The Cone of Shame

I deserve to be wearing one right now for not posting the last few months.  I'm really sorry.  It was getting near the end of school and I had AP Tests and graduation to worry about.  Speaking of, I'm officially a high school graduate now.  Yay!  Now back to the apologies.  I really was extremely busy.  I was sloughing classes the last few weeks of school so I could finish my AP Art Portfolio and to get some extra sleep in.  And, of course, now that school is over and done with, our computer decides to stop turning on which happens to be the computer that has all my photos and Photoshop on it and is the computer that my tablet hooks up to and also our scanner.  So, you'll be getting some real old stuff and not so great pictures today.  When we get our computer back, I'll be able to upload all the drawings I've been doing and better edited pictures.

Before I talk about what I have been doing, I'd like to talk a little about what I'm planning on doing.  So, I've just graduated high school and I'm off to University in just a few months.  I've already changed my major three times, but currently I'm planning on going into Illustration.  I hear it's really hard to get into, but I'm going to try anyways.  I register for classes tonight and I'm planning on taking Drawing in the fall.  It sounds so scary and intense to me, but also exciting and adventurous.  Yeah, that's about it - on to other stuff.

I'll start with some older pictures.

These is just a compilation of random doodles I had uploaded on a separate site from my sketchbook.  I really need to start getting away from pointless doodles and start creating actual pieces that have backgrounds and such.

I love art memes.  They're so much fun and really good for practicing.  This is another old one I had on my other site.  As is this next one.

Just a random picture that I really liked.

My nieces were down a few weeks ago and we did chalk drawings.  It was tons of fun.  My niece made this outline of me and then I just filled it in.  I'm incredibly pleased with that boot.

Look familiar?  A girl in my friend's painting class really wanted me to make her one, so I did.  I completely redid the pattern and I think it's a lot better than the first.  I put beans in the bottom so it actually sits well, this time.   I also saved the pattern, because I think I want to start making more of these and maybe set up an Etsy store sometime in the future.  Of course, I'll have to have a little better quality and get some decent photos, but I think it's worth a try.

More chalk drawing.  This was at our school's end of year rock concert thing.  A friend of mine brought a little box of chalk, which was quickly decimated by about 50 high school students.  This was my little offering.

Now for some recent stuff and somewhat better pictures.  This is Pumkin (purposely spelled like that) from the Youtube series Baman Piderman.  I made it for a friend of mine for her birthday.  I really love how his sweater turned out.  Also, it's the first time I've ever succeeded at needle-felting.  Here are some more angles and detail shots of him.

 This was one of my last art dolls for my AP portfolio.  His name is Steward, and yes, that tree is supposed to be his head.  Seriously, somebody asked me where his head was once.  My favorite part was grass-staining his pants.  My neighbors must wonder sometimes what I'm doing out in my yard rubbing a tiny pair of pants across my lawn.

I love how this picture turned out!  In case you're a little confused, he has little pots and bags of trees tied to the strap on his shoulder.

 

 He's a pretty good tree-climber.

 So, I've been doing a lot of rearranging in my room lately, trying to figure out what I'll be taking to college and whatnot, and my art dolls outgrew their little shelf and I moved them all to the top of my art supply bookshelf.  From left to right there's: Baby Harry Potter, Beowulf, Grendel, Bengta, Steward, the Lady Greene, Mo the the Stop-Mo armature I, Admiral Ackbar, Audubon, Kamaji, Truman, and Hagrid.

 For Graduation my sister and brother-in-law gave me a Hobby Lobby gift card.  I spent it on a bottle cutter and made myself a set of drinking glasses to take to University with me in the fall (just two and a half more months 'til I can move out . . . not that I'm counting).

 I had a Fanta bottle to go with my Coke and Sprite ones, but it broke down the middle in the hot and cold water baths.

 These two were the cleanest separations and they really look the best.

 I love doing art projects with little kids, especially my nieces.  The last time we had them over they collected rocks from our garden and wanted to paint them.  So I joined in on the fun and painted a space-dinosaur.  He is definitely coming to University with me.  (Side note: I noticed someone earlier saying University like people usually say college (like without putting an article in front of it) and I decided I wanted to start saying it.  I mean, I am going to a University, not a college, so why not?)

 This is the reason I didn't post this blog entry yesterday.  I wanted to, but my mom commandeered me to help build a chicken coop.  It was pretty awesome and fun.  The picture makes it look a lot simpler than it actually is.  There's a door on the back that my mom and I put up with a bunch of random hardware we got at Ace.  There were a lot of obstacles, but my mom and I managed to finally get a pretty sturdy, effective coop built before my dad came home.  And yes, it is the bottom portion of a child's playground.  We've got three adorable little chicks - Suds (who I really want to start calling Camilla, like from the Muppets) the white one, Danny Kay, and Rose Tyler (they're both brown).

 This picture and the last ones are my very last project I put in my AP Portfolio.  It's a doll tree-house.  I had the more finished pictures on my other computer, but I can't get them now.  Even now, though, it isn't entirely finished.  It still needs a ladder, a railing, a crow's nest, a ladder to the crow's nest, some props, and possibly a second tree house to connect to it.  Also, it's the first time I've ever built something to scale.  It's all in 1:12 scale.  And I intend on making all the props in 1:12 as well.

Installing the floor on the completed frame.

 A little out of order, but the finished frame and just the first two floorboards put in.  The floor boards were possibly my favorite part to install.

 I felt like the extra pieces of floor board looked pretty nifty stacked up inside the tree house.  Genre detail, I suppose.

 Window frame.

 Completed Floor.  I love the look of it.  I'll have to take more pictures of the completed-looking version that has walls and shingles and stuff.  Oh and a tire swing.  You can actually see the tire I used at the bottom of this last picture.  I went to DI and bought a broken toy tractor just so I could strip one of the tires off.

Okay, one more thing before I close.  I missed two more days of creating.  One was while we were on Tour in Disneyland.  We got back to our hotel at practically midnight and I hadn't had time to do anything.  The other was the day of Graduation.  I spent the morning at a friend's where we talked about creating a stop-motion video, but I never actually did anything.  Unless you count scribbling in my niece's coloring book while being half-asleep, or pretending to do macrame with my gold cords.  So it looks like I'm three days behind, now.  Still, that isn't too bad, I suppose.

Expanding Horizons
One of my best friend's painted this picture and I absolutely love it.  So I'm going to show it to you guys and make all of you love it.  She's fantastic and one of my favorite people ever (and I still owe her a birthday present :( )

Tips or Whatnot
Do art with friends.  You can bounce ideas off each other and get friendly opinions, plus, it's nice to do what you like with people you like.  Art parties are the best parties.  The more the merrier and all that good cliche stuff.

March Roundup

Woot!  It may be the last day of the month, but, hey, at least I still remembered.

Wow, it's been so long I'm not even sure where to begin.  Sorry, but this will probably be a bit of a more pell-mell post, I suppose.

This is Bengta (or Marie Antoinette, if you're my dad). I made her as one of my art dolls for my AP concentration. If you can't tell, she's a marionette. I had loads of fun making her. I started with the arms and legs. I had been attempting to make a stop-motion armature using all these wooden dowels, but it kind of failed, so, rather than wasting all the wood I had already cut, I decided to re-purpose some of it into a marionette. The arms and legs were already cut to the right size and had little holes drilled in them, so they were perfect. I painted each member of her body black, and then painted grey over it. Her torso is stuffed fabric with a dowel inserted at the top for the neck. The head is a wooden ball I acquired from Hobby Lobby, painted to match the rest of the body, with a tassel glued to her head which is also attached to the main string supporting her. I sewed a simple skirt and glued it to her torso and embellished it with a lovely yellow ribbon. Her hands and feet I sculpted from polymer clay and then painted. At the moment, the strings controlling her hands are not very efficient as the hands don't weigh them down enough, so I may change that in the future. She really isn't the most versatile of marionettes, but for the most part, she's at least functional.

My dad and I made the stand out of a board I got at Hobby Lobby and various parts found in our garage. Overall, I think she might be one of the most professional looking things I've done. There are some problems with it, though, like the strings aren't quite right and you can see some of the glue from her hair on her forehead, and she isn't weighted quite properly, but other than that, I really like her.

This was one of my last Breadth pieces for my portfolio.  My concept was sort of a quilt and a stuffed animal all rolled in to one.  I wanted it to radiate comfort.  I don't really know whether I succeeded or not, but for the most part, I'm happy with how he turned out.  Although, one of his legs is rather loose at the moment 'cause some of my friends decided to throw him around at lunch the other day.  I don't mind though, it was a good test to see how durable my sewing was.  I was going to count how many little squares I ended up using, but I lost count, just know that it was a lot.

Hooray!  I've been baking again.  One of my best friend's birthday was the beginning of this month and I still owed her a Tangled-themed Christmas present.  So I was kind of cheap and combined the two and made her a Tangled-themed cake.  I used a mix from a box (someday I'll have time to make things from scratch!) and the frosting is white chocolate raspberry flavored.  It tasted alright, but the smell of that frosting was powerfully strong and not entirely pleasant.  But, overall, I think it was a success.  Also, decorating a cake is a lot harder than painting, just saying.  I thought they might be about the same, but I was very mistaken.  That's why the lanterns turned into plain rectangles rather than anything more detailed and, y'know, lantern-looking.

 Now that the weather's a bit nicer and the birds are becoming more plentiful (and I got some outdoor varnish) I was able to put up my Birdhouse Guitar.  I haven't seen any birds around it, yet, but I really hope it gets inhabited soon.  *crosses fingers*

This is all part of my final breadth piece for AP Art (minus the fedora and the mustachioed manican head).  They're going to be Steampunk goggles with built-in headphones.  And yes, the headphones do still work.  I also wanted to rig up a little flashlight to hook up to the side of them, but I can't think of a way for me to do it that wouldn't look tacky or cost a lot of money.  All I need to finish these up is some black elastic.  And I might do a bit more work with the back to make it fit more snugly to my head.  Oh, and I also want to line the eye-pieces with sheepskin or something akin to it.

As far as drawing is concerned, I've been somewhat disappointed with myself.  I really enjoy the stuff I've been doing in AP Art.  But I miss having a 2 Dimensional art class.  However, I haven't been completely neglecting my drawing.  I still doodle on just about every piece of paper I can lay my hands on at school, but I'd rather not take the time to post all that.  This drawing is just something I thought up recently after I found out I got admitted to BYU.  I decided to draw a sort of evolution picture of Amanda throughout her education.  It was all for fun and I just did it on a whim.  It's not really meant to be taken seriously or anything.  I'll see if I can quickly run through each picture.  First, I went to a daycare-school-thing (it was sort of my proxy kindergarten, since New Hampshire doesn't do kindergarten for public schools) at Colby-Sawyer College called Windy Hill.  I have some really great memories of that place - like the first boy I thought I was in love with telling me that I had too many A's in my name (we were like, 4, okay?), and I discovered my joy for building things when I made a sailboat out of stuff we found on a nature walk and when my best friend and I built wooden castles for all the plastic animals in the toy room.  (How'm I doing on the whole 'quickly' thing).  Next we moved to Utah and I started first grade at Northridge Elementary where the mascot was the Nighthawks.  I have absolutely no good memories of that school.  I remember having to walk home by myself one day because my English teacher (yes, we had different teachers for different subjects like you do in high school) kept me after school because I was too slow at copying down a poem (and so the pain of having neat handwriting began).  Halfway through first grade my brother and I transferred schools to where my dad was working; Manila Elementary, home of the Mustangs.  These were the golden years of my childhood.  In fifth grade I moved schools again to be in the ALL program at Barratt Elementary (we were bobcats, there).  Fifth and sixth grade were not so golden.  I thought I was cooler than an ice box and no one else mattered.  Not a time of life I particularly enjoy looking back on.  Then came the ever-awkward years of junior high.  I had braces, my hair was terrifying, and my personality was stagnant.  Moving on.  High school has been pretty great; I've done a lot of growing and I'm extremely proud to be a caveman.  And now, in just a few months, I'm gonna be a cougar!  Yep, like I said, this is really just the product of being bored on a Sunday afternoon, nothing big and meaningful.

This is a project that I did for my dad over the weekend.  His company is opening two new facilities and he asked me to design potential logos for them.  I like the girl on the horse a lot better, but the boy leaning on the fence is okay, too.  I drew the pictures first, without worrying too much about inner details and then I colored them in with a sharpie.

Okay, so it looks like I've been doing a lot more than I think I've been doing, but I still feel like I haven't been drawing enough.  These two pictures are the results of a project in this really cool book that I have called 52 Drawing Labs for Mixed Media Artists or something like that.  It's the coolest art book I have ever had the pleasure of owning.  For this project you had to take clay creations done by a child and draw them however you wanted to, but in a way that still captured the childlike innocence of the original creation.  Like I said, really cool art book.  The first is a watercolor and gold gel pen painting of a squid/octopus thing that was either made by my dad or one of my older siblings.  I recently got my nice watercolors back from my art teacher and I was itching to use them again, so I did this one first.  Second, I drew, first in pencil and then outlined in pen, this interesting clay creation that my oldest sister made (you'll have to tell me what it is, Addie).  I don't know exactly what it's supposed to be, but I really loved the look of it, and then I turned it into a floating rock.  The last one I did was an owl that my brother made in a Ceramics class.  I used my set of acrylics and painted it with my fingers.  Finger painting sounds all fine and dandy, but you really can't load paint on your fingers like you can in a brush.  It doesn't smooth the same way and the paint dries a lot faster, but still, I like how the owl turned out.

My recommendation for the month would be to check out that book I just mentioned.  It's really creative and you really don't have to have any drawing experience/skills to create some really cool-looking things with it.

And my monthly tip?  Ugh, this is this the hard part.  Take some time to get to know some basic power tools.  I've always been kind of afraid to touch anything in our garage (and not just because they're covered in spider webs) but lately I've been using a Dremel my dad recently gave me and our power drill a lot.  They are so handy for small projects, especially when dealing with wood.  And now I have two new soldering irons from my neighbor to learn how to use.  I'm really starting to fall in love with tools and woodworking machines.  They're so nifty!

Happy Late Totally Not Socially Awkward Valentine's Day

All my posts recently seem to be centered around holidays.  Well, I can most likely guarantee that I probably won't have anything relating to Saint Patrick's day next month.  But who knows.  I wasn't really planning on having anything related to Valentine's day this month, but then here we are, with a Valentine picture.

I honestly don't know why I decided to do this.  I was just feeling particularly inhibitingly awkward the other day and for some reason, this was the result.  I don't know, I think this speaks for itself.  I also just really wanted to draw my Box Elder Fettish in some Valentine related thing.  I really like her design and I'm thinking of maybe trying to do some 'professional-looking' comics with her.  I even decided to do the 25 expressions meme with her to try and work on consistency.

Yeah, the first ones are not the greatest.  I definitely think they got better as I continued.  It'd look better if I had them all in pen, but I've just been working on it here and there and since I have all the expressions at least in pencil, now, I figured I'd post it.  Silly I think is my favorite, or at least one of my favorites.

Oh! Speaking of my little Fettish.  In AP art we had a pre-show for the Springville Art Museum's High School Show.  It's an art show for high school students' work from all over the state and it's kind of a big deal.  Both my Fettish and Audubon, my robot, were selected in the pre-show to be judged at Springville for the actual show.   We sent 18 pieces from our class to be judged but only four made it.  Three of the 2D design students plus my Box Elder Fettish are going to be in the Springville High School Art Show.  I can't believe it!  The show opens this Wednesday and goes for a few weeks; I can't wait to actually go and see one of my baby creations in an actual art show.  Seriously, I don't know what else to say, it's kind of mind-blowing for me.  If anyone's interested enough, I would recommend going to see the show, not because I have something in it (you can just look at pictures in my previous posts), but I've been to the high school show before and there are some seriously talented kids out there.  It's really worth taking a gander at, especially if you enjoy museums and such.

That isn't the only thing that's been happening in AP art, though.  Recently we had to declare our concentrations for our portfolios.  I debated between a lot of things (art dolls, up-cycled material, wearable art, etc.) but I ended up going with art dolls.  I'm glad, because it finally gave me more reason to finish . . . Mystery Man!  Or, as was finally figured out, Hagrid.

For the longest time he was just a Sculpey head on an uncontained body of stuffing, lying in a corner of my room.  But now, he's a lumberjack Hagrid person, holding a little bundle o' Harry Potter (little baby Harry was part of a separate project I did over the summer).  His boots were especially fun to do and I love how they turned out.  My favorite part is actually his collar, although you can't see practically any of it.  I was so proud of myself, because I actually sewed it on like a real collar and it folded over and everything.  Curse his hair for covering it all!

Anyways, although we've dove head-first into our concentrations in AP Art, I still need a few more pieces for the Breadth section of my portfolio.  So, while being unmotivated to finish other projects, I started and finished a new project.

It's a guitar birdhouse feeder thing.  My sister just brought over this broken guitar once and wondered if I could use it.  Well, apparently I could.  I had some other plans for it originally, but then a friend of mine suggested I turn it into a birdhouse.  Well, being mildly to overtly obsessed with birds, I of course thought this was the greatest idea since sliced bread.  I mean, why not? it already has the hole and everything.  So I sanded the original paint off the guitar (it took forever! at least 4 hours) then added the peg and seed trough, added paper clay (you can't tell so much in this picture, but it has a lot of texture to it), and then I painted it.  I'd really like to have a picture of it outside with some birds on it, but unfortunately it isn't weatherproof, yet.  I need to get some marine varnish or something to help protect it from rain and such.  Can you tell it's supposed to be like an aspen tree?

The day I finished the birdhouse I was on a sort of productive rampage and decided to finish another project I had abandoned for a while.

I got a bunch of wire for Christmas and so I decided to experiment with wire-wrapping.  Originally this was going to be a ring, but I really don't have the right kind of wire for that, so it simply became a pin/brooch thing.  I like how it turned out.  I was going for a sort of steampunk hot air balloon thing, don't know if that translated very well, though.

It seems I've been doing a lot with steampunk lately.  I just barely finished the second costume design for a friend of mine's post-apocalyptice sci-fi short film he's been working on.

Annie's design became completely different from the first one's I showed, so I decided to return to Annie's original concept for the design of Lydia, her sister.  I like this one much better.  I don't know if I'll be doing anymore designs for my friend.  I was kind of late with my other ones, so I don't know if he's already worked out the rest of them.

It's not that I was slow working on them, or that I was procrastinating for no reason, I've just been rather overwhelmed with a ton of things recently.  As it turns out, college gets a little expensive, so recently I've been trying to find scholarships and such (no luck so far).  I've found a ton of art related ones, and that's mainly what I've been trying to focus on lately, though I'm only close to really finishing one of them.  The Doodle 4 Google scholarship contest.

I'm not entirely sure I like how it looks in Photoshop, so I've been thinking I'll finish my original sketch with either watercolors or colored pencils and then decide which one I'll actually turn in.  I am pleased with the design, though.

Okay, one last thing before I sign off probably for the rest of the month.  I bound a book!  I've bound books before, actually I bound some books for Christmas, though I forgot to ever take pictures of them, but I feel like its been ages since I just bound a book for fun.  It wasn't totally all on a whim, though, actually.  A few months ago I was talking with a friend of mine and we started discussing the phrase "for the record".  Her comments to me were "what record?  Is there someone keeping minutes on everything we want 'for the record' and if so, where is this record? who gets to read it?"  So, I decided to make "The Record" and I'll use it simply for that; writing down the random things people say with the preceding statement of "for the record".

Well, I guess that wasn't the completely last thing before I leave.

This month's recommendation I have for anyone who still reads my posts is to check out this awesome web-comic I've been reading lately.  www.seed-comic.com  I love the art style and the plot is really intriguing so far.

And, uh, my tip for the month . . . . um, don't work on projects you're frustrated with.  Step away for an hour or maybe a day or two.  Lock the project in a box and refuse to look at it until you've had time to cool down.  If you work on something while you're mad, you'll likely end up breaking something or ruining something which will only compound your frustration.  Yep.