I dun gone and drew it. I think it’s a nice representation of the owls in the photo without totally copying them. I’ll see if it makes a nice rubber stamp.
Archive for the ‘My Art/Design/Business’ Category
Update on the owls drawing.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007Owls.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007I finished the mezuzah. I scrapped the whole liquid polymer thing (too shiny, no way to fix that) and just drew directly on a baked piece of polymer and applied the copper leaf to that. It came out great and no, I don’t have any pictures right now, but I will soon. One of my friends, B., was emailing me about how he found this picture of owls. B. sent me a photo of baby scops owls looking curious and intrigued. And perhaps slightly surprised. It’s a great image. It’s my desktop image on my computer now.
I thought it would be wonderful to make a drawing based on this, a very simple one I could use as a rubber stamp perhaps, so I’ve started with this pen sketch:
It’s not where I want it to be, but it’s heading in the right direction. I want this owl to have a pointier bottom end (not so flattened) and I want his crouching compatriot to be next to him, but I like the face, so I may keep that element the same.
Mezuzah. Now with pictures!
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007OKAY. So that post before where I tried to explain what I was making? Here are pictures.
There. That’s the mezuzah I’m making for my sister. See the colored pencil? See the copper leafing on the moon? It’s nice. The only problem is that it’s very very shiny, like the vinyl coverings your great-aunt put on the couch so no one would mess it up. Here’s a picture taken with a flash.
See. SHINY. Not what I want. I tried spraying it with matte clear coat, but that just made it sticky. Then I dusted it with talc powder to make it not-sticky, and it didn’t tone down the shine either. I will have to put on my thinking cap to solve this conundrum.
I am a genius. Ahem.
Friday, September 14th, 2007The other day I was in a rush and I had just charged my camera battery, so in the dim natural light of my apartment I stuck my recharged battery into my camera. I stuck it in wrong. It is now jammed in there and my camera doesn’t work. I feel like a dolt. There’s an arrow on the battery that corresponds to another arrow on the camera, for crying out loud. So aside from trying to pick it out with my thumbnail and saying curses under my breath, I’m not quite sure what to do. I will ask Cricket, perhaps he can solve this with a minimum of destruction and bloodshed. I wanted to take a picture of the project I’m working on right now, but I cannot, so I will have to describe it to you, which is so very very lame.
My sister K. is celebrating a birthday soon, and I never know what to get her. K. has a small mezuzah collection on one of her walls. For those of you who do not know what a mezuzah is, here is a brief explanation. “Mezuzah” (“doorpost” in Hebrew) is a little box that is affixed to the doorpost of your house (and if you’re particularly observant, every doorpost to every room in your house except the bathroom or the kitchen). Inside the box (which can be decorated in a myriad of ways, more on that later) is a piece of parchment with Hebrew verses. It blesses your house. What’s so great about them is as long as they don’t have a representation of a human on it (Judaism is very wary of human representation on their religious items, you might be worshipping false idols; by the way, Islam has the same rule, that’s why mosques are usually decorated only in geometric patterns and text) you can put most anything on the decorative container. Here’s a website that shows a variety of different styles.
Also, they can be made out of any material. Metal, stone, plastic, glass, you name it. My parents once received one made out of bread that had been shellacked. I should probably mention my parents have about 300 of them. They’ve been collecting them for over 30 years from all over the world (lots of artists make them and they are small and easy to carry in your luggage). ANYWAY, my sister has a collection of about twenty and she asked me to make her one for her birthday. I’ve recently discovered the true awesomeness of polymer clay. Remember how when you were young, you made deformed lumpy figures out of Sculpey or Fimo and then baked it and your mom put it on the mantle or whatever? That’s polymer clay and that is only the tip of its potential. It can be carved, sanded, drilled, polished, painted with acrylics, made to mimic other things like stone or stained glass – oh my God, why haven’t I been using this stuff more often?!!? So I’m making K. a mezuzah out of polymer clay. There’s a liquid form that you can pour over a colored pencil drawing, bake in the oven, and when you pull off the paper, the colored pencil adheres to the now hardened liquid polymer. SO AWESOME. For the mezuzah I made a drawing of a tree with a moon in the background, colored it in with colored pencil, baked the liquid polymer on it, and now I’m putting copper leaf on the moon to make it all pretty and shiny and sparkly. And I am also now realizing that my description SUCKS and if my camera worked it would be so much better because I imagine many of you are going, “Huh? She did what now?” I truly hope Cricket can fix my stupid camera.
UPDATE: My beloved co-worker A. just pulled the battery out with two butter knives and I had put the battery in correctly! Ha ha! But this now means something is for-real wrong with my camera or my battery (A.’s comment, “Perhaps it swelled with the humidity. Well, you got a better idea?”) so I will go to a camera store in the area and see if this can be rectified in some way. Expect pictures of mezuzahs with copper leafing in the near future!
A Completed Bathing Beauty.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007I sanded down the previous text I had on the anglerfish and repainted the black and also the brown shadowing, then retaped out all the text and repainted it and I think I got it this time. It’s lower and more varied in height, so it matches the other fish much more betterer. Now I need to wood putty the sides, paint the sides and the back, attach hanging mechanisms, and we’re good to go. I am happy.
I already have ideas for my next pieces. My friend Jonathan Reidel, who is a terrific dancer and a choreographer, is having a performance in December at the Joyce Soho and we’ve talked about having some of my paintings in the entrance hall. Luckily he’s as eccentric as I am, so deep sea fish would work well with his performance and the kind of audience that will be there. I’ll see how many pieces I can create by then, so I have a selection to choose from that best suites his dances and the space I’ll be given.
The Bathing Beauties’ Progress.
Monday, September 3rd, 2007You know, now they do look rather lovely I must say. I mounted the paper illustrations I made to boards and painted the boards black with a little brown tinting to give it some dimension. Then I painted the names of the fish in gold paint (the paintings are artistic AND informative!). I think I will redo the anglerfish’s lettering, it’s too high and not diverse enough in size compared to the other fishies. Other than that, spray with some matte crystal clear and we’re done! I love them, I really do.
Also, in totally unrelated news, I saw Julie Delpy’s movie this weekend, 2 Days In Paris. My boyfriend Cricket loves Julie Delpy. Actually, love is too soft a word. Saying he loves Julie Delpy is, as Dave Barry once said, like calling someone “a heroin fancier”. So as soon as we found out that she had written, directed, produced and acted in a movie, we had to go. Cricket made my parents go as well (“We all must support Julie!”). I didn’t know what to expect, but it was really good. The dialogue was funny and her parents in the film (played by her parents in real life) were hysterical. It didn’t have a point so it’s not going to change anyone’s life, but still a good film worth seeing. It did remind me of one thing – all of Julie’s friends in the film are artists, and they are ANNOYING. Whenever anyone calls me an artist, I bristle. Artists have MUSES and VISIONS and have to CREATE to release these pent-up demons within, blabitty blah blah. I draw and paint because I enjoy it, but I also want to try to make a living from it, and I’m willing to compromise. By the way, this goes for musicians as well. Whenever one of my friends said, “I’m dating a musician!” I would think, “Great, good for you, tell me how that works out.” All of them were shocked when I started dating Cricket, who has quite possibly the most boring job ever (software programmer). But we’re still together (five years!) because no one has to break off a dinner engagement to run home, immerse themselves in paint and throw themselves at a canvas to express the repressed memory of having their lunch money stolen in second grade.
Meet The Bathing Beauties.
Thursday, August 30th, 2007I’m doing a whole series of deep sea fish and they’re so truly hideous my mother has christened them “The Bathing Beauties”. That name has stuck for the time being, so I’d like you to meet The Bathing Beauties.
This is my anglerfish. She was mentioned in a post below. Originally she was going to be a one-off, but I enjoyed drawing her so much I drew her some friends based on the Blue Planet program I watched. Also, all of my beauties have an anthopomorphic component. For example, the anglerfish has a lure that lights up on a stalk attached to her head. I turned that into a lightbulb. You could really say she lights up the sea! Ha ha ha! Moving on.
Ah, the gulper eel. Isn’t she lovely, folks? I also mentioned her below, saying she looked like a kite because all she is is a giant head with a mouth that opens like screen doors that have been ripped off their hinges by a tornado, a tail and no middle bits. And because kites have those little bows on their tail for stability or balance (I forget, science class and kite-flying is a long way back for me), I put little bows on her tail. Awwwww. Pretty.
And now the hatchetfish. I know I’m going with a Bathing Beauties theme here, but the damn thing looks like its mother mated with an Orc. It truly was hit with the ugly stick. Whacked repeatedly. As you can see, it has barbs coming out of it, so I made the top and bottom rows arrows, two forks and a dental tool.
I’m now working on a viperfish wearing a sock (hey, it gets cold down at 5,000 feet) and one other, I haven’t decided yet. But there will be five of them and I’m hoping I sell them as a set and not one at a time. I’d like to see them all living together.
This past weekend.
Monday, August 27th, 2007I intended to work on my fish painting this weekend, but on Thursday night I got a phone call. Apparently, someone had run an ad in a paper sometime on Wednesday saying, “We’re doing this thing and you should be a part of it. For more information, go to this website!” The ad ran weeks earlier than expected and… there is no website to go to. So my client called me up in a bit of a twitter and I had to spend Saturday taking photos and building Photoshop files and making this website (which I did, thank you very much, banged that sucker out in four hours, I am awesome and great, fear my wrath.) And then Sunday I was meeting with clients early in the day and family members later, so I had exactly zero time to work on my personal stuff. Alas, such is life.
However, last night I was trying to talk to Snorth on the phone, but Blue Planet was on Discovery and they were doing a deep sea segment. The anglerfish I am drawing, he’s a deep sea fish. I LURVES me some deep sea fish. I kept being distracted from whatever we were talking about to say things like, “Whoo, that has to be the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It looks broken.” Here are some of the highlights for me:
This is the gulper eel. It is a head and a tail which hangs down. No middle bits. And its mouth is huge. As you can sorta see from the picture above, his mouth just falls open. He looks like a kite or a poorly made Muppet. But most importantly, his little creepy beady eyes are perched right at the end of his nose, so when he looks at you head-on, he looks like this:
AHHHH! That is the thing of nightmares. A giant mouth that doesn’t even fit on the frame and seems to go on forever, with cold blue eyes that look at you like a bitter spinster librarian who knows you have three books overdue. I need to go scrape this image out of my mind with a plastic knife now.
The creature below would be one of the most terrifying animals ever, except that its blue light-producing photophores (meant to attract prey) reminds me of eighties music videos, specifically Gloria Estefan and Duran Duran.
Their excessive makeup, their blatant use of teal coloring, the fact that they’re WARRIORS, warriors who sing and dance and use synthesizers, but warriors nonetheless. It’s like this horrifying sea creature goes out all day and kills other fish, but then goes home and listens to Bananarama. And while that’s weird, it’s not scary.
Also, there was another creature that I couldn’t find any pictures of, and that was some sort of deep sea worm. It looked like, and I am not exaggerating, a pretty pink phallus wearing a frilly ballroom dancer’s skirt. It would flip its skirts up and gently flop them from side to side and that’s how it would move itself around the ocean floor. You know the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction”? They ain’t kidding. In my most creative moments, I couldn’t have come up with anything resembling, and I never get tired of typing this phrase, a phallus wearing a frilly ballroom skirt.
Exciting!
Monday, August 27th, 2007Well, not really. I’m painting a fish. And not just any fish, an anglerfish, one of nature’s creepiest fish.
I’ll post pictures soon. Other than that, my life is the most mundane thing ever. In the last two weeks I’ve seen Children of Men (sad, gloomy), Brokeback Mountain (sad, repressed), Black Snake Moan (sad, Southern) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (sad, vicious circle). I think I need to see all of National Lampoon’s greatest works to counteract all this cinematic forlonity.*
*Based on “forlorn”. I just made it up. I can do that. If our president can make up “dignitude”, I can have “forlornity”.
My triptych/Meerkat Manor.
Monday, August 20th, 20071. Meerkat Manor. Has anyone been seeing these ads where they compare Flower the Meerkat to Tony Soprano? Are they not HYSTERICAL? Maybe they’re hysterical to me because I’ve met real live authentic meerkats who, even though they kill scorpions and do lots of other brave things, are possibly the least intimidating creatures ever. First of all, they’re less than a foot long. They’re really small. Second, they make adorable little chirping and clicking noises to each other to communicate, it’s precious. Third, and possibly most important, they cuddle and snuggle when they’re in love. Not just a mate-and-saunter-off like the lions, no no, they snuggle up to each other and they chirp at each other and I’m sorry, that does not cause the New Jersey Mafia to just pop into your mind. Here’s the picture that caused me to snort loudly in the middle of the street.
2. Triptych. I can’t deal with this painting right now. I will keep working it and working it until it turns into a giant blurry mass, so I have put it aside and returned to my roots – anal, crazily detailed painting. Mmmmm, so tasty and OCD-licious. Here is a picture of my sad lonely unloved triptych neatly piled in the corner.
