I guess I shouldn't have assumed I'd be ready to jump back into life just after the funeral. On top of it all I brought home some germs that rapidly devolved into being so sick I was pretty much non-functional the week after I got home. Even now I'm finishing up a course of antibiotics because it tried t turn into bronchitis.
Been drawing some, though, and pushing myself to get back into the normal rhythms of things. I'm still looking for work, but I also stumbled on what might be an excellent site for getting illustration work, so I'm scrambling to put together a few pieces for a portfolio that would be appropriate to what they look for there. Freelance is scary, but being jobless is scarier.
That said, updates here may be slow, and while on the one hand I'd meant for this blog to be devoted to the 365 project,
on the other hand it's all art so I may continue posting my other work in between proper entries. Click either of the images here to see them full size on DeviantArt, where I keep my regular work.
As a side note, I sometimes worry that my art is so eclectic that nobody will ever be able to see something I've done and know it's mine. I vary so wildly in style and medium, because the concept always comes first to me, and the style and medium are in service to the idea. I think some artists (most artists?) have a style, and all of their ideas naturally emerge through that style, so you can look at any piece they've done and identify it as theirs.
Maybe I'm caring too much about getting credit for my art? I hope that's not selfish of me. Possibly if I got more people willing to place value on my art by paying for it as work I'd feel validated or something. Possibly because I've been out of work so long, art is the only thing left that gives me a sense of accomplishment I feel I can measure my worth against. Probably I should finish this post now, and go make some more art.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
I will be gone for a week for my grandmother's funeral, and I'll try to get back to regular blogging after my return. Thanks to all who have the patience to still be watching this blog, and if you are, here's more filler art to tide you over.
Sorry for yet another pause in posting. There's not so good family stuff going on, and I've been... distracted. Anyways, I did get this done, so have it as filler art until I get the next 365 project up...
So I've been really struggling with this prompt, and even though I came up with a book to go with it, I just haven't had the energy to make something big. Yesterday involved running an outdoors table in 95-degree weather until seven at night, and by the time I came home I just wasn't even functional. I think Wednesdays I may have to give this blog a pass because I'm usually busy from the moment I get up until I'm so drained I just crash.
Today, I had less excuse. Thursday or Friday usually gets to be my goofing off day. So while I was thinking of the prompt, I didn't come up with an actual project...
There was a movie very loosely based off 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs', but I do mean very loosely. The original book comes off as an excuse, I think, to draw larger-than-life food showering down on townspeople. It's really about the illustrations, and what I've always remembered about it from my childhood was the last scene where there's a snowy hill with a setting sun that just might be mashed potatoes and butter sliding over the edge. I do own a copy of the book, we picked it up a few years ago at a yard sale or somewhere, because both I and my girlfriend remembered it from our childhood.
For a project, the only idea I came up with was to make a giant sushi roll or something, but I just don't have materials and time to make something that big, which I also just know I'd end up making complicated. What I did instead of working on a project was to have a friend over, watch 'Buckaroo Bonzai', and eat watermelon. We didn't just eat watermelon, though. We had an entire watermelon, given to us under protest by my girlfriend's father. We have no room in the fridge for an entire watermelon. It's big and unwieldy, and when our friend came over we offered it to him. He said he'd take it, but then somehow the conversation got around to cutting it open with a sword, and the next thing I knew he and my girlfriend were daring me to do it and wanted to film it.
I own several swords, including a claymore which is ridiculous because I'm not big enough to wield one effectively. I've taken a fair amount of fencing classes, although I stopped shy of expert level thanks to an unrelated-to-fencing knee injury. My friends and I used to spend a lot of time sword fighting with first wooden (not a good idea at all) and then PVC-pipe-and-foam boffer swords. I'm not an expert, but I'm relatively experienced with swords. I was open to the idea because I knew what I've got would go through a watermelon pretty easy, although apparently my girlfriend didn't realize that. So we overturned the garbage can out back, covered it with a clean garbage bag to keep the watermelon clean (which failed), and our friend took my camera. It was fun, and goofy, and we brushed the dirt off and ate watermelon after.
Tonight, while bemoaning my lack of a project, my girlfriend pointed out that cutting open a watermelon open with a sword probably counts as doing something in a much bigger than usual way, and with food even. I usually try to put more thought into my blog entries, but for tonight, I'm willing to call that good. Hope you enjoy watching it at least half as much as I enjoyed doing it.
The prompt to work with yarn pretty quickly led me to think of cats, possibly because any project involving yarn also involves keeping it away from our own.
About the cattiest book I know of is T.S. Eliot's 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats', and my copy is illustrated by Edward Gorey. Probably more people are familiar with this one from the Broadway musical, but it's really worth sitting down and reading the original poems. That's actually why I bought this little paperback of Amazon years ago, back in High School or College. There were a few versions available, but I couldn't pass up Gorey's illustrations.
I tried to capture the style in yarn, which sounded simple enough since there's a lot of attention to line, but it turns out yarn doesn't do well for details. Not standard black yarn, anyway. I drew a quick pencil sketch, and laid down glue over the lines section by section, letting it get a little tacky before I put the yarn down. It was all pretty quick and easy, but I lost the toes on the original drawing and decided whiskers would just clutter it up.
Maybe if I'd worked bigger, I could have gotten more details in.
I have to admit that sitting down and looking through the poems does tend to leave me humming the tunes from the musical, but I think they leave a lasting impression even without that. There's so many different cat personalities described, that we sometimes end up wondering which ones best fit our own cats. Also the poem on 'the Naming of Cats' amuses me, because I don't think I've ever had a cat that didn't name herself.
They also definitely do strange dances in the night, and who knows what all else. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard some bizarre noise downstairs, a crash or something else, in the middle of the night, and gone down to find nothing amiss and one of the cats sitting innocently in the middle of the floor, giving me a 'did you want something?' kind of look. It's pretty clear from the poems that T.S. Eliot personally knew at least a few cats.
I didn't technically create this project underwater, so I'm not sure if I quite met the spirit of the prompt, but for some reason the only idea I kept coming up with had to do with a children's book from the Serendipity series written by Stephen Cosgrove and illustrated by Robin James.The book I was thinking of is called 'Featherfin' and I know I had a copy when I was younger but it either didn't make the move across the country or is somewhere lost in the apartment. When I looked it up again the story itself came back to me, in which Featherfin (a fantasy eel with peacock feather designs) dreams about the big world above the water, all his (her?) elders say it's no place for an eel, but Featherfin goes anyway and almost asphyxiates on the beach before escaping back under the waves.
I'm not sure I really like the implications, but it's the illustrations that lingered in my mind. I suppose the message still makes it pretty appropriate for the prompt.
The underwater part of things is in the video below, but I made a little Featherfin eel puppet out of a few scraps of fabric and a wire. It took maybe half an hour to put together and half of that was cursing at the netting that's sandwiched between the green fabric because it would not hold still. I have my girlfriend to thank for the gorgeous green-gold metallic fabric, and the whole thing was done in a big fishbowl I've had set up but sans water, that I keep meaning to get a few fish for. Now that it's full of water maybe it would be less effort to get a couple fish than to drain it again... In the meantime, it makes a good theatre for eel puppetry.
