We have a map of the piano

This is from way at the beginning of summer

My mother had an old broken piano that came with her house. We couldn't get rid of it, so we explored it instead.

The initial plan was to dismantle it completely, but we hit a point where we couldn't get much further without brute force, didn't have enough muscle, and had to call in the cavalry.

All that's left now are a couple strings and a bar I took for souvenirs, the rest is in a scrap yard somewhere.

Occupying my time

Painting painting painting.
I'm pretending this is done but honestly it really really isn't - I'm just tired of working on it. It's sort of funny how I get to that state, and I might not even see anything wrong with it until I decide to share it. About the moment I look at the photographs I've taken a whole bunch of things jump out at me... eh, we'll see, a revision of this might end up here later.

Starbucks

Trying to keep busy and keep on with drawing, so I've been spending a couple hours every day in starbucks (weekdays at least) drawing strangers. Some results (most recent at the bottom):

I've done some more paintings and things that I'll probably be uploading sometime over the next couple days... I know you (the audience that essentially comes down to myself, family and maybe a few friends when you boil all the imagination off of it) probably have much better and more important things to look forwards to in your life, but the inherent egomania that comes with writing this sort of thing (LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT WHAT I DRAW!) sort of infects, and I feel compelled to make announcements about future things that I will do and post... man I feel lame...

Your Children

Summer so far...

So I've been trying to keep busy over the summer...

Painted a Cyberman for Carina's birthday...

That and I've done a number of self portraits, that number being 3 so far. This is the second of the bunch, I might post the third later, but the first is just... well... clearly the first? Going to see how far I take this, how competent I manage to get...


That's all for now.

Tying up loose ends...

Right then, so here we have the last assignment of my sophomore Illustration class. The assignment was to do an editorial piece about phosphate mining. We were assigned a lot of reading on the topic and then set loose. Honestly there were a lot of things that I could have made an image about, but in the end I settled on phosphogypsum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum ) and all that.

I had such a good time doing the 3d stuff for my last assignment that I figured I'd give it another go, and there's the result. A step up but definitely still learning. This time I didn't use as much sculpey, it's mostly cell phone pieces, a broken RF switch, paper mache and wire.

Also, the lighting set up I made was pretty ridiculous, so I figured I would share that too. That's outside in my backyard by the way.

And on a final note, I put together a website (as an assignment for my graphic design class) and I think it turned out pretty neat. Some of the stuff on there is just placeholder (see bio + portrait of the artist), it's not really complete in the sense that it's something I would send to someone I wanted to show myself off to, but I'm happy with the tricks and whatnot I learned doing it (translation: Thanks for showing me around Carina).

That website is here

That's all for now. One more assignment by 4:00 tomorrow and a test. The marathon is almost over.

More heads...

You know what they say about practice...

nowhere near perfect yet, but I'm making ground.

Attempt No 3:

So this one is starting to get towards a likeness, but still quite a bit off. Some features remain generic while others take on the characteristics of the model. I did this in a combination (about 50/50 mixture) of super sculpey and super sculpey firm (the grey and the flesh colored). A step forwards but still not there yet...

If you know the Ringling models, this is Sarah, by the way.

Attempt No. 04:

The closest I've gotten so far, right here, though, after a certain point I just sort of veered off in another direction. It started out looking quite a bit like the model (Allison) but right around when I put the eyes in the sockets and started putting the meat and eyelids on around them I noticed the eyeballs I had made were very much too small... and she started to look like a deranged Asian woman. Since it still looked quite a bit more like a real human being than any of my previous attempts I just sort of ran with it (though I mostly ditched the deranged part).

Anyway, that's how that goes, more to come most likely.