Art Dump

2 More in my Series of Personified Cigarette Brand Demons:
[click for larger images]





I bought two Moleskines yesterday. They're barely 3x5in at a whopping $10 per! But I figured I should get some while I had a few extra dollars before they are gone forever. And having a friend at the Art Center to help on discounts is a good incentive.

Ah yes, and I think I'm getting obsessed with Meso-American culture.

Observation

It is totally pointless to be a PetCo Pals member as a snake-owner. Mice never go on sale, and you can't choose what brand of mouse to buy.

Just finished this poster for tomorrow's class. So tired. No sleep in two nights. Must rest.



REVISION:


Now that I look at it... I like the text of the first more. I'll probably change that & reprint.

Pet Peeve #459

When photographers try to reproduce famous paintings with a "modern spin". Especially when it's done badly, and especially when the photographer relies on the merit of the original work to give the new shit quality, or context.

EXAMPLE:



INTO:



How can you even presume to capture all of the layers of that painting with a snapshot? How can you simplify Klimt's obsessive markmaking into a wallpaper pattern? How can you dumb his figures down to a mop-headed teenager in a smock? How can you not pay attention to the most simple picture plane aspects shared by painting & photography, so that there is no similarity in poise, mood, lighting, placement, delineation of space, shape, form, color, ANYTHING?

Art Dump

So Valentines Day has come & gone, and I got a manicure, pedicure, massage, steak dinner, bottle of table wine, and awesome Sci-Fi movie out of it all. What a darling boy I have, eh? All of my brilliant birthday gift ideas for Shea fell miserably through, so I ended up drawing him a caricature, like he had been whining at me to do. The angle of his head throws off the upwardly curled lip, so the smile I intended to balance out his wide eyes kindof disappeared... Or maybe I just think that, and it looks fine, and I should shut up so you think it looks good too...



Also, as of late, I have to say I'm still pretty excited by all the ideas I get these days for projects. The ideas I have are always stupid, or silly, or basically, not intended for a canvas or gallery, in the most blunt, stereotypical terms. It's as if finally taking a studio class that allows & even encourages silliness, stories, caricatures, and black ink has given me license to utilize them all again. Although I felt at the time that I was doing the right thing by challenging myself to draw naturalistically, I was bored to tears. It's really picturesque to think I came to art school to grow out of my comic book style of drawing, and have 4 semesters in, fallen right back into it, full-steam.

Anyway, I quite smoking this week, so I'm doing a cope piece. I'm attempting to personify individual cigarette brands into demons. I just finished the first last night, though I think I might be redoing him completely...



That's all, folks!

Pet Peeve #346:

People who come into the school computer lab, among several diligently working students, strictly to use the internet to check myspace and listen to music without headphones. Some kid just walked in here all huffy, sat down, loudly whispered FUCK a few times, finally settled himself, and has since played "Groove is in the Heart", "You Make Me Feel Like Dancin", and "The Best Things in Life Are Free". I guess this is his way of decompressing. How do some people seem to have absolutely no radar as to how fucking loud they are?

F - R - E - E
THAT SPELLS FREE
CREDIT REPORT DOT COM BABY

This is my favorite of the FreeCreditReport.com commercials. I was singing this particular jingle inanely all day at school last week, and someone asked what the name of that band was. I hadn't really thought of them being a band, but I think it was Derrick I was talking to that brought up the observation that it's the same couple of guys each commercial. I did a little research, and they are not a band.

The singer is a guy named Eric Violette, and he is a French actor. Here's his website: http://www.ericviolette.com/. The video on the front page has him, slightly pudgier, speaking in French about what seems to be a montage of his dramatic roles in low-budget soap operas. I wasn't sure if this was the guy or not, till I checked out his experiences and saw, Rôle principal in Free credit report, réalisateur Danny Leiner under the Publicité section.

Vertically Integrated Culturejamming

I just found this Amercian Apparel spoof. It's done so well! It has apparently been posted all over LA, recently.



Even better, though, was this Onion article: 14 American Apparel Models Freed

Octopus Ink or IBS?

4 panel Comic due today in class, far from completion:



I feel like this has become some odd parallel between octopi and people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or intense gastrointestinal problems. Poor lil' inker. I'll be posting the completed version sometime between now and Tuesday.

Ill-Fated

Alas, all of the doctors' diagnoses and recommendations and prescriptions came to a head this week. Being but eleven years old and having a man with cold hands prod your neck, take some blood, and conclude that you would be taking a pill every morning for the rest of your life to make up for your body's insuffiency is perhaps overwhelming, but manageable. Being nineteen and having a very obese but particularly intelligent man tell you that one pill a day is going to become closer to six... It's a bit frustrating. I hate it, but I can deal with it.

Here's me dealing with it:



And here is my lovely doctor:

Seven Deadly Sins

Assignment 2 for Illustrated Story was to create a narrative, again with no words, that alluded in some way to each of the seven deadly sins: sloth, lust, avarice, envy, gluttony, wrath, and vanity. While brainstorming, I dilluted the sins down to basic selfishness, neglect, and self-absorption. I figured if I had one person to embody each of the sins, they'd have a lot in common as far as guilt goes, and if they were for some reason all together in one room, it might be them dealing with it individually. From there, the dots connected, and I've sat in on enough NA meetings to accurately portray the scene. Here's the revised version, post-critique.