what is your childhood trauma?

um, i so fail at the consistent blogging thing this time around. like a lot. i could go on with the "blah, blah, lots of work, blah, blah, not enough sleep", but really, it's the same story for everyone, so i won't make excuses. me=the suck, i'm aware. but here's words on wheels. !!

words on wheels is an "illustrate a selected middle-schooler's poem and have it juried to be maybe printed for public transit in maryland" project. my poem is (as you can deduce, i imagine) about a little girl being told she's bad at art. how could i not illustrate a poem for a little girl who's sad because she's told she's bad at art? there were a lot of troublesome restrictions to the assignment like particular font size, color, placement, orientation, etc., etc., but overall it was a surprisingly enjoyable experience. also, i found out mine will for real be printed to go on buses and light rails and other public-type vehicles, so that makes it all the more agreeable. other peculiar trivia associated with this project: the poem i was originally given was plagiarized from a pretty terrible internet chain letter. by a sixth grader. how many different sorts of depressing is that?

i would close with the optimistic implication that i would post more later, but that would likely be a vicious lie. there are things to be shown, i promise, i just have to get around to actually, you know, showing them. don't judge. also, i have hit the "all my projects are independent" part of the semester, so things are less exciting to display anyway.

toooooooooolbox.

i'm unfortunately aware that it has been like a month since i last posted anything - tragic, unspeakable, unforgivable, etc., etc. floggings will be administered. let's get back into the groove with some response-respond pieces from the last few weeks, shall we?
first we have a "continuation" of two weird monster kid things that looked like they were yawning very symmetrically, thus sleeping very symmetrically, except one of them is maybe not really a monster. then more sleeping.this week's was "reversing" a food chain that said that snakes and frogs and deer-ish things and bunnies ate children. so instead, we have a silly blond boy with footie pajamas and a really big appetite. and an alice in wonderland-esque girl in a blue frock.

these were actually the first week's response-respond pieces, the ones i forgot to scan. it was an "exaggeration" of a boy quasi-hugging (think awkward family portrait) a skull-faced polo-wearing guy while holding baseball-type accoutrements. naturally, a crazy slide-tackle hug ensued. and a demented anatomy archer guy followed.and apparently by "last few weeks", i really meant "all the response-repsond pieces after the first one, since i haven't posted anything in like eight million years". sorry guys. this one is "questioning" a robot ripping off the head of some guy by, you know, making the robot a nerd in a robot suit? maybe? then a bird falls off a cliff, i'm not sure why. my random 'respond' pieces are bizarre, and usually completed very late at night.

so there you have it, all the response-respond pieces up to now. stay tuned for a cover design for one of these books, my "freak the mighty" book proposal comps, my words on wheels poster, and my christmas wrapping paper design. etc.! i promise i definitely probably won't be such a toolbox like this again.

response and respond.

i realize that they are a noun and verb of the same thing, but i couldn't really find a better way to differentiate between the two-part double-page spread sketchbook assignment i'm doing this semester. this time it's a response to the previous two-page spread based on a keyword (i.e., exaggerated, or oppositional), and another open-ended spread for someone else to respond to the following week. get it, get it?i forgot to scan last week, so i'll see if i can't get that book back later and scan them then.this week's response was an "oppositional" take on a farmhouse in a woodsy grove, so i decided on a tiny tree struggling to exist in a super-urban cityscape, that i decided to execute like wallpaper, you know, for fun. my 'respond' piece is a little girl afraid of the dark and psycho-killer-nightmare-monsters that dwell in the shadows. i'm gonna give these books the "hey i want to experiment with some mixed media" treatment, so i can play with new things and expand my repertoire without botching something i need to turn in. also, apologies abound for the minimal updates thus far. things are just getting underway-ish and ceramics is so not a scannable, web-friendly art (nor am i very good at it), so it's limiting how much i have to show for my efforts. also, because my illustrated book class is a long-term singular project, it has less 'in the meantime' sort of nice-to-look-at things. but i should have some character designs and turnarounds to show soon, so never fear.

"neo-crunches have a great respect for dolphins and think we should be more like them."

so it's been a little while, what with the whole 'no classes' thing, there hasn't been much in the way of updates. i did do all the work for my solo show coming up next month (more on that later) but i can't go and post it all over the web before it hangs in all its glory in the filling station, now can i? i gotta be at least a little sneaky.

so in the meantime, we have hipsters. specifically, "neo-crunch" hipsters as explained by robert lanham in the hipster handbook, which really is an actual book. Neo-crunches are essentially modern hippies who love recycling and marijuana, hate big corporations and showering, and wear tattered old clothing to hide the fact that they are financially secure, meaning basically, everyone that lives in boulder, co. the assignment was a full-page, half-page, and quarter-page, seen below in gouache and ink. it was pointed out to me that the middle lotus-pose zen-hipster looks like she really, really loves pot (and sort of loves wheatgrass juice), the baggie of granola kind of looks like pot, and the apple she's accessorizing with could easily be an apple bong. not so much the goal there, but it's still pretty accurate. the bottom neo-crunch is cutting holes in her jeans to discourage anyone from thinking she values worldy possessions, and the top hipster, my favorite, is since playing his banjo not for spare change, but to recycle your starbucks cups.

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.

hopefully it's not an even trade.

this is a little something i like to call "ultra-mediocre". i could be worse, i suppose, but whatever. i had absolutely no idea what this book was about, so i did what i could. the word was "aglow", which is what outside the windows is. not my best work, but there is some definitive shrugging going on in that regard because i have some much more important work to be done for finals and national portfolio day is this weekend, thus sucking any and all of my free time away from me. i did what i could with what i've got. so sue me. my other projects are shaping-up pretty a-okayly, so we'll see if the mediocrity was worth it.

"grand-slam-home-run-slam-dunk"

so today in class, much to my "oh man i hope we get out early"-shaped chagrin, we had a surprisingly great in-class exercise in character development. it won over my lazy butt real fast. it was a collaborative assignment, to design a toy line that worked singularly and as a set, that somehow combined (think voltron or power rangers) into a more exciting new toy if you bought the whole set. so my group developed the tentatively named "friend-versibles", a series of plush dolls that flip inside out to form parts of a larger animal, corresponding to the environment from which they come. here, we see the safari photographer, part of the "jungle" series, who combined with her other two counterparts (a hawaiian-shirt-and-sunglasses-donning tourist and a khaki-and-combat-boots safari guide) who all flip inside out and attach to one another to form an elephant. other proposed series included a cow/farm series, a bear/forest series, a dragon/fantasy series, and a whale/ocean series (with flippers and scuba gear!). better yet, each individual animal part could be velcroed to the other animal parts to form crazy new animal friends like the cow-lephant-ragon, or whatever. and each human character would have removable accessories to mix and match with other human or animal characters. cool! now please don't go be a douchebag and go market our brilliance and make our millions. copyright, patent pending, blah blah leave us alone. anyway, super fun.

also firmly entrenched in the three-dimensional world is my final for that class, since it, well, has to be 3-d anyway. my super-well-received proposal was for another plush doll, this one with super long arms with magnets in the hands so she can hug the sad metal city things. hug-a-lamp-post! hug-a-fire-hydrant! hug-a-street-sign! hug-a-mailbox! awwww, right? everything needs a hug. she would also wear a mustard yellow jumper, which is also great. brian loved this, and i was super-glad because i love it too. i'm excited. excited enough to teach myself to make plush dolls for this class, and go gallivant around town photographing her hugging every sad metal city thing.

can i also put out there as a side note how much i hate formatting multiple image blog posts? they never work and the images go all crazy and align themselves willy-nilly with nothing in particular and throw off the nice aesthetics and no matter how hard i try they won't go where i want. pout.

when in doubt: GO CRAZY.

awww, crazy tin-can robot tirade. can't really apply the blanket "story of my life" caption to this one, go figure. the story is about, well, a a tin-can robot looking for his future, though the story digressed into, i don't know, a whole lot of weird shit, like carousels and bagpipes and bobcats and sexy android ladies. i was unclear about what was happening, so... TIN-CAN ROBOT SMASH. what an eloquent solution to my confusion. he goes crazy, swats all the weird shit in the story away, so i guess the next person can decide where he's going. also, my original word was "airbag", then i unceremoniously cheated and swapped it with rebecca for "fish", which worked out because a seahorse had already shown up in the narrative. weird story, that's for damn sure.

p.s. happy thanksgiving! i love cranberry sauce.