christmas means refurbish and resolve.

so i'm home for winter break and apparently incapable of inaction, so i spent the last couple days uploading new work to my fancier, official-er website and revamping the navigation/design a bit (and waking up at 7:30 sans alarm or reason--why, god, why?). i like it much better now, so go see it in all it's splendor! the link is to the left.

also, maybe even more exciting, is the debut of my daily illustration project on my site, something never before seen, never gracing the pages of this blog! i (try to, anyway) do a daily illustration, and select a series of sixteen for each month (since i'm not quite up to daily after all.) to function as a loose visual journal. june through september are uploaded and available for viewing under the new 'projects' section of my portfolio, so go take a peek!

my new year's resolution? *DAILY* daily illustrations, so i would literally have one-a-day for, um, forever. october was a dicey, dicey month and december, ummm, was a miserable failure, so the rest of 2007 will not grace the site until january-ish (because i have a lot of work to do on them, and also because my scanner is 1700 miles away at the moment.) but i'll do my best to salvage them. but! 2008 will be a whole different story. probably. maybe.

who says finals can't be full of love?

hooray for hugs and love and plush and joy! this was the final version of the sketches for my "hug-a-city friend" that i posted a bit ago for my "character designed for a site-specific outdoor environment." final. she is almost all fleece, with felt mary-janes, hair, and facial features. her shoes are even removable yay.

the first photo is the "aw, look how cute!" one, so you can actually see her. the series of five photographs below that are the actual documentation of her serving her purpose - to go hug sad metal things in the city and cheer them up. she has super-strong magnets in her hands (underneath the hearts!), so she sticks to all manner of city objects. she also has one in the back of her right hand, so that she can hug around non-metal things and stick to herself.

photographing her proved to be hilarious, as cars were slowing to a crawl, pedestrians were talking to me (and her), and one guy even came and took a picture of me taking a picture of her. the weather was perfectly sad and overcast. and brian loved it. and so do i. also, for never having made anything 3d, and for *never* having made anything plush, or even sewn beyond like, a hole in my clothes, i was pretty damn pleased with myself.

swappy pen-pal art.

so this was a book cover design for "the book of lost things" by john connolly. we were partnered with sophomore illustration students in the u.k., who we art directed to design a cover for us (mine was "harriet the
spy" by louise fitzhugh) and vice versa. it was a really obscure slash jam-packed book to try and illustrate without having read it, but ultimately, i think it turned out pretty okay, if not a little confusing. not an easy assignment to get fully invested in for a final, but a lot of people had a lot more trouble with the art direction coming from their person, so i think i got off lucky.

departure, or, wow i love being not a fine-artist.

so here are a couple things from fibers, the only really substantial things i made in that class. the other large projects were a weaving (in which i wove mostly yarn, but also blue painter's tape and vcr cassette tape) and a presentation on victorian crazy quilts, spawning the first image, my final for that class. the rest was just in-class putzing around. overall, i suppose i really enjoyed the techniques we learned in that class, that was basically every type of fibers manipulation ever, but the class was still steeped in the crazy fine-arts attitude that i had forgotten existed since i'd been in illustration. that part pretty much sucked beyond the telling of it, but other than that, i was okay with it.

so the crocheted crazy quilt is not so much a quilt at all, but a glorified blanket, essentially. there was a loose concept tied into the fact that crazy quilts were luxury icons of "look how much expensive scrap velvet and silk and time i have on my hands that i can afford to lavish the surface of this quilt with embellishments and stupid little butterflies, etc.", while crocheting was considered "low art" associated with prostitutes. there was a bit of research i found indicating that they were called 'hookers' for all the crocheting they did (though nichole gives a different version of generation of the nickname). the surface has my full name, "alissandra corinne kachidurian seelaus", and the year crocheted on the surface, as an "IN YOUR FACE" signature, claiming the supposedly low art piece emphatically as my own. plus it's, you know, prettier that way.

the bottom part is my screenprint, painstakingly cut out off contact paper leaf by leaf on three screens and printed. i printed about two yards, and each leaf is about the size of a quarter. it's printed with dye, so it's embedded in the fibers of the cotton, not a surface treatment.

the end. i like the idea of making things (scarves, blankets, etc.), but fibers doesn't like being commodified. which is too damn bad, because i did it anyway. having these non-illustration classes is pretty okay in that regard, getting to make actual tactile objects (last semester, i made a book in photo.) next semester, the non-illustration elective will be ceramics. tea and coffee and such abound.

nothing ties a nice neat bow at the end of a narrative like automatic weapons.

this is it. my very last weekly double-page spread for concepts. this one didn't come with a word, only the goal of concluding the story. this one was called "deserving death", about a hit man/assassin whose family thinks he's a traveling salesman, who finds out that another agent similar to himself has been charged to take him out in his home. last page was him as an old man, wondering if he'd live long enough to see that age.

i now wish he was wearing a tie that was flapping emphatically over one shoulder as he dives dramatically through the air, guns a-blazin'. i kind of loved this assignment. next week we get to keep books in the order of highest sketchbook grades, so we'll see what all this work earned me, if anything worthwhile. there are a couple books that i have my eye on, i won't lie.

until then, i guess i'll have to settle for working my ass off on finals. monday will yield my final book cover (we haven't critted yet), and tuesday will produce my foray into the third dimension. unfortunately, the rain/snow/sleet has made baltimore extra-disgusting, so photographing my hug-a-friend hugging the city will be, um, gross. bummer.