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?

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.

ZOMBIE HORSE OH SHIT

so here's a whole slew of sketchbook things again, of varying quality, as per usual. first, a forties-era cover. nothing's really forties-ish about it except her dress, but shhhhh. and, the book had a lot of blue in it? rough week, this one was.
the next two are in that same book, perpetuating the "a lot of blue" thing. i rather like the first one, a "parody" of a weird-shaped thing abstract thing that i decided was a big angry pile of laundry trying to scare the little boy in the dark.

next up, "glorification" of "ZOMBIE HORSE OH SHIT!" there's a crown? yeah. this does not do the original justice, but i never was one for drawing zombie horses very well at all. and then a sad man trying to sprout something out of what turned out to look like a mound of tar. not so promising.

finally, a nice cheat-y week: "in addition to" the cut paper puppy? A GIRL HUGGING HIM. god i'm predictable. then a little boy in footie pajamas escaping out his window into the night. i'm okay-ish with this one.and break!