Afishionados,

I’ve been trying to get my dear ol’ grandmother so sign up for some oil painting classes at the same college I attend. Not because I want her to be in my classes, though. No, fuck that, I hate painting, especially oil painting. Who has that kind of time and patience to wait for the shit to dry? No thanks. But I’m getting off topic. I’ll have to complain about oil painting some other time.

Anyway, the real reason I want my grandmother to do some oil painting classes is because the courses are completely free to her. Senior citizens can take any class they want at the college at no cost. All she would have to pay for is her painting supplies. Another reason is because all my grandmother does all day is sit and watch television and order complete shit from QVC. (She also has the habit of watching political pundits and taking everything they say personally. She also can’t keep political facts straight, so it’s impossible to carry on any kind of political conversation with her.)

Now, my grandmother is really good at coming up with bullshit excuses as to why she doesn’t want to paint or take art classes but they’re all poor excuses. First off, I know she likes to paint because she’s taken classes with her sister and has a bunch of her own paintings hanging up in her condo. She’s no Bob Ross or anything, but she’s not the worst painter I’ve ever seen. But that’s beside the point. Even if she painted completely abhorrent pictures, it would still be a million times better than sitting on her ass and buying stupid junk from QVC like “washballs”. Yes, that’s a real product and yes she ordered it.

The excuses I’ve heard the most are that she doesn’t have time, she doesn’t want to drive down to the campus, she can’t see that well, and she’s concerned about the cost involved. I’ve tackled each and every one of these on multiple occasions.

As for the drive down, I’ve offered to drive her the whopping 15 minutes it takes to get to campus and help her register for classes myself. I’ve also suggested she take classes that meet the same time as my courses so that we can carpool down there. So that bullshit excuse doesn’t fly.

So then she says she doesn’t have time or money and can’t see. That’s because all of it is spent on the couch ordering stuff from the television. My grandmother absolutely refuses to learn how to disable the alarm at the house, but she’s more than capable of reading those small-as-shit product numbers from her TV and speed dialing the QVC folks. How someone can phone in a long fucking product ID but not punch in a simple code to turn off an alarm boggles the mind. She could spot Gary Coleman crouching in the dark a hundred yards away on a foggy night if he was tagged with a QVC product number, I swear it.

My grandmother is getting crankier and crabbier the older she gets, and I hate to see her turn in to such a bitter old lady that never leaves her house. I wish she’d do something, even if she doesn’t want to paint or take classes for free. But I guess there’s just no changing some people.

Afishionados,

I made a most excellent discovery at school tonight. I needed to print off a project for the “Photocopy Wonder” and it was too large to print to a regular printer. Fortunately, the school has a computer lab with a plotter.

For those not in the know, a plotter is a really big, expensive printer that prints from a gigantic roll of paper. So you can print nearly anything you want at any size. Or, at the very least, 3 feet wide and as long as you want.

Kinkos and similar stores want to charge anywhere from $7 to $20 to print off my project. I found out the school will let me print to the plotter for just 50 cents! Any size I want, too! This opens up a whole new world of possibilities. It’s even better than having my own plotter because I don’t have to pay for ink or paper! Awesome!

So, friends and family members reading this: I hope you want posters for Christmas because that’s what you’re getting. I hope you like bikini models.

Afishionados,

I thought I’d share a little bit of what I’ve been up to in my Design Basics 2D class this past quarter. At the beginning of the quarter, each student randomly drew the name of a musician from a hat. We weren’t allowed to trade our musician for anyone else’s and we couldn’t redraw if we didn’t like who we picked. The musician we selected was to be the focus of all our projects (whether we liked it or not). I ended up choosing Mozart, which ended up being both good and bad.

I don’t dislike Mozart’s music, but I don’t listen to it either. Other students had the benefit of incorporating song lyrics, photos of their musician, and album covers into their projects. Mozart, of course, doesn’t have much to offer in this regard.

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One of our later assignments was to select an object that represents our musician and design five different styles using that image, including: negative space, outline, line drawing, weighted line drawing, and stylized. I went with a violin.

I found a high-res image of a violin on a stock photography web site that I belong to and used that as a reference. Here’s a scan of my stylized image. It’s completely stippled and, unfortunately, doesn’t show up well as a scanned JPG. I used a really fine point marker to make it and it looks much crisper in person, but you get the idea. Of the five required styles, this was my favorite. This and the other four violin images would serve as the basis for future projects as well.

For whatever reason, my professor is obsessed with photocopiers. A later assignment involved taking the original violin images and creating both plural and compound designs from them (Plural incorporating multiple copies of the same image and compound including two different violin images together).

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I mention the instructor’s love for the photocopier because she stated that we were not to use the computer whatsoever for any of our plural and compound assignments. Instead, we were supposed to use tissue paper to trace and crop or original violin images and then (of course) photocopy the tissue paper to resize it we needed. From there, you can photocopy your photocopies, cut them out, and arrange them in your plural and compound layouts, then photocopy THAT image to create a final piece. Have you ever tried to trace a stippled image? I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t have that kind of fucking time, not to mention the cost of copying. I bent the rules to my favor and ended up using Photoshop anyway. I scanned my original stippled image, then arranged it in Photoshop to create my final piece. We had to do five compound designs and five plural designs. This image is one of my plural assignments, as well as my favorite of all ten pieces. The “flower” formed by the violins was a happy accident, and I ended up using this on my final project for the class (which I may post at a later date). There is simply no way to get this kind of result by using a photocopier (you can’t overlay the dots!).

Before “bending the rules”, I tried pleading with my instructor to let me use Photoshop. She wouldn’t hear of it. When I asked the logic behind her retarded decision, she said “Not everyone knows how to use Photoshop and the computer, and I want the class to be on a level playing field.”

Oh really? I suppose that’s true, but why should I be punished just because I do know how to use Photoshop and a computer? I tried to explain my logic to her. “Yea, but there’s a regular Olympics and a Special Olympics, and I’m not retarded.” I don’t think I need to tell you that she didn’t appreciate my analogy.

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Here’s another one of my projects, this time an example from one of my compound images. I scanned my weighted line drawing and used Photoshop to arrange it with my stylized (stippled) drawing. I really like the contrast between the two images.

If I had to do this project over, I would redo the weighted line drawing to look less like a “horror” violin. If Time Burton had a violin, it would look like this. But, in what little time I had to draw it, I think it came out okay, and still ends up working in the end.

The final assignment that I had to do with my violin drawings was to create a repeating pattern. Again, Photoshop wasn’t permitted but you can see how long it would take to do this by photocopying image after image after image.

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Here’s my final tiled piece. It’s the same as my compound image, but around a quarter of the original size (Each assignment had to fit within a 6″ x 6″ square).

I saved hours of pointless photocopying by using my good friend Photoshop once again. Although it only took a few minutes to do this, I’m really happy with how it turned out. If Mozart had to wallpaper his bathroom, this is the pattern he’d use. Or if he had gifts to wrap, or needed a Hawaiian shirt… I suppose I could throw in a couple palm trees to really make it work.

The instructor and I are civil to one another, but I don’t think either of us likes the other very much. She’s the only professor that I know of who teachers 2D Design and prohibits the use of the computer, so I’m sure this will be the last time I sign up for a class with her. But I don’t think the class was a total waste, as I’m really happy with how a lot of my assignments have turned out, not to mention that I’ve gotten really good grades on all my projects. So hopefully I’m doing something right!

Afishionados,

I’m taking a class on Adobe Illustrator and today we had to create a project that essentially involved “cutting out objects” within basic shapes. Eventually, we’ll be doing a complete paneled piece, and today’s goal was to create something that you could use for your final work.

My selected theme is the Iraqi war because it’s controversial and everyone else is doing music, movies, nature, or something stupid and I wanted to be different. I’m pretty sure that the teacher is a fan of ol’ Dubya, too, which makes it even better.

Here’s what I came up with this afternoon. I like it and I think it came out pretty well. Sorry for the watermark, but I don’t want people stealing it and using it on their web sites or something without my permission. I think I’ll even be able to use parts of this in the final panel piece towards the end of the quarter.

I’ve been away for the past couple of days because I’ve been in heated negotiations with the Olympic Committee about being the official blog of the Olympics. And not just for Torino 2006, but from now to all eternity. Naturally, the committee was ecstatic (to say the least) and agreed with me.

Unfortunately, I had no say whatsoever in the choosing of the Olympic mascot. My artistic skills just can’t compete with Pedro Albuquerque. I mean, just look at these…things. There is no way I could draw something this technical and difficult looking.

Here is what the Official Torino 2006 site has to say about the mascots:

“Neve”: she is a gentle, kind and elegant snowball; “Gliz”: he is a lively, playful ice cube. They are the two symbolic characters of the XX Olympic Winter Games. They complement each other and personify the very essence of winter sports.

Damn, they aren’t kidding when it comes to the personification of winter sports. How did they know that these two characters were exactly what I picture in my mind when I hear the term “winter sports”? It’s like they crawled into my brain and stole this image from my mind’s eye. I swear.

Kind and elegant snowball? Can a snowball even get pissed off and bitchy? And Gliz isn’t even an original idea. I’ve beat the Smoking Gun to this story. Gliz is really a ripoff of the Stinky Cheeseman.

I propose the removal of Gliz and to replace him with this guy:

This is Wiz. And here is what the Official Blog of the Olympics has to say about Wiz:

“Wiz”: he is an outgoing, moist and yellow snowbeing; He is the symbolic character of the XX Olympic Winter Games. He personifies the very essence of waiting outside and watching winter sports with a full bladder.

Let the games begin!

UPDATE: It has also recently come to my attention that Neve is none other than the Cingular logo.

Coming soon to the back of a car near you.

In a past life, when I had more free time, I liked to draw. These are three pictures that I’ve drawn and really like. They’re not perfect, but I am proud of them and I thought I’d share them.

I have other pictures that I’ve drawn but I’m sad to say I don’t have them with me in South Carolina at the moment. Once I get my hands on my portfolio again I will try and post them. Meanwhile, they’re still safely stored away in Ohio.

These three in particular are framed and hanging in my hallway. I had to take them out of the frames to photograph and I’m not terribly good at taking pictures. Also, the drawings are really reflective so I had to take pictures without the flash. So the photos are not the highest quality.

That being said, the first one I want to talk about is the “oldest” one. When I was still in high school, I drew a quick sketch of Yoda but never did anything with it. It was just a fast outline and it ended up getting stowed away for future use. When I got to college, I was given a project with the theme “duality”. I’ve always liked Star Wars and I thought Darth Maul looked cool as far as villains go, so I dusted off my Episode I Yoda sketch and found a use for it.

You can see the final version here. My professor hated it, of course. She told me it was too much like a comic book and not “real art”. That may be, but I bet you can make a lot more money off comic book drawings than anything she ever did.

The drawing in the middle was also made for a project in college. I can’t remember exactly what the topic was, but I know it involved something with colors. One of my favorite artists/illustrators is Mary Grandpre’. She’s probably best known for her illustrations for U.S. versions of the Harry Potter books. My Harry Potter drawing was meant to have a much more detailed background, but I simply ran out of time. I only had a week to complete the drawing and it took longer than I expected to blend all the colors in Harry. I still like this picture a lot, though.

Here’s a larger view. This was my first successful “experiment” with Prismacolor pencils. I really like them a lot because you can blend colors so easily. Once again, my professor (a different one) hated it. “Illustration is not art” says they. “Illustration is some of the best art,” says I.

Last but not least, a picture of Anakin and company from Episode II. This is just something I did in one night in my mom’s basement. Like Yoda, it’s graphite pencil on bristol board. None of my professors had the chance to hate this one because they never saw it. Here is the Anakin portrait.

My all time favorite artist is James Gurney (Ironically enough, one of my most hated artists is Thomas Kinkade, Gurney’s roommate in college.) I have an autographed poster hanging above my couch. His oil paintings for his Dinotopia books are simply amazing.

I also enjoy Mary Grandpre’ (The Harry Potter books) and Drew Struzan (Lots of movie posters, especially for Star Wars).

Perhaps, once I get out of the Navy, I can return to something that offers a little more creativity. Until then, hi ho, hi ho…

Thanks to the large amount of snow that Ohio received in the past week, my youngest brother and his friends were able to construct the most offensive snow creation the small town of Rittman has ever seen. While I have not witnessed this phenomenon first hand, I have it on good authority that each testicle is over 5 feet in diameter and the erectile centerpiece is over 10 feet high.

Also of note, this fine firm frozen feat was established in the front yard of the house, where it’s featured for all to witness. Also, it’s conveniently lit at night for those traveling by automobile to oggle and awe.

Admission is free and the exhibition is expected to remain on display until, like the real thing, it just shrivels to the point where it no longer impresses anyone.