make a drawing from 8 reference photos, okay

My last drawing assignment for Uni got an offer, as in, a classmate wanted to buy it.  A good omen, yes?  Oh yes!  I should say so.  Some small part of it might be the antique frames, which are admittedly gorgeous and make my disparate doodles less... disparate.  Actually, this whole thing had a magnetic kind of cohesiveness, for, if you look at it a certain way, doesn't it look like a dragon kind of creature passing by the windows?  That's the idea, anyway.  It's a sum of parts, and if you go to the Flickr link you can see exactly what each piece was.

Working title might be something like "how to turn a pedestrian drawing assignment into a work of meaningful art", or something, whatever, I'm terrible at naming things, generally.  Names are pretty bollocks, yeah.

The girl who offered to buy my piece?  Made this.  I fell over, a little bit, inside, when I looked in her white diorama ceramic sculpture-thing.  There were marshmallows, bird-like marshmallows making silent tender conversation in stop-motion video at the end of that dream-like music-box-sized corridor.  And she wondered if it was Art with a capital A, and to that I say -- Bollocks!  This is gazing inside someone, something, and if that isn't worthy of the A, I'm out of the game.  I ran up 3 flights of stairs and back down to the basement floor just to grab my camera and remember this.  Enchanted....

post-soleil. the setted sun?

This one's rising.

Well, I made it until noon.  Noontime, sun at the zenith.  I captured it with a masking tape circle on the floor, which is actually an enso really.  No, really.  I had a 76% urge when I showed up to not even open my pencils at all and fudge everyone out who happened to show up with that trick.  To be completely honest, it's probably more powerful to expect a huge drawing performance and find only a bare floor with a circle on it, than to see some art student draw yet another random project in the hallway.  It's like those monks who whack their disciples over the head to shock them into enlightenment.  Much more penetrating.  Much more better.

That said, I like my sun.  I think I'll fill the rest of the page later on at my leisure, over the summer, to be a giant flaming flower planet-thing.  And I need to figure out how to attach the little mirror without hurting the paper.

I also found out this morning while reading up on Shinto for class, that Amaterasu - the epic-ly epic primary Shinto Kami of the sun -- is often represented with a mirror! (!)

I love Amaterasu.  Ever since I heard about the legend where she hides herself in a cave, until getting tricked outside to bring light back to world, well... I thought she was neat.  Female deities are soooooo often associated with the moon, but not this girl, no, she was flaming from the get-go!  Her brother Tsukiyomi is the Moon Kami.

"when you want to harvest these just use a razor with delicacy on the edges of their travel compartment"

Everything's swirling together for the finish line: 1 more week of school left, and 1 week of solid studio critiques to look forward to.  My projects (my babies!) are just about incubated, grown solid limbs, hot off the presses (so to speak).  The booklet was the most nebulous until very recently.  I actually wasn't sure if it would come together at all, but an inspired format change to the font was the missing element it needed, and I got happy with the layout late last night.  *wipes giant anime sweatdrop from off of head*

I just have to figure out how to print it at a higher quality than a usual casual zine, give it an appropriately surrealistic-yet-delicious name ("Apocalypse Popcorn" ?), and then my first art-book will be done.  Go life accomplishments. :)  

Also, happy happy: I got more mail in my metal conjuring box!

A girl named Sailor sent me a postcard full of my favourite things: children's book cutouts, maps, paint names, bubble-balloons, blood cells, and.....

Beautiful bugstamps!  I'm so grateful, these look like treasures.  Thank you, Sailor!  I'll leave them in their clear cage for now, save them for a world-saving letter, or perhaps save them forever, chittering behind the plastic making talk-time with Waldo and the swatch called "New Spring" :)

I do love mail correspondence... I picked up a bunch of free pastel boxes today, I think I'll fill them with small neat things and send them around the world soon.  AFTER school is done being stressful, that is.  Oh, I'm gonna go apeshit with the sparkles and reality tv after this week is done....

I think it's entirely possible to evolve into a foolproof machine

Imagine if you might... the top floor of this building is a dislocated airport atmosphere, an ice age wisp-moment, a lavender ghost shark air-quarium.  It'll be my home for a full day of drawing, all my pencils scattered around me as I slowly, slowly grow a sun in graphite, flames licking in slow motion to fill a gigantic paper on the floor.  My temporary home and magic carpet ride, ha!  

If I could extend this to a 24-hour performance and watch the nightlight twinkle in all colours of the city all around me, all alone in the sky........ I would, oh I ..... all for the want of an after-hours pass. :/

This will still be glorious, though.

like 64% of art students, I have a thing for little sparrow-y city birds and tangled masses of branch

These are some friends of mine.  Accidental videos are the sidewaysest!  I mean the best.  

O HAI

Oh, and Montreal is pretty much designed to climb all up over at a moment's desire, if you can take a bit of dust and the moderate thrill of kicking your boots against the side of old buildings at people's head level.  We saw had the most epic-ly boring evening right after, with stolen birthday cake and deliberately terrible karaoke and Eddie Vedder's ghost channeled into a roots rocker and it was AWESOME.

I also totally wasn't kidding about the birds.  They were having a little tea party this morning in the lot behind the arts building!  So springy, wish I'd had some breadcrumbs in my pocket, even if it is a strange thing to carry around.  I know it's not the most amazing picture in the world, but actually if you look at it for more than 4 seconds it starts to become quite beautiful, like a cloud of smoke or daydream of park light... oooweeeeooooooooooo.  It was kind of a moment, and I also got a big kick out of taking pictures of presumably nothing, a couple steps away from the art hang, because regardless of how eccentric it might look, in that general vicinity bird-picturing ranks a modest LOW in weird behaviour.  

I even have a relevant drawing to post.  tweet!

"if i snapped a photo of you every time you smiled, i would end up with a lot of useless, blurry photos"

Sometimes my mailbox is a day-brightener.  Every so often I remember the #1 perk of making & trading zines, and that is getting to read other people's.  A girl named Keet sends me her creations every so often and every time it's like a fresh breeze, xeroxed cheesy dancing kinda smile-making stuff.  This most recent one came with robot postcards, even!  And the book is little thoughts and twisty snippets of musings on life, I quite love it ---

To get yrs, and ask her for anything else she's done cause it's all awesome I assure you:  NERDTURD@Gmail.com will set you right.

oh I've been working on the silk road...

I'm still alive!  I've been busy with the end of semester, working on a few larger paintings for class, and hoping that I manage to step away from the brushes long enough for things to dry so I can take them into school without smudging them all over.  Lately it's all been about colour and fluidity... and big dots.  And wishing I had more tubes to choose from.  This summer I'm taking another painting course though, meaning a lot of focused attention and hopefully some splurges at the art store.  New brushes and solvents and surfaces, oh my!  Who needs a vacation when you can build worlds at the end of your bed/studio? :D (I'm only half joking!).  I can always do Asia after school (and that way I don't have to come back if I don't want to...)

So you probably also noticed that's a self portrait up there.  Or, um... if you've ever seen me, you'd know that's my funny face.  Appropriately sitting on my pirate lunchbox canvas perch (!) anyway, I needed to make a new one after destroying the last one in my first public performance two weeks ago.  The project was a combination "destroy something you love" and healing piece that involved Javanese gamelan music, an ancient television set, a huge pair of scissors and a bucket of white housepaint called "Moonlight".  It went so powerfully, even if the documentation video ended up being pitch black, *sob*.  Maybe I'll post it anyway, but it's really really lame and all you can see is a fuzzy blue screen and my arms flailing around.  Ah well, such is life.  I'll just have to be brave and attempt another performance, maybe this one with a light source around?  ha.

Here's also a sneak look at the kind of work I'm doing right now.  Again, very colour based...

It's very much not finished, but it's close, and my vision in pigment is starting to speak the same language as my drawings, which I'm happy about.  I'm even kind of pleased about the big blank bare canvas spots... don't ask me why.  If I had to speak inspiration... I'm waist-deep in Chinese philosophy right now, which was almost certainly a subconscious force here.  The whole Jade thing it's got going on, as well as rather perfectly exemplifying the Neo-Confucian concept of Li, which is "the underlying intelligence and order of nature as reflected in its organic forms", as quoted from Wiki.  

It's really astonishing actually, how the world orders itself into an awkward & pure perfection. The other day I found myself staring at the folds of my headband hanging off the radiator in the bathroom, remembering the dark shape and feeling almost as if I'd seen it before.  Or drawn it before.  And I probably had.  Which makes me wonder about chaos and how much our surroundings are shaped by the physical way we interact with them, and how much by our perception of it all.  Like, when I toss a book on my bed... does it land in a particularly Elizabeth sort of way, and I'm inclined to say yes?  And in that case... is making oatmeal or catching the bus art?  Holding a pencil or a lover is the same?  And when I see a book that someone else has tossed upon their bed, do I mentally alter the angle and colour to fit into what I've deemed aesthetically comfortable to MY reality?  If it doesn't, what happens then?  Who designates this Li stuff, anyway? !!

haha, okay, I shut up now. :DDDD

*doodles*