos/Mormons/salesmen/condo association.

Anyway. That egg dried out pretty well over the course of the day, and by evening it was up for some more masque splatter, which I added while watching Invasion of the Dinosaurs with Chiz and Colen, alternating splashes of latex with bites of brownie and macncheeze. Other than the subsequent food poisoning, it was a good night.

Today it rained and I had more food poisoning and I worked, so not much got done. I'd hoped to spray at least a base primer coat on the egg, but the damp outside left no real chance of that, and New Cute Baby Snake convinced me through telepathy not to fill the house with toxic vapours.

Oh, yeah. Colen bought a New Cute Baby Snake. So that's cool.

Anyway, if tomorrow is less rainy, I'll be spraying egg #2, but regardless, I'm about to try and drain another batch of eggs. There's a lovely oblong jobby that I'll try extra hard not to break, and Karn says I can probably sell these kids to furries, which I believe. Furries will buy any damn thing, and I'd rather sell cool but easy dragon's eggs to the weirdos than bunny girl/fox boy sexy pictures. I tried to draw furry art once, for the sake of cash, but realized at some point that I had a soul and it was getting upset. So eggs it is.

A little too close to the sun

2010-04-21T15:42:00.000-05:00

Every day brings a host of challenges. Making breakfast before the average person eats dinner, fighting the losing battle with the greasy kitchen, and the eternal struggle against apathy and time-wasting link-chasing on the internets. Some problems are unique to the day, like wondering if acrylic paint will stick to an egg without flaking, and some are consistent, like attempting to sketch for five minutes without getting distracted by pictures of Mario birthday cakes or the Pope attempting to eat a child.

So, to combat this, I am making a CHANGE. Starting now.

I will tell you, the reader (my father, I assume, who will reciprocate my blog following out of duty), what clever thing I am making, and, hopefully, that shared childish excitement will encourage me to actually finish things I begin. So let me start with today's venture.

Today I am making a dragon's egg. Prototype. Out of a chicken egg. Erm. Well, here. I would like to make a cool, giant egg thing that looks like a Dragon's egg, to keep in my room and never, ever sell, although I'll pretend for a while that I will sell it, for real this time, and then balk at setting a price and end up with the damn thing for the rest of my natural life. At least I know my limits. But, anyway, I'm practicing by making a little, simpler egg, in order to see how paint and other media react to the surface of the egg, and to see if my 2D sketches even begin to be feasibly transferred to a round, awkward egg.

The egg was drilled with a pin and drained to make my lunch last week. Cleaned with vinegar and set on a spiral-y bent wire to dry. The wire bends up and through the bottom and top holes, holding it upright and allowing it to spin, which is AMAZING for painting, as long as the holes are aligned and the egg spins evenly, which mine does not. But that's alright. It's been splashed with latex liquid masque and sprayed. I almost wish I'd splashed it with something permanent, because those raised, warty bumps look pretty nifty, actually. Next time, gadget!

Well, I guess I am actually in luck because ha ha! Most of those little bumps don't come off. The paint layer is too thick, and locks the tiniest drops of latex down. So now I have an egg with big holes in the paint layers, and small bumps.

Whatever. Prototype. Next time I will use masque as texture and add extra paint so they can't come off. Anyhow, now I have these white spots, which I'm going to paint bright green and blue. The acrylic paint sticks in the little holes, so when I buff it off it leaves behind little bits of colour. I make some warts out of glue and acrylic gel, and paint over the whole thing with washes of metallic paint and VIOLA!

It's...not quite what I was going for. Those warts are way too big. The colour comes through well, but not in the photo, I'm afraid. The cell phone takes great pictures, but lousy macro.

But still cool enough for a prototype. Looks like I'll be making scrambled eggs for breakfast. And lunch. Maybe dinner. For the next week.

Well, post number one and project number one are done. As a reward for myself, I'm going to read my webcomics, and then get started on the next project.