Summer is the season of blogging!

I camwhored (with my cell phone cam) a bunch of pictures I did in art class the past year! Whoohoo! The pictures are all very bad because I couldn't find a real camera and I am too lazy to fix them up in Photoshop.

This guy was a big ass watercolor, forgot the exact dimensions. I started drawing these weird guys in my sketchbook after seeing that dance group at the Cerritos Performing Arts Center with AP Physics. This is called The Cave.
A detail shot of the bugger in front's face!
And the little babies clinging to the parental figure in the back...

This was my first concept doodle, done right after seeing the physics dance thingy.
A study practicing in watercolor. The words say something like 'Shield it with your body, offer it each phantom crumb." It's a quote from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the only book of his I can get through it seems.This was the more developed sketch for the final. Oh, the background formation was inspired by plant cells from AP Bio! Schlerenchyma something... I forgot it already. The actual cave opening was inspired by stomata guard cells.


This next guy is called Crocodile Tears. It was my first piece where I used sewing machine a crap of a lot. I ended up playing with the sewing machine a lot last year... it was frustrating because of my incredible ability to jack up all machines around me, yet fun!Oh, and this was inspired by the Brian Eno song "Sombre Reptiles" off the album Another Green World, one of my all-time favorite CDs.
Detail shot of a bit of shoreline. I first watercolored the croc, then collaged a bunch of tissue paper and paper towels and cardboard. Oh yeah, and cut out some random newspaper headlines from WHS Aspects (RIP, Aspects D':). Then I stitched with a sewing machine over top of the whole thing. It got stuck so many times on the cardboard and duct tape... it took forever to finish!

Detail of the bugger's face! Terrible photo... haha.

My original concept sketch! This was done with my nice felt-tip markers. My original idea was about pollution. But after I did the sewing and such, I didn't feel like throwing nasty black India ink all over my hard work... haha. Also, the goose/swan thing was taken out.

This is one of my favorites from this year! I originally had this idea of doing Athena pwning Arachne in the Greek myth about weaving and spiders, and it was going to be a mixed media piece (see sketch below,haha). But then I saw this magazine from Ms. Agrums where someone prepared a bunch of pieces of paper with all sorts of collage and stuff, then made them into sort of paper quilts or tapestries. So I decided to do that. Back to the sewing machine again! But first I splashed tempura, tissue paper, gold spray paint (left over from Contemporary Media 2nd film festival) and bits of old journal entries from Dalley's class on large sheets of construction paper. Then I cut out the little buggers into cool shapes and sewed them (no glue involved!) on a large white construction paper. Then it looked too crazy so I outlined in India ink. Go India ink!! Photos are terrible. :( The thing is too darn shiny to get a proper photo. Detail of Athena.
Yay the first concept sketches! As you can see, I originally planned for Athena to be a lot smaller and for the tapestry to depict scenes from Greek mythology. But I think it would have taken me a year to finish if I had tried that.
A sketchbook thing of Athena, with some tissue paper collage. Watercolor with some Pilot G-2 pen on top.
The next guy is called Everything Divides Us. It's an acrylic painting in three panels. It's based on Bleach! Haha, actually just the Persephone myth that Bleach kind of adapted with the whole Ulquiorra/Orihime thing. Ulquiorra is supposed to be Charon, the boatman who takes Orihime (obviously Persephone) to the underworld. I first painted the middle, then the Charon and the Persephone I rushed on the day of the art final. So not too happy with the last panel, but oh well.
A detail of the middle panel. I used some sparkly gold paint. heheh. I was always frustrated with the awkward posture of Charon/Ulquiorra. couldn't quite figure out how the neck/shoulder area should work.
The middle panel. I like how the colors in the background came out. The raft thing annoyed me to no end.
Detail of Persephone/Orihime. Her nose turned out dinky and too low. >_<
Detail of Charon/Ulquiorra. I actually like how he came out. I tried to conjure up Ulquiorra's beautiful nose...The original concept sketch. Actually, I only got the idea to do this piece after there was an awesome canvas sale at Tall Mouse. The 2 skinny pieces were like $3 and the middle one was like $5.

This next guy is a study for a larger acrylic piece, but I actually like the study more than the actual! It's called Sub-subterraneans, inspired by the David Bowie song Subterraneans off the album Low. I think it's rather cute.

This one is Subterraneans. I was pretty happy with it at the time, but the more I look, the more I don't like. If only I used more color... meh. And if only I actually understood human anatomy... lol.The concept sketch, which I actually prefer. I don't know why I couldn't get that diagonal in the final piece that's present here. The words around are lyrics from the song Subterraneans.

This is a random study of sewing machine. Based on Arachne turning into a spider. Watercolor with this cool netting stuff sewed to it. The actual thing is about the size of an index card.Mm, unhappy with this one. I'm not too good at oil paints. It's called The Man in his City or some nonsense like that. It's supposed to be Tyron Deteri, a villainous character from Parallax. He's chilling out in Mephis, his hometown. This started the I-cannot-paint-in-colors-other-than-blue-and-yellow phase.

This next guy is called Three-Headed Phoenix. It's a phoenix with three heads. I got a piece of pine plywood, watercolored on it, collaged tissue paper, outlined with India ink, glued on glass, then carved out bits with a wood cutting thing. I sold it to Mr. Z at Open House. I hate to brag, but it won 1st place at the District Art Show. For which I got $100, heheheheheeh.A detail of one of the heads. This is the girliest one.
So Mr. Z bought the above piece at Open House, but this lawyer alumnus guy wanted to buy it. But I already sold it to Mr. Z ahead of time, so he ended up commissioning me to do a "similar" piece. This one I'm ambivalent about. Took me forever. Looked a lot better in my head... oh well. Got an old flat drawer thing, cut out a bird shaped stencil and then gold-spray painted the bird, then tissue paper collaged for the tail. Then I burned all those stupid scales in and outlined the bugger. Then I stuck on the lame background. The glass bits were something of an afterthought, since it seemed sort of plain.

A detail of the tail which took me an unholy amount of time.

This wasn't done in art class, but with Comiclub! It was the Mighty Muggs thingy. I of course made a little Lanat. It's rather cute, I think. Though too bad it turned out so messy... Colored all with Sharpies.

The following is a work in progress. While watching the commentary of Jürgen Prochnow and Wolfgang Peterson and some guy who helped with the director's cut of Das Boot, I got the urge to sculpt a bust of the dashing captain in ancient Crayola AirDry Clay. I think it turned out pretty well considering I've never been in ceramics... haha. I plan to add watercolor to him when he dries.
As you can see, I postured him on top of The Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide.
He looks like Abraham Lincoln in this shot...
When I was cleaning the exacto knife I was using to carve stuff for this, I sliced my thumb open! Ouch! But it was worth it... was it?




The below are bonus pictures! I found an old folder of a bunch of scans of pictures from my childhood. My mom says I haven't improved in art since then, so please tell me that she is wrong...

Harry Potter! Note the charming spelling of "professors". I like Dumbledore's expression here... I think this is circa 3rd grade? Not sure.
Another picture from the same time era. This is Harry and Hermione on Buckbeak rescuing Sirius. Aww, if I had known then that Sirius would die, my 3rd grade heart would have cracked. :'(
Ahaha, this is Viktor Krum and Hermione at the Yule Ball with jealous Ron in the background. I had this thing for Viktor Krum back in the day, before they cast that bald guy as him in the movie. When I look at this now, I think, What a waste of Prismacolor pencils!
And this is from 1st grade! A watercolor of a horse. I based it off the cover of my copy of Black Beauty, except I made it brown.

My Current Direction in Life

...is to become a media-consuming recluse!!

I'll get the diary-type stuff out of the way first.
Graduation. I, like Caroline, don't want to spend too long talking about it. Except I was kind of disturbed that I didn't cry. I took a very awkward picture with the twins, who I never ever talked to at Whitney, on the urging of their parents who work at the same place as my mom. Besides that weird moment, it was nice. Thursday, after playing Sims 3 in solitude for the whole morning (yes I know I'm pathetic) was pleasantly interrupted by a surprise phone call from Caro. (To Caro: You never call me to invite me out on stuff! You should do it more often. Call my home line if I don't pick up my cell. Otherwise I'll develop an abandonment complex). Went to ChikFila, however you spell it, with Caro, Tanya, Jodie, Jonathan, Alex. Ate free chicken sandwich, then bought random crap at Borders'.
I aim to exercise at least one hour a day this summer! I must get up in the morning to jog in the park, otherwise it is too hot and I don't want sunburn. Let's see how long this attempt will last.

My other aim is become more cultured this summer. It's been a long time since I regularly used the library, and seems like a good time to start again. So many books and movies that I am expected to have read/seen but haven't! Oh, the shame.
Current list from Cerritos Library
Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Mushroom Hunter's Field Guide. (The last book I highly recommend you check out from the Cerritos Library. It has color photographs of like 4 million mushrooms. I saw it hanging out of one of the shelves and I just had to grab it.)

Currently reading Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The former is actually a lot more agreeable than I thought it would be. I used to have this cool comic-book adaptation of it that I read obsessively as a little kid, but I never got around to reading the actual book out of sheer intimidation. But after finishing Middlemarch, I got the guts to start. It's quite fascinating. All of the characters are assholes in some degree or another, but I can't help being interested in them nonetheless. The thing that annoys me the most about it is the stupid accent of Joseph, Heathcliff's servant dude. I have to read it out loud to try to understand it phoenetically.

Oh right, the other book I'm reading right now. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I sort of regret buying it. I blame the power of the ever-mighty coupon. It started off relatively strong and pretty cute, but the zombie schtick is too tacked on. It's a shame; I think it could have been really good, at least hilarious, if executed properly, but this is more like, oh, Elizabeth is pretty, and has good deadly arts skills. I swear, do a Ctrl+F for "deadly arts" in this book and you'll find at least 300 hits. The cover is awesome, though. Well, I'm only through about 100 pages. Here's hoping it will improve later on.
Anyway, sat through 8 hours of traffic school today. It was excruciating. The horror, the horror!, etc. Look! This is a very lame cell phone picture of my doodling with the nifty red/black changing pen I got.
yeah... you get the idea.
I suppose traffic school is supposed to be like purgatory, where your sins are cleansed/burned away with fire. The fire in this case was a series of increasingly painful DMV videos about stopping at stop signs. There was one interesting video at the end: almost too interesting actually. It was the Extreme! Driving! What (not) to do in various horrible situations that are likely to happen to you. After watching it, I didn't want to drive or be driven ever again for fear of being stuffed in my trunk, beaten with a baseball bat at an intersection, drowned in my own car, or crushing my skull on the dashboard. This feeling quickly subsided once I had to drive home, however.
Yeah guys... be careful when you drive. You don't want to go to traffic school...
Now I want to find the emergency trunk latch in my car.
I fear this post is so long it will never be read. But oh well! this is for ME anyway.


Finished watching Das Boot (Director's Cut) just 1.5 hours ago. I never thought that 3.5 hours of German submarine movie would become my favorite film ever, but hell. I'm really glad Mr. Z showed the first 1.5 hours to us in the last day of contemporary media, or I would never had heard of it.
There are movies where I watch them and I laugh, jump up and down, maybe even cry. If I like them maybe I'll watch the special features on the DVD and look up the actors to see if they've done anything else worth watching.
Then there are movies that bother me for days. These are the movies that I watch the director's commentary on. (Am I the only soul in the world who watches those things?) These movies I stupidly end up buying hard copies of off Amazon because online money doesn't feel like real money to me, which I'm loose enough with as it is.
I'm in danger of buying the 5-hour German miniseries version of Das Boot. Then watching the commentary for it. That's the kind of movie it is.
See, I have this stupid, annoying tendency of always falling in love (figuratively speaking) with at least one male character in each movie I watch. Often this character becomes the only reason I finish watching a mediocre or bad film. This character is usually pretty good-looking, although my standards are often strange/unpopular. It's a really annoying problem. I fangirl, then cringe at myself, then end up fangirling again anyway. Rinse and repeat this cycle. Hopefully I will grow out of this eventually.
But my hormonal teenage girl method of gauging a really good movie is, if this character was ugly, would I still like it?
I ended up "falling in love" with the captain in Das Boot. Just typing that made me want to bash my head on the desk. Even saying these things in the privacy of my own brain makes me want to gouge my own eyes out! But saying stuff on the Internet is always less embarrassing than saying it in your own head, right?
Anyways, I think even if the captain was hideous (well for all I know he is by most standards) I would have become obsessed with this film. It hit on so many levels: cerebral, artistic, guttural, etc.
I doubt anyone will actually watch this movie based on this rather vague recommendation, but I still don't want to give away any spoilers. So uh, spoilers below.
The ending felt like I was having my heart ripped in little pieces inside of me.
I wept! Like, I burst out into tears. Normally when I cry in movies the tears slowly well up and such, but no.
The really sad thing about the ending was that I kind of wanted it to happen so that the characters I ended up liking so much wouldn't have to face the truth of what Nazi Germany did back in the land war and such... but oh God! It sucked that they had to be Germans to begin with... but that's the point of the film actually. You end up not wanting the Allies to kill them, even though you wish the Axis were defeated.
/end spoilers
I was really uncomfortable going into the movie knowing it was about the Germans in WWII, hoping that it wouldn't be some Neo-Nazi romanticised drivel about U-boat warfare.
It wasn't.
It was good that the Germans weren't universally portrayed as Nazi villains. But it was also good that they weren't heroic figures either. I initially felt extremely guilty for liking the characters, knowing they were German soldiers, but the U-boat navy supposedly was the least Nazi part of the German military anyway. And the captain is pretty anti-Nazi, which made me feel less guilty for liking him. Politics are pretty muchabsent from the crews' daily lives of monotonous routine and boredom, punctuated briefly by episodes of terror.
ok, it's almost 2 and I'm incoherent now. stupid blogging. it was funner than i remembered it to be.

Anyone know anyone who could temporarily take care of a dog?

Anyone know anyone who could take care of my dog next year when my parents go on vacation? He is an 8 year old Golden Retriever, neutered, probably around 80-90 lbs. He is very sweet and clingy.
We don't want to send him to a dog hotel and get fleas or traumatized or something. We would be willing to pay a small sum...
This would probably be for late October 2009 and perhaps later vacation times as well (winter, spring, etc.)
Some pictures of him!

Middlemarch madness

I had been in something of a digital art rut recently, but Middlemarch inspired me to pick up my tablet pen once more!
These are all speed paints I did just this night.

"The Worst Kind of Virgin Sacrifice"
photoshop
time: 20 mins
explanation: Dorothea's fruitless labors in her disastrous marriage with Mr. Casaubon. The "worst kind of virgin sacrifice" is what Sir James Chettam calls her marriage, since she thinks she's devoting her life to contributing to his great work, The Key to All Mythology, except it's really not that great.
"Will Ladislaw"
photoshop
time: 15 mins
expl: A weird portrait of Will Ladislaw, inexplicably nude (or at least cravat-less). So not based on Rufus Sewell. Nevermind the heavily lidded jade green eyes and curly black hair ._.

"Dorothea Brooke"
Tegaki
time: 20 mins
expl: Ergh, don't like this one. First of my drawings tonight, though. Whenever I do these solid things, the contrast never comes out good enough. :/
"On the Steppes"
Photoshop
time: ~5-10 mins
Random blobular landscape. Looked a lot better in my head than on paper. Could be Dorothea and Will agonizingly, repressingly cavorting about, or Fred and Mary traversing the steppes of Middlemarch.
Well, that was fun!!! I'm far too lazy to create a real finished, polished piece at the moment. This graduation business is making me feel really apathetic and useless. But speed painting is less taxing, and it forces me to draw something.
It's quite remarkable that drawing got me out of my Sims 3 mode for today! The way I play Sims 3 is wasteful; I spend about 3/4 of my time playing on the character creation screen.
Upcoming... Middlemarch sims... I smell trouble.

Somebody else needs to read this book or watch this drama besides my mother, since I think she's tired of me ranting to her about it.