The Value of Stress

Our last assignment was to find a b&w photo, put a grid on it, put a grid on a blank piece of paper and recreate the original b&w photo with cut out pieces from other b&w magazine photos.

Found this nice one of... Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, I think?

UGHHHHHHHHHHH Looking back on it, I'd really have to say that this assignment stressed me out more than any other assignment I've ever done. Even the paintings.

1. I mostly LOATHE arts and crafts. I can draw, paint, play piano, whatever... but when it comes to cutting things and glueing them... DEATHHHHHHH
2. I worked on these straight through two class periods. That's about 4-6 hours of cutting these tiny pieces to paste them into a 9x12 image without talking to anyone and being really frustrated at glue and scissors and keeping track of value tones and little pieces of paper and FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Yeah, I know. I'm just a big drama queen. Complaining is how I get stress relief, alright? Cut me some slack. No pun intended lol :3

HOWEVER, I must admit that as cruel and sadistic an assignment this was, it was good for patience, detail, and... well... looking at it now, maybe not so much it's intended purpose for valuing value. @_@;;

Next assignment is a freeform self-portrait or self-expression mixed media piece. Need to get ahold of a clean TBell wrapper... HMMMM

ALSO: Living on your own is really expensive. Holy crap.

ALSO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wLWhSZ1Uvo Detektivbyrån is this AMAZING band that I was just introduced to by one of my Asian twins, Janelle. Check out that entire playlist. All those bands are soooo goooooddd! Very calm, indie, european, and quirky. Something you'd hear in.... maybe... Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind... or some other indie movie. You know. DEFINITELY RECOMMENDED!!!!!

Copic Portraits

Random spurt of copic marker portraits. Need a bigger scanner. No space. Bullocks.

They got progressively worse as my attention span began to wane.

Yep.

The Three Fates

At least, I think these are the three fates.

I'm currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Almost done and I still like it. Has a lot of references to Greek mythology and the Odyssey and such... perhaps direct reference to the Odyssey... although, I can't remember much of the story. It is one of the upcoming books on my reading list. And then I will reread American Gods. Hoorah!

AT ANY RATE, I drew the picture above because that is what I saw when I read that part of the book [do read it, please, on my recommendation, even though I don't have much backup to support me as a good person to get recommendations from].

On Reading

It is one thing to wish I read more books... but another to wish I had the attention span to read more books. I love love love reading, but it seems these days I find myself unable to continue reading for long periods of time... even if I want to read more. I don't know. ADD perhaps.

But truly I blame the Internet. What an addiction. It draws me. Compels me. Even if I just want to write down my thoughts... I have the need to publish them. Not that anyone cares, but there is always that small romantic idea that someone out there will stumble upon my thoughts and make good use of them. Hm?

Tessellation Assignment

I've only now come to realize that tessellation is pretty much the foundation of the creative vision I want to promote in my lifetime. And I hate tessellation. Balls. What I want to promote is seeing images within ordinary shapes or objects that you wouldn't ordinarily think to see anything interesting in.

I did a few quick sketches to see if there were any interesting designs I could get... Got lucky and the second one was a whale that formed the shape of a boat [although I really should've paid more attention to detail because it's difficult to see that they are boats/submarines. Perhaps if I had added some foamy spew to the top of the whale, the boat would've been more obvious. Maybe it would've had a smoke cloud, too.].

The purpose of this assignment is to draw something, put it into a pattern, and fill the negative spaces this pattern forms with some other image. See Escher's stuff for some amazingly detailed and intelligent examples.

At any rate, I hate tessellation because it calls for exactness and precision that would be so much easier on a computer. It calls for patience. Let me put it like this, after tracing the first row of whales, I wanted to die. lol

A Gross Thought

So it seems that every time my fat, white male ass feels the need to poop, I sit down and then I don't feel like pooping anymore. I'm thinking, what's the deal with that?

Well, I came up with some theories.

1. Perhaps my butt and the toilet have become best of friends, therefore stopping my butt from performing an atrocity of an uncalled for water sport unto its flushing fiend friend.

2. Or maybe pooping is like the french kissing of the disgusting fecal-to-porcelain world. Then that would imply that my butt and the toilet are definitely not in a romantic relationship. Just best friends. Or worst enemies. Isn't that weird how you can substitute one for the other so easily in this peculiar situation?

3. More scientifically, maybe the height at which the toilet is at somehow comforts or discomforts my bowels so much to the point that my butt just doesn't want to do anything but sit there.

And that's all for that.

Here is a screenshot from my favorite episode thus far of Spaced. For the lulz.

:3

So like... this alien that raised me in the Australian wilderness is really upset that I say "I" a lot on my blog, therefore revealing my true identity. It gave me some pretty valid guidance on how I should change my ways.

The secret is that since you never know who is stalking you on the Internet, since you can never believe anything on the Internet [which is a subset of real life; something along the lines of "virtual reality"], and since you can never trust anyone [not even your parents probably], you ALSO have to lie on the Internet! 

You must conform and contribute to all fallacies and falsities! True, it may be at the point where you can't tell the difference between TRUE and FALSE, TROLL and... LOL? Really, even if you tell the truth at this point, everyone will think you're lying. REGARDLESS, you must lie. Do it in real life, too, so that no one can ever figure out your weaknesses and who you really are. SO THAT NOTHING CAN HARM YOU because, as we all know, having no identity means you can be a high-skilled government assassin and BLOW. SHIT. UP. 

This is my contribution to the Internetz.

:3

Also, new layout because blogger updated their generic design templates. fart.

Also, fyi, I want to be a children's book illustrator. Perfect, I know. :3

Thought to Speak

A thought before bed: When I think in my mind, sentences begin before other sentences end. By the time I am done by the first sentence, multiple sentences have already started or have already ended.

Perhaps this is the first step to understand why I blank so much when I'm talking.

That's why I communication lack proper.

Today's Class Society

I don't know if I brag a lot about my art because... iono, there's not much to brag about, but I have to sound confident or else no one will have confidence in my art... if that makes any sense. And I don't consider having a website dedicated to my own art bragging... it's marketing. lol Which, I suppose in some sense, is a form of bragging. But I have to put myself out there somehow or die, right?

Two girls sitting in front of me. I hate those chairs. They are stupid designs and not much of an improvement from the regular stool.

Our assignment was to draw 21 thumbnails [3"x3" or so] consisting of a mixture of abstract, figure, and landscape with the seven principles of design [harmony, balance, variety, etc.]. 

Then we had to choose one to develop into a 9"x12" image consisting of all the principles of design. 

My image got cut off slightly [there's more to that IV bag at the top left, although not much to care for] in the scan, but I'm pretty satisfied with it for the time I spent on it [about 1.5 hours]. The idea has been floating around in my head for a few days. My friend works with a bunch of nurses that always seem to be doing things wrong or not caring to do things right, and we were talking about nursing homes a while back... and how old people always go to nursing homes to die. Because you've pretty much given up at that point. No one cares about you, or at least they don't have the time or money to do so. It's America. It's fast-paced, impersonal, and selfish. What can you expect? Anyway, that's that.

And then the second part of the assignment was to take a 4.5"x6" piece of the previous image and blow it up into a 9"x12" image. Personally, I thought this was pointless, but whatever. It's supposed to widen your capacity for creativity. 

The Light Shape Project

It all started when I was waiting in my car for a friend who was running late. Twas in the evening and I was listening to music in my car. Got bored, started taking photos with my camera phone of the glowing light emanating from my car radio. 

HENCE 31 images [I will refer to them as Light Shape images] similar to the one below [I just moved the camera around whilst taking the photo] that I will use to inspire new drawings/paintings. 

This is #1. I rotated it [although this time I forgot to flip it as well] in order to see it from different viewpoints. Got about 33 small thumbnails of different ways to see this image. The main reason for this project is that I'm bossy and I always want people to see the world like I do. lol But really, I see images, characters, faces, all sorts of things in... everything. Carpets, shadows, textures, food, abstractions, etc. Shit, and I don't even do drugs. 

Thumbnails

More thumbnails, plus some larger versions of some concepts I got from the Light Shape image. 

Ultimately, I decided to do an ambiguous painting of some adorable excited beavers with one left out. I was thinking of putting him on the other side so that you could see his expression, but I want to leave his feelings up to the viewer. Maybe he's pretentious, maybe he's really sad that he's not part of that crowd, maybe he's plotting murder. I don't know. Do you?

At any rate, this painting will be one of many projects I have over the summer. BUT FIRST, I have to paint a friend's shoes with an Irish theme. Thinking it's gonna be a lot of shamrocks/clovers with harp coins on fallen tree trunks. 

Robot Science Fanart

Starting to get productive here. 

Most of my drawings are concepts more than anything finished... sigh. But I liked this idea. The turntables are the sun and the moon.


Fanart for my electronic musical friend, Charlie. Download his two albums for free here. 

Portrait of a Scientist

Iono, I was doing some conceptual sketches for that whole schizophrenia thing from last night, and then I figured I should draw something that is somewhat worth posting. After I drew it, it sort of reminded me of Jekyll and Hyde. Yup.


As for the concept sketches, I thought it would be neat to do a series of childhood imagination vs. adult hallucination/schizophrenia. I've got a whole file of these random ideas and have yet to do anything with them. 

THE FUTURE

Pretty sure that I'm gonna end up schizophrenic later on in life. 


1. I already half-believe scenarios I make up in my mind on the basis that at any moment in time, I could be living in an alternate reality. I really never should've read the Brain in a Vat theory, or watched the Matrix for that matter. 
2. A lot of old people get Alzheimer's, which means I will probably forget that I am making up scenarios. 
3. Therefore, I will be schizophrenic and not know what is real anymore. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!


The end.

Scanner/Printer Set Up Hooray

I've always been afraid of color because I've never been very good with it. I'm still terrible with it. I wanted to intermix colors in this, but I didn't. They're all separate except in the sky, where the only differences are orange, red orange, and red.  Boo. I did, however, enjoy the minor experimentation with line texture.

Wellp.

Same as the above, but I accidentally moved it while scanning and I thought it had an interesting effect. Keep this in mind if you ever want to do scanner art.

Iono. I was trying to figure out how to mix colors within skin tones and what sort of depth each color gives... but I didn't find out very much. Red brings forward, blue pushes back... what does green do?

Poorly Drawn Eyebrows. Iono.


UGH I hate how cmdA and cmdQ are right next to each other. Another inconvenient Mac point. Thank goodness for autosave.

Uh...

Well, I still haven't gotten my printer/scanner set up yet. BUT I'M ALMOST KIND OF THERE. 

So here is a silly song I wrote yesterday instead.

Other than that, I started my summer art class yesterday. It's pretty much a beginning drawing class. And oh my FFFFFFFF Everyone stereotypical is in that class. 


There's that young middle-high school Asian girl that is going to grow up to be that Asian woman in my accounting classes that asks every single irrelevant question in the world repeatedly. 
The mother with 2 children that she doesn't even try to keep quiet. 
The old gent that always has this serene happy look to him, like, if his cheeks were rosy he'd be drunk. 
The guy that looks like Sylvester Stallone, but he seems pretty friendly.
The good looking but prolly douchey Volcom hipster.
The middle-old aged woman that tries to suck up to the professor but fails miserably, but still tries.
The guy with a turban that speaks perfect english, but doesn't know how to communicate whatsoever.
And then there's me, the typical poser punk hipster Asian that judges everyone else in the class. 


UGHHHHHHH Must change these mindsets. I guess it's better to try to get to know people rather than not... even if you end up with people you really don't want to know and you can't un-know. Ughhh I am such a lazy pos. 


My goal for this upcoming [academic] year is to return my mindset back to that of the beginning of college sophomore year. When I really wanted to break out of my anti-social box and I got to know all the residents in my building.