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| June is a month full of birthdays for me, including my own. I'll be twenty-six on the twenty-ninth. I feel a little old, but I'll deal.
Not the point of this blog today.
One of my friends had her birthday this past Sunday, and I always make artwork for the people that I love. It's two fold, I get to make something personal, and I get to give myself a little promotion my friends have guests over to their places and ask about it. It's about giving something to my friends, but if I can get a couple of commissions out of it then why not, right?
Well, Flo, as we call her loves the color blue, the sky, and the ocean. I wanted to create something that could be both sky and water, so here is the illustration. The line art as well as the final colored version.
You'll have to forgive the formatting. I'm not very good at working with embedding media on live journal. | |
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| I'm always on the look for black licorice. I don't know why it's so hard to find where I live, but you'd think that the anise reserves in Northeast Georgia ran dry or something. When I do find some I stock up. I cannot explain why I love traditional licorice, but its something that reminds me of the happy parts of my childhood. My mom used to bring it home from a local candy shop that made it from scratch, and it was probably the best candy I had ever had.
Twizzlers aren't nearly as good, but they are a quick and satisfying substitute. The local Dollar Tree has a few bags right now, so I'm stocking up. A friend found it today, and bought me a bag, and I'm so grateful to them. Now if I could just find some Fennel Seed candy I'd be in sweet stuff heaven. | |
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| There was this strange DSL outage that took out most of the state of GA the other day. Someone cut a fiber cable while repairing another problem, was what I understood the problem to be. Most people had their service back up within 4-6 hours, but there were others, like myself, who were without service for two days. I'd like to say that I am not obsessed with the internet, that I have a rich offline life. In many ways I do have a rich life, I live in a beautiful single family rental, that's surrounded by trees, and has it's own private access driveway. I have a library card, so I can get as many books as I care to read on a regular basis. I have two wonderful, beautiful dogs. I also have great friends, that I spend a lot of time with. The problem with all of this is that even while I was hanging out in my yard, enjoying these lovely early Summer days, reading Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, under the Snowball tree, with my little corgi cuddling up with me, all I could think about was the fact that I was bored. I couldn't check my e-mail, or facebook. I couldn't update the status of my DeviantArt account or check up with people on Gaia Online. I now realize that I am addicted, you might say, to the internet. I was disconnected from the world for two days. I was unable to make plans with my friends who don't have cellphones (yes there are still people that don't have them). We don't realize how much we rely on that electronic box that sits in our livingrooms and offices, until some guy at the local service provider cuts the wrong cable. I'd say that I'm going to try to kick this addiction, but I'm not. I like the connection to the world that it creates. It's my only luxury at the moment., and I simply don't want to give it up. ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- ---------------- New Project: I started a new project last week, and I never posted the images from it. I'm a huge fan of Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. It's one of those movies that's on my "secret" top ten list because everybody just looks at me like I'm a fool when I start talking about it being ahead of its time. Really, it was, 1967, and you have this sexually adventurous woman on screen, that was a big deal. So, I wanted to create a few illustrations based off the the landscapes and characters from the film. I only have the characters done so far, and I'm working in photoshop to pull these two images together with a landscape that I've been working on. It's the largest digital art piece I've done since my intro to graphic design class, and I'm completely out of my depth. I'm loving it though. It's been fun learning the ins and outs of photoshop. I've been having to do research about different techniques, and how to make things look a certain way without a tablet. I'm hoping to get a tablet this summer, and we'll see how that goes. I'm getting sucked into the digital art craze, and for the first time I don't feel guilty about it. I'm still a traditional artist, but I'm finding new ways to create the same work, sometimes making it better. All of my Art Ethics classes are coming into play as well, is this truly self-created art, or is the computer doing most of the work for me (sometimes the computer does the work, really it does)? If you create the digital line work from a traditional sketch, is it traditional or digital? It's digital. Yes, those were questions from my classes. So here are the images: ( Barbarella and The Great Tyrant ) | |
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|  Another collage. This time a mish-mesh of feelings about my family. Don't over analyze. | |
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|  I got the urge to play around with my scanner tonight. I was inspired by someone else's collages. I make a lot of these, but I don't generally show them to people. They tend to be very personal and people ask questions. Please don't, just take what you will from this. I'm doing a series of them now. They will all have the same background. This collage features words by Laura Marling, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Coogan, and Myself. | |
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| Art work from the past few months, or at least the stuff that I've really liked.
Patch, the Pirate
( Image Dump ) | |
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| I haven't posted on here in forever (forever of course being since the end of March.) I suddenly needed to vent in a forum that wouldn't bring the scrutiny of high school aged eyes. I know that's ridiculous, those young eyes are just as likely to read this as anybody else, but I'm just writing my thoughts out loud. There are few things that I don't talk about with people in depth. Most of the time I'm willing to vomit out massive amounts of information about myself without ever really thinking about the consequences. One of the topics that I often keep myself, though, is my father. I've told a handful of my friends about him, but other than the glossy cover art of the story, they don't really know. It's the one thing that has shaped me more than being raised by a free-spirited, independent, single mom. I'm highly aware that I was an accident. When I say accident you guys are thinking that my mom told me my entire life that I was a pleasant surprise right? No, not really. My parents didn't want children. I was not part of their future plan, immediate or otherwise. They took all precautions, shy of the surgical. There plan was to travel the world, and they were well on their way. They had traveled across most of the US on their vacations. They both worked in relatively well paying jobs (both were extremely boring, not getting into it.) They loved the same music, and although my mom was not nearly as into film as my dad, she thought it was a cute obsession (which I apparently inherited from him... nature vs. nurture?). They both have equally odd families, though I think that my mom's family is by far the stranger of the two. My dad's family is simply Scottish... very very Scottish. My mom's family is Scots-Irish/Dutch Appalachian hillbilly. I've always wondered how they met, my mom won't tell me. I think it's to do with the fact that she doesn't want to remember being that happy. I never asked my dad, but then again the last time I saw him I was five, and after that I only talked to him twice on the phone. They don't seem like people who would have traveled in the same circles. My dad is seven years younger than my mom. He was a student at Georgia Tech, and my mom was working at Grady. If you know anything about Atlanta you know that Grady and GT aren't really near each other. I can't imagine the scenario in which a first generation Scottish-American (my dad was born in San Francisco) college student, and a hillbilly lab-tech chanced to meet. It had to be like some scene from a romantic comedy. My nerdy math addled dad stumbles upon my disco dancing mom at a local night spot. I imagine there's some spilled beer and overkill apologies. Awkward laughing followed by big smiles and my mom's realization that my dad has black hair and blue eyes, her favorite combination. My dad noting that my mom is red haired and green eyed. They couldn't be a more suitable couple. Cut seven years down the road. They have been happily married for five years. It's 1982, they've just returned from their third trip to Nashville. My mom has been sick for over week. Nausea, fatigue, etc. She assumes the flu because she works in a hospital and it's November. Much to her surprise the doctor tells her she's pregnant with the fetus that will become me. I imagine there were tears, and a lot of soul searching on her way back to their apartment. My dad is home when she gets there, he got off of work a little early (speculative). She sits down and tells my dad to do the same, but he says no, so she says "Fine, we'll both stand."
My mom tells my dad that she's pregnant. My dad didn't take this news well. Apparently, where as my mom is willing to go with the situation (free-spirit remember) my dad becomes violently angry. He punches her in the stomach before she can tell him that she's two months along. My mom walked out, without anything more than the clothes on her back and her purse. It's the last time she'll see my dad until after I'm born. He of course shows little interest in the pregnancy, and if not for the intervention of his parents would show little interest in me after I was born. My dad was a bigger part of my life until I was four. My mom decided to move us out to California to be close to him and his parents. At four and a half my mom moved herself and me back to Georgia to be closer to her parents. I'm a better person for this.
It's one of those what if games. What if we had stayed in California? What if I had never known my Grandpa and had instead known my Grandfather? My grandmother vs. my grandma? What if my dad had shown more interest? What if he had paid the child support on time every month without trying to hoodwink the system? I've always wanted a relationship with my father. I want to know about that part of my family. I have three cousins that I've never known, and an aunt and an uncle. I'm not lacking in family, the universe knows that I'm related to more than half of North East Georgia by blood or marriage, but there's still that other half that's missing.
I found my dad by a fluke. A friend of mine was accepted to Duke Law last year, and she was looking through the faculty/staff website when she ran across my dad's name. It's unique, and very Scottish. She sent me the link, asking if it was my dad. I didn't know, I had to send the page to my mom. She said that it was and sent me a picture of the three of us the Halloween I turned three. Though he has gray hair now, and his glasses are smaller, it was unmistakably him.
I now have a phone number and an e-mail address by which I could reach him, but I don't know if I should. I'm afraid I'll cry, because Duke University is only a six hour drive from where I live. This means that for the past four years he, knowing where I was living, could have contacted me. I'm not a mystery. If you know my real name my contact info is pretty easy to come by.
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| There's got to be something I can talk about. People tell me I never shut up, or they call me big mouth (the reality of the situation is that my mouth is actually way smaller than average, but that's semantics). I should be able to come up with something to say here on LJ once a day. That's all I was trying to do, but as we can see that hasn't been happening. The old saying, life gets in the way, comes to mind.
I'm currently sitting here, late night, I have a babysitting job tomorrow, all day. I should be asleep. I say this a lot, but when you know that a two year old and a 18 month old are in your future, it makes it all the more true. I'm one of the 12.5 million unemployed at the moment. I'm lucky that I have a great support system, an understanding landlord, and a mom that can't seem to let me fail. The babysitting is something to keep me busy, but right now I HATE KIDS. I don't know why, I'm just in that place right now. It's not just the idea that I don't want any, I really don't like kids at the moment. Oh well.
I've done a lot of artwork in the past few weeks. I've had a lot of time to work on it. Some of it is line art, some is full color and some is actually pencil. I've also adopted a dog. I learned how to drive a stick shift (aka standard transmission) truck. I've collected all 8 of the Anne of Green Gables books. I finished reading all of the Sookie Stackhouse books that are currently published. I'm reading Michael Crihton's Next. My mom had a liver biopsy, and I got the flu from someone at the hospital while I waited for her to get out of "surgery". I rearranged my dining room, so that the dog didn't have to sleep under the kitchen table. Ok, yeah, my life is boring. I like it that way. I nearly forgot that I got Photoshop CS4, I love it. I've taught myself how to digitally color some of my work. It's exciting. Well, maybe not.
So, pictures are in order, because I have pictures of my dog, and artwork... but not of my adventures in learning stick.
( Pictures )</div> | |
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red_luscara's journal
