dailies 6/22-6/28.

latest week of dailies here: pre-college is one week down, three to go, but is actually going really-super-mega-ultra well, so no complaints here. it also let me go see the sweet "ballyhoo!" poster show at the national portrait gallery yesterday, so that was even more awesome.

sunday, june 22nd: "the smile and high pitch mislead everyone."
monday, june 23rd: "i think i'm winning them over."
tuesday, june 24th: "speaking in front of an audience totally highlights your bad habits."
wednesday, june 25th: "i set a new standard for foot-in-mouthery today."
thursday, june 26th: "insulating myself from the opportunity for failure. and success."
friday, june 27th: "wasting time trying to anticipate problems doesn't make them go away."
saturday, june 28th: "he's performing stand-up without a mike whenever he opens his mouth."

that's it. i've hit a few speed-bumps (i.e. negative free time) trying to get some more personal work off the ground, so i'm trying to work out those details to have more to show soon. fingers crossed!

dailies 6/15-6/21.

here we have another week of dailies, also commemorating the start of the pre-college program, aka employment, for me for the next month. posts may be scarce since i will be high school student-ing like crazy as they take classes and explore baltimore via me, their tarc (short for the very long teaching assistant/resident counselor). so without further adieu:

sunday, june 15th: "moderating an insect war."
monday, june 16th: "i really, really need new shoes. like really."
tuesday, june 17th: "my susceptibility to fiction-induced wallowing i'll never fully understand."
wednesday, june 18th: "apparently, my reputation precedes me."
thursday, june 19th: "it's nice to know i'm not a mean drunk."
friday, june 20th: "i'm bad at being a girl."
saturday, june 21st: "here's to some optimism."

that's it for me tonight. like i said, don't take the inevitable lapse in communication as any sort of purposeful shun-- i'd really like to get some of my own work done during this next marathon-month, but i'm not sure fruitful it will really be. i will certainly be trying, and there will at the very least be weekly dailies updates, so it won't be a total blackout.

dailies 6/8-6/14.

round two! i'm sleepy, slash, have to wake up earlyish tomorrow, so right to the point tonight.


sunday, june 8th: "i can't tell where my skin stops and my clothing begins."
monday, june 9th: "door swelled, frame did not."
tuesday, june 10th: "the 'last lots of things' day."
wednesday, june 11th: "i'll never know, really."
thursday, june 12th, : "the lurching pit of the stomach feeling minus the generally associated amusement."
friday, june 13th: "taking the survival of this bonsai as a personal challenge."
saturday, june 14th: "almost too many weird the same-ities."

sorry for the lack of frothy banter tonight. time for me to be asleep.

end of a really short era.

okay, i did the best i could to get these up in a timely manner, but since i suck a little and held out for so long already, it did not seem fair to draw out their debut even more by posting separately. so, all at once, here are the last of my screenprints, "just in case", "take me away", and "not in the closet or under the bed", respectively. the last one was in the print exchange that we did in combination with the letterpress class next door to us. it was pretty okay, i got a couple pieces that i liked a whole lot, so that was a win.

now that the class is over, i'm thinking about how to go about my work for the rest of the summer, and how maybe, just maybe, to incorporate screenprinting (or some of the things that i learned through the process) into my upcoming work. i liked it a lot, like a lot a lot, but practicality is nearly non-existent with the pursuit of screenprinting as a method of illustration. also, my screen was snatched before the class even ended, another lovely hiccup in the road to becoming "alissandra the screenprinter." so i'm considering other applications of the breakdown of shape (ahem, *coughcollagecough*) and line, to go about things a little differently than i have been. hello, experimentation phase. stay tuned for some inevitably bad illustrative tangents coming soon.

and, as a last ditch effort to recover some of the costs of wooing my new friend screenprinting: since i have a whole lot of duplicates of these bad boys (and my postcards, and my misleading second grade instructional resource poster about things that may or may not fly), if any of you are dying to have, say, a giant toothy monster shadow on your wall, let me know and i'd be happy to hook you up. they're cheap! okay, shameless and marginally convincing sales pitch over.

PREMIERE: dailies 6.1.08-6.7.08.

at last, i have committed to uploading my dailies regularly, to avoid the "weird quasi-useless 5-month backlog" syndrome from which i am currently suffering. on june 1st (conveniently a sunday), i continued my regular daily illustration habit (one 3x3 inch square plus one sentence plus one color equals daily journal-diary-sketchbook-combo-platter for alissandra) but now, they will appear here once a week, instead of, well, appearing nowhere except the tiny tiny moleskines in which they are initially drawn. chronologically from left to right:

sunday, june 1st: "oops i'm a glutton."
monday, june 2nd: "i get an unfortunate number of good ideas in the shower."
tuesday, june 3rd: "i've grown too accustomed to actually having time."
wednesday, june 4th: "i think my pie really did trump her pie, amazingly enough."
thursday, june 5th: "i kind of love screenprinting, like a lot a lot."
friday, june 6th: "nothing like a healthy dose of 'running into your professor whom you like a whole lot at the liquor store' to simultaneously awkwardize and awesomize your evening."
saturday, june 6th: "i have too much crap."

i prefer the dailies with a little more volume to the forms (like these ones), but i'm not sure how practical the week-by-week method will be with that included. one step at a time! also, sorry to have still not uploaded screenprints three, four, or five, but they are still living in the dolphin building, as my final crit is tuesday, slash, i packed up my scanner (moving! tomorrow! awesome!) so i couldn't scan 'em anyway. soon soon. after that, i will be trying my hand at a new mystery project for the rest of the summer. and by mystery, i really mean i have no idea what it is yet.

too bad the stamps they sell at postal ops are dumb slash ugly.

as promised, here is the postcard set that i screenprinted. there are two "hi"-type cards, two "i miss you"-type cards, and two "you're swell"-type cards for all your postcard sending needs, all spoken by inanimate objects of sorts. clockwise, we've got a camera, a mountain (slash jello mold, according to one of my classmates--oops), a banjo, a coffee cup, a lamp, and a cupcake. yay!
i ended up screening 28 sets of these, though there were definitely some (read: many) casualties in the registration process. and besides, misregistered/streaky/flawed screenprints are part of the charm of the medium, yeah? sort of badly done or not, i like them, so i may revisit the idea for my extra-mega-bonus assignment(!!) that i am going to be able to squeeze in before the class ends next week, now that i suck less. i finished up another print yesterday, and, barring any sort of catastrophe, will square away my fourth (and last required) print tomorrow. rather than drag my feet on this last piece, i think i can squeeze one more print out of the class, while i still have access to the facilities. we'll see, but either way, keep an eye out for those other two at the very least coming up!

brought to you by the dolphin building.

i've spent the better part of the last eleven days of my life in the dolphin building (which, as it turns out, is named for the street it lives on, not for any other highly unlikely but far more exciting reason involving a mica patron that just happens to be a friendly water-dwelling mammal. i mention this only because i went to - and gave tours at - this school for two and a half years before i figured out why the hell the printmaking building was called the dolphin building, apparently because i'm very dumb.) moral of the story is that i have only not been there when eating (actually only sometimes true, as my morning yogurt and coffee is consumed daily in class), sleeping, or spending money on screenprinting things that i can't so much afford. there was also a highly fruitful trip to the book thing (baltimore's free book store slash best thing ever) in there somewhere, which yielded many a book that i had been eyeballing and/or longing desperately for, though it definitely did not help the "downsize your life to move next week" plan i have been trying to put into action. but enough about that.

the class is actually really great, as is the professor, whose face is screenprinted onto his apron (but in a good way, i promise). his music collection has remarkable overlap with mine, so the cds played in class sound like my ipod on shuffle. or what my ipod on shuffle would sound like if it weren't way busted. who knew ipods made the sad mr.yuk, x-ed out eyeball, tongue-lolling face when they were dead? not me until right now. anyway, the only "assignment" for the class was a four-plus color 11x14 traditionally editioned print of fifteen. following that we have two open assignments and an optional print exchange. it sounded more terrifying to do that much work in two and a half weeks before i, well, did some of it. here's my editioned print, "some things that can fly." at first it seemed like a weird instructional resource poster for second graders. so i added some things that in fact CANNOT fly, so the smart kids will know better and the awesome kids will throw their toasters out the window and see if it sprouts wings.

i've actually finished my second project as well (see above, re: every waking hour), a set of postcards with well-wishing inanimate objects on them, but i just finished xacto-ing all 28 times 6 of them apart, and am now too tired to find the nice ones for scanning and editing and uploading and etc. so later. plus, there's more suspense that way, right?

also, june 1st marked the first day of my weekly daily upload goal, which is to say that i plan on uploading my daily illustrations once a week, instead of just drawing them for five months and now knowing what to do with them after the fact *coughmerightnowcough*. i'm still working on what i might do with said five months. any brilliant ideas?