Not Stella

Saturday I went to Ann Arbor with some friends to see Stella


EXCEPT I didn't buy a ticket online and we got there too late and I stood in line and then they were sold out. So everyone I came with, plus my 2 roomates who came seperately, all saw Stella, and I walked sadly away into the snow and found a coffee shop


and I was really crabby and I ordered a cup of tea but there were so many kinds and I had an actual snarl on my face when I said please just give me the plain one and I feel really bad because the barista didn't deserve a mean customer just because I didn't buy my ticket with everyone else.

Anyway I just drew pictures of strangers for 2 hours and most of them caught me spying on them but I was too crabby to care.

blog

Just because I'm an American now doesn't mean I should have stopped posting in this crummy blog.

I'm going to try to be dedicated. We're making all of the zodiac signs in my Illustrator class, and we have to learn all the different techniques so some of them look terrible but some I like a lot. Here are some:

Capricron


Pisces


Leo

If I knew how to dance I'd get so many more dates.

Someone's Mom at Speakers Corner.

Ghosts with low self-esteem, and a dating advice monster.

Ooooooooohhhh I'm a ghooooostttttt!


Some people are lonely.

I saw this guy in Sainsbury's trying to decide if 47p ketchup is a good idea. 47p ketchup is always a good idea.



The only other thing he bought was a half dozen donuts.

Speakers Corner

"Are you drawing these guys?"
"Yeah."
"You should probably just draw them all with penises for heads."

Here's some sketchbook pages from when I was a vagrant in Europe.

Time saver society

Our task is to create a new society. Could they even give us a more daunting task. At first I was mega pissed about it, because I've pretty much already come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to save the world.

But now I'm getting excited about the project; it's less of the hippy clusterfuck I initially thought it was going to be. I think it's important to be aware at the ways in which we do exist as a society, and importantly, how we perpetuate the ideolology of that society. Since a society only exists because the members of the society continually agree to be in it, and follow the rules that allow us to interact, spreading an ethos is a necessary part of the system.

I think we were discussing along these lines when Hamburger University came up.

It's McDonald's school for training management. The McDonald's way. This is so utterly beautiful and hilarious to me. It's so perfect. I never even thought about the possibility of this existing, but now that I know about it, it's like of course how could it NOT exist. It makes me want to salute a flag or something. My country, tis of thee.

Photo Booth, you guys. I always thought the effects portion of this application was totally stupid, but lately I've become OBSESSED. Look all these great people I can make out of my face!

No talking in the library!!


I'm important!

Raaah giraffe!

I have a huge file of these. It's retarded.

Whatever!

I'm supposed to be building a primordial soup body suit instead of this. I went to a charity shop today to get some inspiration, but instead I just bought a heavily sequined belt for me to wear when I dance in front of the mirror without a shirt on.

I have a few ideas though. Tomorrow I'm going to go dumpster diving.

I've been trying to get back into painting. Last semester I pretty much I forgot how to paint for a few months, and it was pretty much a huge crisis, and suddenly color was just utterly baffling to me. But by the end of the semester I had just about figured things out again.


3 hour class study

But then it was winter break and then I moved to London and then I haven't really painted much since December. So I'm trying to get back into it, and so for an exercise I took some doodles I've done on the tube...

this nice lady

this weird guy


and tried to paint them, attempting to create form while preserving the quality of the drawing.





I don't really know how I feel about them. I feel like I've lost some of the freshness that I struggled to find last semester. This might be because I am using acrylic and not oil. Or I am just reverting to old habits. I have to keep reminding myself to keep my head in the game and better shapes with each stroke instead of needling. Not sure if I want to pursue this style of working. I love the look of painted illustration with stylized form, but I find it really difficult.



In other news, the battle in our kitchen is reaching new heights of passive aggression.

THINGS THAT ARE INPIRING ME

This is a Joe Frank Radio piece, a selection from Black Hole produced for The Other Side in 2001 with Tim Jerome. It's probably not actually legal for me to put this on here, but I got it from the free podcast so whatever.

boomp3.com
It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in my life.

Also I really love the stop motion and editing in the Road to Nowhere video by the Talking Heads. Especially the epic scene with David Byrne at 2:55.


The Talking Heads all went to RISD, so that's pretty sweet. My dad used them in a pep talk he gave me one time about how going to art school opens a bunch of doors and you're not limited to exactly what you go to school for.

Here's a part from my song project.