me=kind of a big fat liar.

well, all that talk about "summer! " and "finished!" was apparently an outrageous lie. i mean, i'm still finished, but i forgot about my little friend here. he's a netsuke (a japanese charm/toggle-type sculpture), made of one cubic inch of porcelain, i.e., very small. he is probably the only thing i made in ceramics and didn't immediately want to hurl from the fourth floor balcony of the commons. and he has little underneath feet.


end!

final final project! starring: my hands.

the semester is done. summer is here. and making its big debut: the last of my final projects, officially titled "A KID'S GUIDE (or for anyone who's curious) TO THE REALLY cool, not-taught-in-schools but totally super-mega IMPORTANT skills, strategies, and other THINGS IN LIFE." complicated, to say the least.

first up is a (shoddily compiled) image of several views of the actual book itself. then the nice spreads from inside. then the book all open and crazy looking. it's bound in a modified squash style, for any of you book-making nerds out there, and closes with a jazzy purple slip band (seen below). the actual illustrations and text were all hand-done in ink and gouache, then scanned and cleaned up a little and printed (so i could arguably make millions! or not) to make the final specimen you see before you.




the end! i start my screenprinting class on thursday, so there should be something fruitful from that, AND i am using the summer as a testing ground for my "oh god i have so many things to do, can i slash will i choose to, and actually follow-through with, making some semblance of art too?!" fear that my unavoidably official senior-status has forced to the surface. so i'm working on some things to that end as well. i'm also holding down about twelve different jobs this summer, sticking around in baltimore, and hopefully taking some semblance of a vacation to nyc at some point. and trying to iron out my thesis. and i have about 5 months' worth of daily illustrations scanned into my computer, waiting to be... something more exciting. so, the moral of the story is hopefully my blog will remain active with proof of these lofty goals taking place throughout the summer. so stay tuned!

did it just get incredibly full of rage in here, or is it just me?

here they are, en masse. the bane of my existence for the past semester. the reason that i wore my embarrassing pink running shorts in public too many times to count, and that the automatic answer to "what are you doing today?" was inevitably followed by a dramatic sigh of defeat instead of an actual response essentially every weekend. in case i haven't made it abundantly clear (perhaps with the number of times that i uttered "fuck ceramics" at a remarkably high volume, often in the ceramics studio, always met with dirty glares from the students that actually like smushing clay into deeply conceptual vessels), me and ceramics did not so much see eye to eye. i'm glad i learned to throw, but beyond now being able to generate a sweet tableware set should i ever feel decidedly masochistic, i do not feel at all compelled to ever enter a ceramics studio again. that being said, here's what came of my toil.

first up is my final, a tea set with tea leaf fortunes actually sculpturally slipped into the cups. i read up on how to read tea leaves, bought loose black tea and a practice teacup with optimum leaf-reading capabilities, drank, swirled, read, and documented the fortunes, then recreated them. but part of the fun is that where one person sees a grasshopper, another sees a whale. so it's all a little ambiguous. which you would never expect from fortune-telling, obviously.

this is my "historical vessel combined with modern mass produced vessel addressing a pressing current issue" vessel. yeah. did i mention how much i love ceramics? it's about this article i read (on digg, because man, i'm just that classy with my research) about how if you took all the water on the planet (oceans, ice caps, moisture in the atmosphere, etc.) and compared it to the actual earth, it would be like comparing a marble (water) to a grapefruit (planet). global warming is hilarious, is the moral of that story. anyway, so this thing is giant-ish, like 16 inches tall, 13 wide and about 8 or 9 deep at its fattest point.

and the bowls. they... are bowls. deeply, deeply conceptual bowls. that's about the it. never again, is all i can say about that.

unnecessary drumroll.

after an emotionally traumatizing day of lessons in nothing-prints-out-as-nice-as-it-looks-on-screen-or-in-real-life-ology, i played angry frisbee for twenty minutes, then decided it was time-wasting time. so here we are. because i also happen to be fast approaching the end of finals time (supporting evidence of the severity of the above learning curve), this is also the time for the big reveals of all the things i've been promising and hinting at for weeks on end. and because the print-outs look like balls, here are the nicer, but not quite as nice as in person, spreads and such for my illustrated version of 'freak the mighty', a young-adult-ish book.





the book is written from max's perspective (the big kid, purple sweatshirt), about his unlikely friendship with kevin, aka freak (the little kid). the two of them play to one another's strengths to conquer the world! or, you know, go on adventures and things. a surprisingly depressing book, i found out as i reread it, like bridge to terebithia's lesser counterpart. it was also made into a (pretty awful) movie with kieran culkin. i illustrated the book as max's journal (featured in the book, as the book itself) and fleshed it out to accompany the text. there are all sorts of "knights of the round table" references throughout the book as well, hence the horses and "fair guineveres" abound. the end! ooh, except the book would arguably have a full page illustration like this for each of the twenty-five chapters in the book, i just don't have them all because, um, yikes.