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Wednesday, November 29, 2006

boo hoo

this isn't exactly blogging anymore, it's a piss-and-moan-log, heretofore written and known as pamlogging.

i actually did lose it last night (good thing i just bought a ginormous box of tissues the other day), i actually did get the cap off the bottle, and i swallowed one-half a vicadin to "take the edge off".

i feel just as shitty today. don't feel like doing any art. went and got a haircut last night since i won't be able to hack at it myself for several weeks, and it looks just as bad today as it did yesterday. stupid fucking hairdressers.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

henpecking

yeah well never mind now, "how am I going to tie my shoes?" or "how are those dishes going to be washed?" (which is just what put me over the edge tonight after my friends dropped me off and made my bed for me - you/\'d think that NOT doing dishes would overjoy a body. no. i can't stand for dishes to pile up)

the burning "how am i gonna do___________one-handed??" is about that childproof cap on the bottle of Vicadin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

you can bet at this point that i will find a way.

ouch

Q: what happens when you combine good intentions, new shoes, unbrushed concrete and the element of surprise?

A: one-handed typing!

?!?

i slipped on stairs outside my apartment yesterday afternoon, broke my fall w/my left wrist and now it is broken in 3 places. just returning from a nice walkabout the neighborhood. not even a bike wreck. catscan tomorrow, follow-up w/specialist thurs for surgery recommendation or not...but odds are the wrist needs surgery.

well, fook.

wish i'd taken a picture before th splint went on. weirdo that i am. it was very definitely....memorably misshapen. no bones poking through, though. and hey yeah i'm not paralyzed and everything else feels surisingly hale!

well i'll keep y'all posted best i can....maybe i'll switc to video-only posts for awhile.....

Monday, November 27, 2006

Ginger Snacks

oo-er! and oog. not to mention yawn and but yay! Here's another little snack for y'all:




Again with the Sculpey from the score at work, and the wee man is from a coworker several years and a few jobs ago. A couple of them live on top of the fridge. This one took more'n three hours to put together - some of the best hours of me life. Gotta love noodling around, eh?? LIFE'S GOOD!!

**ps -- this looks SO much better if you view the file without the middleman (YouTube). So if you can handle it, and you wanna see better quality, I will email you the movie. It's 3.5MB**

**edit -- today I don't see any video. here's the link to YouTube:

ginger snacks

Saturday, November 25, 2006

fry.day.

Well howdy. Thanksgiving was a success. I'm ten pounds heavier, that is how I can tell.

Nah nah nah. I'm only about six pounds heavier. But it was a great group of folk and we laughed and ate for HOURS. This is Megan. She played with the clay while we played Cranium. This is her opera singer - I think it totally rocks!



And this is my art for friday night (it's friday night at apartment 24 - tomorrow is my saturday). I think.....yeah. It's my largest piece yet. It very nearly fills a standard letter-sized 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper (A4):



who is calling on the phone at this hour?? ciao!

Thursday, November 23, 2006

....did someone say Turkey Cake?!





I bought a new pen...I am really liking it!!!

Recipe for that sweet potato pie forthcoming......gotta jet now, go eat some turkey n stuff'n. Cheers!

gobble gobble

Here's the latest volley in the Cake Comic. You can see the first multi-panel sheet here and the next ones right here.




Oy! A very lot of fun we are!

And I woke up feeling like someone kicked me last night in my sleep. My ribs are all bruised-feeling. What is going on. It's not gonna stop me from going for a ride prior to dinner with friends. I'll need to move my bod and get the blood circulating, as well as rev up my appetite. I made a sweet potato pie for sharing (and this one here is for me):



Talk about goodness. Maple syrup, banana, and a whole orange (peel and all!) go into the mix here. It's surprisingly excellent. And everything turned out very well especially for the first pies of the season. I tend to eat this pie all winter long - it's great for breakfast with some walnuts and apple slices. It's a hearty pie, ain't nothing too Betty Crocker about it.

I need to go make a Turkey Cake.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Sunday, November 19, 2006

uninvisible

I'm up to my old wicked ways again.....staying up late in the interest of art. In this case, I've just made my first-ever stop-motion movie (short..clip...ditty thing). Halfway through, all the batteries in the place decided to go dead, so I cruised over to Target and bought more. Talk about convenience and luxury, you know?? God! I watched an excellent animated stop motion (well actually two) tonight on YouTube, and I got to thinking....it's time for me to sit down with iDVD and learn how to do this thing. So here you go:


ANGEL UNINVISIBLED





or go to YouTube and watch it there:

Angel

Now if I could only figure out how to un-pixelate it at YouTube. I saved a few different copies of this, at various qualities. This is the largest/best and it's still grainy....I wonder why? It's crystal clear on my desktop, hmmmm....what a load of fun evening this has been. I think I'm hooked. Just like I always knew I'd be.

JOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


***edited at 1 am - on a whim, I just visited the apple movie trailer site and on the front page is a movie called....Invisible. Didn't even know about it 'til this very last second. I'm so jacked in.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

orange crush

I'm listening to Chemical Brothers (and PeopleTree Sessions -- it's Milla Jovovitch doing some VERY hot stuff, betcha didn't know she did anything besides bad acting and modeling, right? well this album is the best thing since sliced bread, she croons and loops dubs and breathy lyrics all without sounding campy). And doing my usual thing, here:



it's ATC-sized. I was going for eraser-sized. Now I know how to fit my work for an ATC. Every time I've tried to do a small carving specifically for an ATC, I go way out of bounds. Here's the sketch, you can see the border for the eraser, and down below for the foot, about a million eraser marks. I worked on that foot for a long time!! The picture I was sketching from did not include feet - they're cut off. So I envisioned, and looked in the mirror, and persevered and finally - I just drew a foot and it looked right. COOOL!!!!!!!!! (you can also see my caricature feet below the sketch - har!)




Right then. Thom Yorke's The Eraser is up next. And maybe a movie - been waiting to see Nightwatch, a Russian flick about vampires and creatures of the night. Pretty sure. Wish there were more sci fi and vampire flicks around. With unscary dialogue and no frighteningly bad acting.

Friday, November 17, 2006

mojo pop art



So okay. You can say it. I didn't realize what/who this kinda resembles until I started uploading the photo of this print I just printed from a carving I just carved tonight....I guess I should start my own band now and spell my name in anagrams.

Cause you know if it rains tomorrow, I'll be...ridin' in the storm....

Well I just had to try my hand at something like this, really high contrast. So I used a photo of myself and then did the twitcherydoo in photoshop to get some nice shadows going. Then I did a sketch while I looked at the computer and listened to Dot Allison and also Golden Palominos. It's about 4x5".

And I even woke up before the alarm this morning. 7 o'clock! This despite all that up late sleep in way late business....and I was up late last night but I decided oh well fukkit ya know? I canNOT force myself to go to sleep if I am not tired. I can eat when I'm not hungry, but that's a horse of a different color.

People were messy today at work. The patrons, not the colleague folk. Sheesh, man. People ripping apart papers and leaving them gutted and strewn 'round the room, books and magazines everywhere, under chairs, piles of candy wrappers (no, there is a no food policy)...one guy was snoring pretty loud and I was putting new magazines away. My intention was to wake him up when I'd put the issue I was replacing into the folder, but by the time I'd clasped it shut and turned around, he was awake and looking around. I said, "oh good, you're awake, I was just about to wake you up."

"What? No, no I wasn't....I'm not sleeping."

"Yeah you were."

"No I wasn't!"

"You were snoring! Sorry man, no sleeping in the library!" and I walked off before he could argue any further with me. People were looking at me to see what I'd say. Like I'd agree with him. It was kinda funny though. Best way to wake someone up is to knock on the table they're drooling onto, or knock on the wide wooden chair arms. You don't wanna touch 'em. And you wanna be cool and be ready to step back in case they come to swingin'. Luckily that's never happened to me.

Time for me to brush teefs and get this body to bed.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

and then there was rain

The rain held back, but only for about ten minutes. It was perfect timing, in that way.....and about 25 minutes into my ride the wind really picked up and the rain went slantwise.

Huff, puff.

I'm sure glad I wasn't touring on my bike, and that my destination was close-by, and I could go in and dry off and get warm and fed. And I'm glad of gore-tex, too. (no I've never toured and really I don't know that I would relish that, unless I could stay at bed and breakfasts...not so tough after all, eh?)

I'm mad about Stripgenerator. I've made two zines from the stuff I've done over there. Brings out the salty potty-mouthed sailor in me, as well as the mischievious little shit. Here's the cover and backside of issue 2, which I hand-illustrated. Inside are the comic strips.





Bear in mind, of course, that these are raw. Pasted up, not copied, and pictures, not scans. But - fun! Check out that site and let me know if you make a strip so's I can go gawk at it, mmmkay?

The backside illo is from my bike ride on monday. It was a total soaker. But I did see this guy riding in the opposite direction who looked happy enough, certainly not dismal, and his face was markedly frog-like. Yeah!

And who the hell is using their circular saw at this hour?? It's 11:30 in the post-mortem! If it's the next door neighbors, the ones who bake cakes and make their own seven-tiered cake stands, I can forgive. But only just. I mean come on! Ah well, the traffic going by is louder. People! Get on your bikes!!

hump day






More cake! You can see what Haddock sent recently here and also over here!.

Well then. It's almost one o'clock and I need to get my butt in gear. Not feeling as itchy and angsty today, so okay, kind of a relief. Interested in what comes next again instead of dreading some unknown weird thing. Panic attacks must be absolutely horrible. I think I had a prolonged low grade/petit mal panic attack, by no means debilitating but definitely put a dent in my enthusiasm. Maybe the rain will even hold back until after I bike in to work......!

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

today it's for now



I'm going somewhere, I know where I wanna go, but I'm expecting surprises and revolutions. All the hairs on the nape of my neck are standing on end, anticipating some potential bifurcation activity.

Actually I'm up against an edge and I'm facing a potential revolution right now. Am I going to meet the edge and work with it, or poke it in the eye with my Berol 2B drawing pencil?? I've arrived at a place where, if I want to be able to express myself artistically the way I envision, I need to do something different. And some of the different means putting in some serious figure-studying drawing time, and studying and drawing comics. Again and again and over and over and probably turning out a lot of shit and less focus on putting out one finished piece after another so quickly.

Extremely uncomfortable in here the last several days.

(do I really have the patience? the confidence in myself? the desire? to go futher/more/into/down/through?)

Who knows, I might just fall back into a rhythm where I stay with what I know and that will start being as exciting and fulfilling as it's been this past year. Or,

ON BEYOND INFINITY!!!

There is a small cake buffet next door if you care to click on over.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

night owling

Couple of smaller than regular postcard-sized doodles, and I drew with a gel ink pen on some cardstock, to encourage myself to just DRAW and discourage myself from being too careful and taking it all too seriously in a cramp-my-style-kind of way.





Now I know why I am having a sleepover with myself -- if I'm up 'til late, the street traffic and downstairs lady noise is finally over with for a few hours and I can finally enjoy some freakin' QUIET. I am eating slabs of bread off the loaf I just baked, and also eating a tootsie pop, and staying up WAY past my regular bedtime. I just may make pancakes in the morning and shuffle around in my jimjams until late afternoon, too!

Saturday, November 11, 2006

black hole

It's holiday here, so no work at the library for this girl. Cette fille is doing a bit of online 'shopping'. I wondered if I could obtain an inexpensive copy of Zoot Suite by the Langridge brothers over at eBay. Saw one for like...three bucks several weeks ago. No, no. Long gone. Everything else is ten dollars and media mail shipping at six plus dollars (the point of media mail is that it is cheaper, and from New York, for this size book, it would be about a dollar and a half - piss on these online seller prices then). So then I start looking for other Langridge gems and see Fred the Clown...and instead of shelling out some clams, I decide to double check our library collection and by jove we do have it (must be new - don't remember ever seeing it there). So I am doing the happy dance. And I start looking around at Amazon and seeing bunches of awesome graphic novels.

So I stumble upon Charles Burns' Black Hole, and a picture of one of his panels is included with the review and it goes a little something like this:



And I realize that the other night when I was experimenting with line for the comic jam that my hands (the right-hand hands) look like his drawings! Love that! Had never looked at Burns before.

I'm trying to figure out what I wanna do next in art. You know....last week was pretty boring. I was bored. Uninspired. Uninterested. Wrick says do what you love, therein you'll find the excitement. Of course, I know that, he knows I know that, but I thought about it some more and even though last week I just wasn't in love with anything......I got Haddock's end of the comic, and I became excited about that and remembered again that ever since I was a kid I've been in love with comics. Doesn't mean I know a whole hell of a lot about them, or have studied, or even know many folks in the field (through browsing their works). But...I've always wanted to be a cartoonist. Nowadays you've gotcher graphic novels. I love these mediums.

I don't care if I have to trace and copy to learn, and draw 'til my hand turns blue......and I can at least right now let go of any big expectations that I'll ever turn out anything I really like or need approval for (ha! ha! ha!). But I do notice that the more I draw, the more I like looking at different styles of drawing. I would always pass up the comics and graphic novels that looked scribbly ('unskilled'??!!). For aesthetics...I mean, I prefer Breathed's Opus, or Michael Manning, the disturbing but beautiful stuff.

I think I'm finding that beauty in scribbly lines now. I mean...okay, check this out. It's Matt Brinkman's whacky world. Click the Contents at the top to go to his text-only menu, or click Next to advance to the next panel. The more I look at his drawings the more I love it. And part of that is because since I've been drawing this year and trying to put it together and see how things are put together....I can appreciate the skill needed to convey something accurately in pictures and...it's difficult to capture things with minimal lines. Not that his sketches and panels are minimalistic. But if you look at this one:



Check out the shoes/feet on the guard. They are just lines, with nary a shadow or shading to suggest depth or roundness and yet....you know they're round because he's given you enough information in the right places for your brain to go, 'that is a three dimensional foot, all righty!'

I'm gonna go check out more stuff. And then draw some stuff. Anyone want to jam on a comic with me? We could send panels back and forth...it is this kind of stuff that fuels my imagination. One of the things that I feel as a stumbling block for me is...storytelling. I'm okay but not great at it. It's fun when there is someone else there to surprise you when you see what they've done in a panel, and then you take it somewhere else.

Oh and by the way...WEEDS is a killer chronic show. It's fookin' hilarious.

Friday, November 10, 2006

alpha beta

Well, no I haven't switched over yet. Have you? If so, whaddya think?

After a week-long slump, I finally felt enthusiastic about doing some art. Here's page two of the comic jam Haddock and I are volleying back and forth. You can view the first page this-a-way.




And I am also reading Adrian Tomine's 32 Stories - The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics. Yeah! He's quite good, and I'm laughing my arse off.

Tonight I took myself out to Sweet Life, which is our Patisserie. You walk in and there is the long case of baked confections and the like, and you feel like the kid in the candy store because, uh....you are....and they make everything from scratch (natch). I haven't gone out for anything to eat since um...August I think. So really was a treat to be served up a scrumptious piece of pie (we are NOT talking your run of the mill diner pie, although they DO have their place). I went after work, and I hung out at work for about three hours past my shift, so I could copy fold staple the ZINE!! YES!!!

And then I rewarded myself with pie. And then I sat and read Optic Nerve, and since I already have a fondness for things Optic/al and Nervey (yes, this time, I need to post pictures -- what good is that blog just sitting there without pictures, eh? fook!), I really sat down with it and god is it good. I could learn a lot from this guy. And I laughed aloud in lots of places.

Now, I'm going to brew up a nice hot toddy (well, an alcohol-less version, and also without the toddy...what the hell IS a hot toddy? I'm making Inka with almond milk and honey, that is my hot toddy) and watch WEEDS. I keep hearing people sing praises, and I think I am now about ready to tackle another series, since I am starting to come down off the high of Six Feet Under. Takes awhile to digest and recouperate.

ta

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

love it don't leave it



I'm listening to Karen Black's I Want a Lip. What a great voice. Song. Yeah yeah yeah....

Finally got our rains! I was drenched by the time I arrived home this afternoon. The power went out, so rather than sitting here in dimness, I went for a bike ride. Even my gore-tex was soaked through in places. Yerg. But, not really windy, and definitely not chilly, so really it's quite clement. It's the freezing rain that goes to the bone baby.

Love your inner gollum folks. I'm sending you a postcard to remind you.

And do try some magic cake. But don't let me unduly influence you.

***editing at 11***

okay all I see is that stupid half smile on gollumn's face now. What the hell was I doing with that?? Did gollum force me to make him look like that? Little fucker.

***editing at 11:02pm***

He made me spell his name like collumn, too. Go away and obsess about something shiny, why don't you??

Monday, November 06, 2006

happy hallowe'en...aftermath



squee.

This is what kind of day I'm in. And this is how I am doing it.

You Are a Henna Gaijin!

You're not Japanese, but you wish you were!
You can use chopsticks with your eyes closed, and you've memorized hundreds of Kanji.
You even answer your phone "moshi moshi."
While the number of anime videos you've seen is way higher than the number of dates you've been on, there's hope.
Play the sexy, mysterous gaijin, and you'll have plenty of Japanese meat.

Friday, November 03, 2006

put some clothes on



This drawn from Interview magazine in 2000, a fashion spread done in the spirit and memory of Kiki (Alice Prin), "The Queen of Montparnasse" - Paris in the earlier 1900s, the movers and shakers of the art world, and she a friend and lover to many of them (or, at least a nude model!). Also an actress, singer and painter in her own right. Audacious and well-loved. I sketched this out on lunch yesterday.

And here, a little eraser-carving I just did tonight, after returning home from work and then a side-trip with Jacque to DIVA (downtown initiative for the visual arts), where a friend opened his own show. Nice work there, Mr. DeLaittre - female nudes in hard pastel and watercolor washes. Another friend of Jacque's was there and said his friend, a sculptor, could not seem to sell any of her nudes. But then she carved a bit of clothing on to her ladies, and they sold just fine. Wot?! That's just weird. I don't understand.





'Dernier'

Less than one inch by less than two and a half inches.

There was bread, wine, cheese and other assorted goodies galore, too. My kind of gathering.

Josie walked up the stairs to the deck (all six of them!) all by her very own self this afternoon! Jacque told me this and this is very very good. She's hoping Josie can go for regular (although short) walks soon too. Yip!

Help yourself to some BUSHIDO CAKE!!

Thursday, November 02, 2006

gostopgo



Another Butoh, and another gel pen ATC. (measures 2.5" x 3.5" for the uninitiated)

Another Egon Schiele book arrived on the holds shelf for me yesterday. It's a beaut. That man inspires, what a way with lines he has. Drawing is such an interesting exercise. Tonight I remembered in words what infuses something with life, and it is (at least for me) feeling the way as much as it is seeing technically where everything needs to go to make it come together in a way that's correct. I want to draw like Egon, and for that, I need to keep practicing. I think it's needful, for reasons manifold, but I really think that in order to reconstruct the human figure (or any figure) you need to be able to break it down into the correct parts first and be real familiar with how everything works together........then your re-interpretation packs that much more punch, and you can really say what you want to say. I mean me, but - you know?

It's another one of those paradoxes - a sort of control married and mingled with a sense of abandon. Maybe they hand off the torch to one another in rapid succession. The more I live the more I think it's all about holding on and letting go, the in and out, oh....never mind, I'm getting all zen on my own ass and if I try to think about it too much more, I'll get constipated.

g'night!

babypoundcake