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