long day.

morning: pulling flags from Veteran Cemetary with my brothers' boy scout troop, at like 8am. Learned a lot of names. Avoided a lot of spiders.

geekout: there were two spanish american war veteran gravestones.

problem: after a few years, walking through a graveyard doesnt bother me.

afternoon: went to two libraries and read the local church bulletin, which is usually hilariously bias.

geekout: found a Hans Christian Anderson story book in the library, with pictures of Anderson's cutouts.

problem: the bulletin was about the Holy Spirit-as fire and air- being the forces that 'shapes landscapes' and 'pulls the boat across the sea'. in short, it was about male (fire and air) triumphing over female (earth and water). it still bothers me that the priest used the elements and pagan symbols to get his point across.

night: carnival is in a local parking lot. everything is overpriced.

geekout: there was a spinning ride that looked a lot like a UFO, and i remembered all the SciFi theories for gravity- having an inflated spinning doughnut.

problem: felt disconnected from crowd- lots of the rides were swinging-based, and no matter how many Gs, they were really calming. most of the other people were screaming.

experimenting with real watercolor.

UP. omg clouds. the whole time I just stared at them the whole time... and there was the whole balloons + leafblower idea, which was amazing *vague on purpose*.

drawings left in school. it was a nice rapunzel design.

word of the day: Extrapolation. an inference derived from known facts.

summer's the worst, summer love is a scam.

should i be learning how to paint/color using computers? Like photoshop? I'd rather learn how to use a pencil. and later, I'll use a pen tablet. That's the next thing, after landscapes and real watercolor. After that, I'll try oils with painting. I think oil painting is part of Art Bootcamp.

i had this cutout/painting idea for Rapunzel, but its in school. I'll see if i can make a series of cutouts/paintings. Painting would only be for the backgrounds, and the characters will be cut out. Grimm or Anderson? I have a Grimm book, so Grimm.

current projects. most are due in the next 2 weeks.

STACart man vs. machine ebony pencil drawing.

Film- must edit SOuL CANDY on FinalCut. Must learn FinalCut first. Find music for it, get brother to write music?

Cutout project in Art. Bring in the construction paper. Draw out outlines and thumbnails.

PANdemic. Lead a team of people to make a color theory mural based on the works of Paul Klee. Lots of squares.

Learn Pitman Shorthand.

Midsummer night's dream poster project character designs.

From left: Helena, Demetrius (painful angle. lets call it cubism. worst haircut evers.), Hermia, and Lysander. I know Lysander is based off a characture of someone, but I forgot. Maybe a Hirshfield picture.

who are the people in your neighborhood, x3, oh who are the people in your neighborhood? the people that you meet each day.

this guy was picking up his grandson from elementary school. the kid was really cute.

and there is a design for an unpretty princess. "ugly" is too harsh a word. she's bored, and she's royalty. she is the cousin of the real princess (the deer-eyed prince killer), and she's a changeling. not the evil kind but like the exchanged baby at birth kind. she shouldn't have perfect posture, or she should have perfect posture. no inbetween there. the squiggles next to her are supposed to be a dragon shoulder.

if only, if only, the woodpecker sighed.

monday, i got to see Angels and Demons. tickets are a lot cheaper when someone else pays for them. Angels and Demons could have been funny if i hadn't spent the whole time wishing for one major chord from the violins. i still prefer straightforward action movies and animated movies.

i ordered a medium hi-C and it was gihugeic:

post number 100.

not a good day.

i was actually trying to sit still in church thismorning (i usually bring a book or sketch), and the lady sitting next to me gave me a pencil and paper. what's worse is that i accepted it.

behold, a tired king with dog ears. wow the axis is skewed a lot more than i thought. oh, well.

a subway in nyc.

11:30pm. E train to Jamaica, local.

i sit next to a dozing woman, about 50-something with pepper hair. she's tired.

there is a thin, angled black woman with a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 1-year-old. she's a bit harsh.

the 4-year-old sits with other relatives farther down the car. he sings his ABGs the whole time. so cute.

there's a black man sitting straight across from me with a face like snoop dog- the angular chin, the nose, the elven face angle. he has brand-new clothes.

there's a darker man next to him, who is basically shrek with small ears.

he speaks with his wife(?), who has really really big lips and a tiny nose.

next to her is another black woman who wore all black. she read a Hair playbill. he hair was short, and she may have been scared or crying at one point. she had pointy flats.

there is a crazy ranting man that the car wants to ignore. he was a war veteran, and he doesn't trust dentists. he feels like he's at war with people, and he has no problem getting a granade. he cant be more than 35.

there is a man across from him who tells him to Shh and 'dont say things like that'. by the end of the line, the man had a steely gaze on the ranting man.

there was a group of giggling girls  (all black too. actually, my family and the lady next to me and the ranting man were the only white people). by their clothes, they were well-off financially. they got off at the JFK stop.

there is a hispanic man sitting next to the mother-of-three. he listens to his ipod and tries to ignore the chaos around him. his converse are brand-new.

like as a hart desireth the water brooks.

i can hear my little wristwatch ticking.

it's late, and i don't have much to do this weekend. i've already worked at the art studio twice this week and i'll be teaching a bassoon lesson monday. i have an english paper, but thats nothing to worry about.

i started learning pitman shorthand. once i was able to memorize (on some level) the basic consonants and some vowels i could write a little. it gets confusing.

i remembered an off-topic lecture from band about child language development: a child will babble at first to try to make any sound. as does the deaf child learning sign language. i guess that i cannot learn shorthand by being right all the time- start babbling with the symbols. i remember looking for the symbols for the vowels sounds of 'journal'. in normal speech, i would pronouce 'journal' as 'jer-nle'. but some people may pronounce it as 'jer-nahl'. very confusing.

flicked another beetle out my window. ive heard that in Indian hotels, the decent ones anyway, there are lizards in each room to keep the insect population under control. perhaps i should just get one big spider. a trained spider. like Cpt. Hook had in that JV Hart book.

saw three movies today:

charlie chaplin's City Lights. overall, it was a better movie than modern times and gold rush, but i still like Modern Times a lot better. except for the bread-dance of Gold Rush.

some version of Robin Hood, with Uma Thurman as Marian. this version had so much myth in it. there were pagan rites and there was Marian the godess and robin as her hero. there was even a Saxon festival of fools for the coming of sping, and flowers in Marian's hair at her wedding. it was amazing in that sense. im sure modern critics would dub it a terrible movie. checking: ohnos, the Tomatometer has no opinion.

and there was a four hour special on Hans Christian Anderson on the Hallmark movie channel. i dont know how i sat through that. i thought that the acting was great. and it got me thinking again about fairy tales.

palate knife

it's late. im over yesterday. not totally, but enough. i just dont like working hard for things when other people dont. not much drawing.

finished the workshop painting. i really like how it came out. i fully plan to use the texture-painting in the future- it's simple to do and it looks interesting. my painting came out as it was designed. if anything, the painting didn't have the same quality of shape/line that the drawing/color test had. But that's okay, cuz i got to learn how to paint with a palate knife.

pics from cathryn:

whole thing

the shoulder/collar area

the face area

it's okay to be angry at people, but you have to do something about it. right now im at the point in the school year when no one wants to do anything, and I'm doing so many things I love. Mostly art things. And just no one around me is motivated, and its frustrating when I need cooperation from these people to get things done. i want to do it all myself and look back at them and say You didn't care.

i want to fell bad for them, but i dont. and it's okay that you can be angry.

from the Imagineering book: "No show is better than a bad show."

literally 'shades of black' for color mural. umm, the colors transition into black eventually. and theres no transition within the black tiles. the circles just felt right.

pics

pics.

i got bored and found the plate on the table. the lunchtrays are made out of sturdy cardboard. why not? Blue marker. The crone, the maid, and the mother. with the same hair.

Oberon the fairy king. Theres so much symmetry in the design that i just couldnt add a crown. I pictured the King and Queen as Pharohs, and as immortals they would be almost without time. This is his face whenever Titania bothers him. Black pen. I love how the nose and the ear are like opposite shapes. Plus, the eye has no opposite shape, so it stands out more. Magic Trolls and the Troll Warriors. Remember King No-Laugh?!

SHADES of BLACK. like my soul lols.

workshop with Cathryn: today i learned that i really reallllly need to stop and stand back for a second. this also comes from the specific vs. general. Specific is when you have to paint a part a specific way. the general, when you stand back and see the affect and the shapes and the colors. it's a very good thing to balance.

while writing my paper i came upon more than one problem with general and specific. In history, i usually do not attempt to distinguish between the two, except for the 'Major Themes' that each kids gets pounded into their brain. Like the 'containment of communism' theme of Cold War. But I cannot, for ex, tell you that the Tet Offensive was less or more important than the fact that women in WWII would draw lines on their legs to represent stockings.

on painting: i loved the video yesterday by Margaret? just the method of painting is so decisive- one layer after another after another. if something doesnt feel right, it doesnt feel right. just do another one. or flip it over and consider it that way.

circles in the shades of black: one of the visual themes of the PANdemic mural is that eventually all color lines transition into black tiles, which are filled with squares of 'shades of black'. It seemed too much, too much of the same. There's no transition. So I added a circle right in the middle of the page and added the dark tiles around it. I think it really lets the tile, and hopefully the mural, breathe.

Primary sources and secondary sources.

listening to: Venus in Furs, velvet underground

i have aprx two hours to write the bulk of a major history paper. thesis: there was more media coverage of war during Vietnam than WWII.

drew on a plate today. the typical lunch trays are made of sturdy paper. they'll be added in eventually. porbably not today.

flash change in the world: what if those guys at Panera, when they write your name down, officially changed your name? So, when the guy said my name was Lissy, it would change to Lissy forever. sucks for the guy ordering at the register that has a broken 'e' key ^_^.

characters

ss papers aren't fun.

a few character design pages. I finally saw Black Cauldron yesterday. its a cross between lord of the rings, star wars, and the sword in the stone. there's a Smeagol, a magic sword, a wizard, an evil overlord, the Smeagol character dies off a rocky ledge into magical liquid/plasma. theres a princess, too. i can't remember names because they were all extremely english.

first page is the characterization of my own face. or, how other people may see my face. the nose is never quite right. each head on the first page was about 2 inches tall. the other one was a bit smaller. that's the killer princess. DEER EYES. her color is like twisted around and sewed or something- it was in a Robin Hood movie, I'm sure of it. i cant seem to draw her face.. deadly. or like full of hate. it doesn't work, yet. the middle head was more failure than success with that 'hate' look.

using this poster to get more well-defined facial expressions. and then extending all these to the body, in multiple positions. should be a nice undertaking.

day

the post-ap schedule today:

1 watercolor PANdemic

2 watercolor PANdemic

3 Sub in SS- drawing

4 Band

5 Reading in english.

6 drawing and painting 1. (design/color/colored pencil)

7 STACart. (design/drawing)

8 STACart.

9 STACart.

and my chem teacher from last year (style totally stolen from Craig McCracken). some sorta sweater and pants... on a packet that tells me what to do for an english paper. i think this might be handed in. oh, well.

i thought that the differences between arm widths would bother me, but it doesn't.

it's morning, and i shouldn't be awake enough to type, but i just remembered somethings:

1. i prefer my goldfish normal, without the painting behind it to give it color. i think the colors don't add anything that people can't add themselves, and they certainly don't change the overall tone of the piece. 

2. my verbal communication skills get totally shot when im concentrating on painting.

now, i don't want to change this.

theres a princess, any princess, take a look they're all like me

just had the terribly great idea of having a princess that was stuck at a castle with a witch-dragon, and the princess kills any prince or knight that come to save her, the way the witch-dragon told her to. It's like Amazon. Anyway, the witch laughs to herself because she switched the Princess with her own daughter. So that her own daughter will be on the throne, and the Queen's daughter will live a life with the witch, doing labor (sustainable life) and killing princes. and like, the Queen is some neat and fancy lady. Whoa matriarchy vs patriarchy.

my mind races.

typed this wearing red-tinted glasses i got from Friendly's a couple forevers ago.

Klee

ok. im going to be fully ready for tomorrow's painting. i feel like im running a workshop. im making 8 tiles of mock-up: 

red-orange, 

orange-yellow, 

yellow-green, 

green-blue, 

blue-purple, 

purple-red, 

red-black,

black.

technically, if there's a black tile, there should be the beginning white tile. whatever. this is only a model of the actual, and as long as the idea goes across, everything will be fine.

I really really like the idea that only one person is moving at a time for the bittersweet symphony film. If we can get a dolly, and have a lot of people be still, it will be so friggin awesome. i think it's great that stac people can say 'wow thats a great idea lemme throw out everything my group did and do it'.

drawings in blue crayola marker.

edit: the colors look great. more later.

invisible castle's hostile takeover

i saw star trek again, as celebration for the end of ap biology. there were 4 groups in the theater, about 10 people. i took notes. most of them were along the lines of 'i didnt think things could go boom in space.' and other comments on impossibilities, like firing photon torpedoes when the shield is up. i didn't know that was possible. i also got to draw some of the shots- some of the large spaceship shots were amazing in terms of shapes and colors.

workshop: i feel like cathryn and i are on different pages, but both see the same general picture. learned a very valuable technique- dry brush painting. it really brings out texture and is really nice for blending. i also like working at the larger size. at least 2' x 2'.

i've had a few ideas for the art show. i feel like any ideas i have now require more time, and that rushing them through development would be bad. a few thumbnails for the Invisible Castle idea:

top left down, top right down: invisible castle. invisible castle, under attack. invisible castle, conquered (normandy's flag). invisible castle falls to ruin. invisible castle, rediscovered (archaeologist).

i think i like the second one best, the normandy takeover. but this is a concept thats conceivable. it's also an excuse to learn basic landscape techniques. but it's not a good idea to learn that much in such a short amount of time.

i forgot to re-color my nails all nice for the Mother's Day breakfast. i had a rusty purpley color that may have been a metalic red on my left hand and a olive/forest/icky green on the other hand. my grandpa, an old Navy man and Metropolitan Museum of Art union guy, pointed them out: port and starboard.

i looked it up when i got home. he was right. wow.

mr. Pink, no klingons, ap bio, bookshelf wars

Mr. Pink the right-brain economy spoke-man talks about the rise of the right-brain economy.

i was fully expecting to see klingons in the star trek movie. and Cardassians were mentioned. Why? They aren't in the series until at least the Next Generation. and Chekov didn't say that something was made in russia! but it was a good movie. great jokes, nice pacing (though a little heavy in action sequences and repeated action sequences), but good. 

today is ap bio study day. all afternoon. and then, i'll watch a disney movie tonight, or Iron Giant. something animated. i refuse to get worked up about this, but i dont want to do bad, either.

starting a campaign for a bookshelf. hopefully ill find an older, sturdy one. perhaps i'll rearrange my room before the summer ends. that's a decent excuse to clean and organize all the papery things. ill get new posters, too. the current 'muscles n bones' poster doesn't have everything labelled. im a little past a fifth grade classroom. with a muscles n bones poster, star charts, and national geographic's world map, i may need to get some more accurate posters. to the museum of natural history's gift shop!

i've found the Science HD channel. Huzzah!

started catching up on my star trek for the movie.

life domain kingdom phylum class order family genus species.

i'll name her goldy

AP bio test on monday. then stac in the afternoon (which may fry my brain even more), then Star Trek.

i was. . reprimanded today for lack of perfection, and it bothers me when my. . its not like 'level of artistic talent', but i dont like when someone claims that another person got so much better artistically from just the atmosphere of the first someone. it might be a lack of a compliment, or it might be someone's total love for the other person's work, but it doesn't feel right.

its like mispronouncing something. you are marked by such an impediment forever. and then someone younger than you gets complimented and even loved for saying something right. by now, you've already broken down your one mispronounced word into syllables, looked up its history, and can say it in three languages. it's aggravating.

fish-eye cutout. two hours? aboutish. singled-edged razor and paper, with temporary blue construction paper here. maybe it should be orange construction paper. it was an exhausting day. for size ratio, it needed to be put sideways to fit in the scanner. the man is about 6 inches, and has a weirdly shaped head.

sometimes in stac i feel like im distancing myself from people. like. . .okay, there are certainly times when i just want to yell shuddup to the room, and times when i want to snap at people for degrading their work, and sometimes when i know i should say 'you've really improved' but i end up saying something more negative. i don't think im unapproachable- i helped people who came to me- but a lot of times, i wouldn't want to deal with me.

ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.

looking for: a version of Peter Paul and Mary's It's Raining, from their children's cd.

i need a new music-player. and i dont really want an ipod. im still not sure why, but i know it's not a good reason. its like a bias towards La Quinta Inn- Holiday Inn is fine, but it's not La Quinta. i have a bias for Wendy's over BurgerKing, i won't eat fish. BurgerKing is perfectly fine, but it's not Wendy's. There's something about the iPod wheel that doesn't work for me. it's a great design, compatable, etc etc. Nike and New Balance! I'm a new balance person, but there's no problem with Nike.

star trek movie comes out tomorrow. i know the general caste of the original show, but i havent technically seen more than one episode. i've interested to see if the klingons have lobster-heads or not.

no color mural:

White: higher self: (dreams, aspirations, what i positively intend)

so far, i have a poem about a queen, written in iambic verse. its a little too open, i think, which is why its not here.

Grey1: how they see me:

i'm still thinking about this, because this shade of grey changes each year, usually according to how i see myself. in general, the themes would be around seriousness, pencils, and i just picture a very straight line with little lines in it going through looping lines. but that's not words. so i'll have to work on that.

Grey2: how i see me:

originally i mistook this for 'how i see them', and wrote a short story about that. it's not a very good short story, but it centered around smell and mixed up the other senses, which i like.

Black: lower self: (the selfish part that you don't like)(capitalizations and uncapitalizations on purpose)

Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry

i'm not sorry. i'm not sorry. i'm not sorry.

Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry Sorry

i'm not sorry. i'm not sorry.

i'm not sorry. i probably won't be sorry.

painting, being sorta messy, and planting

cathryn's workshop! more later, and explanation first:

i'm partially person. my handwriting isn't neat, my clothes aren't quite folded in their drawers, my books are in their own piles on the floor. painting works well for me because i can nudge it in the right direction to make a painting and i can get messy.

painting in general is an action of mess- i don't really know what's going to happen when i put a brush on the paper/or/canvas. sometimes something coherent comes out and looks decent. sometimes painting results in a fruitless mess, but that's okay, too.

in the workshop today i made such a mess. but i definately learned a lot about palate brushes, and i have an outline and underlining texture for my painting. its a good design, too, i think. the coloring was interesting, and i got to use negative space (!) to connect the face with the background better. <3>

this summer's garden is turning into a medicinal/culinary herb garden. with the tomatoes and radishes on the side. i even found chocolate mint at Hicks last weekend, and that should be interesting in tea. That, and peppermint, spearmint, lemon balm, chamomile, anise, parsley, sweet basil, chives. so far. the chives and lemon balm grew back from last year. the lavender and rosemary did not.

story vs. game:

the protagonist of a story is a character, a separate entity. the protagonist of a game is a person. people learn from example from stories, and learn from experience in games.

arts

the workshop face design (sorta a yucky hairstyle. <3>

metropolis post-it (drawn after the movie in a resturant):

princess and the frog

PRINCESS AND THE FROG CLIPS.

this is a movie i would wait outside a theater in the rain for. lasseter seems just a little overwhelmed... at least, he looks like he has another appointment. whatever. it looks great. i must see it more than once.

the Cathryn painting workshop. this should be an interesting workshop. hope to learn a lot, yada yada yada. . . i want to experiment more with acrylics in general. perhaps that's next year's thing. or this summer's project. this year i learned watercolor, and ive worked with acrylic and charcoal extensively for the first time. and ink, although that's still on the 'to Learn' list. I realized today how much i don't like prints, and that prints especially don't work for textured drawings. You get the feel of the art, but it isn't the same.

i've been reading the Imagineering Way, a little book about developing ideas with a group, making ideas a reality, the nature of ideas, and opening yourself to all possiblilties. i looked for quotes (ive highlighted most of the book) but none of them really work in this context, without their story. and some of them are just like: There's nothing you can screw up that can't be fixed. well, if people in stac followed that, they would make decisions more, wouldn't they?

fanfare and Klee

the kentucky derby. wow. theres a horseracing story:

each year for my grandpa's birthday, the whole extended family goes to Belmont for the day. grandma makes pnutbutter and jelly, grandpa, the aunts, and the uncles gamble. and if any one person wins too much, there's ice cream for all of us. no one wins that much. then we go to my aunt's house that's on the border of queens of nassau county and have bbq burgers. and most of us are sunburnt by then but don't really care.

so there's a certain comfort at the racetrack, just to be there without gambling yourself. i actually tried drawing the horses one year. i should do that this year. but it seems too much like... oh look at me i'm gonna use family bonding time to prove that i want to b an art-person. at the same time, WTH should i care- i need to learn how to draw horses.

i came up with a few examples of color-blending with watercolor. this is from a set i borrowed from Ganes, so its the same PRANG colors. Blue-Yellow. there are a few interpretations. and i really just wanted to paint.

note that these use a brick pattern for the placing of the squares. we'll just call them bricks. brick pattern works better for me, but Klee used more of a grid pattern. Gradatation is the change in color, from the first to the second. this can be through another color, a set of colors, or by interweaving the two original colors. Saturation is literally the same principle as the salinity of solutions: more dye, stronger/brighter color; low saturation in watercolor means there is more water. simple.

1st attempt: a more literal transition, with the same hues of two colors (blue and red). it doesn't work for me.

2nd attempt: different hues of the same colors (blue and yellow). theres some green in there, some orange in there, mixed in with the blue/yellow. it's more interesting, but the flow isn't right.

3rd attempt: this is what i think should happen, and is the hardest to do. color gradation from red to blue. there are greens and oranges mixed in here, one place or another, but the flow is intact. the saturation isn't as varied as it should be (in this pic, at least), but the purpose was to get a feel for the flow of color.

time, batman, shakespeare, Klee squares

it is 1:42AM at the current moment, the night of may 1st. technically, it is may 2nd, but that's by regimental time and not by biological time.

there was this god-awful batman tv show on today, and its plot was the same as an episode of magic school bus: person is ill, shrink to microscopic level to kill microorganisms. but this time, aquaman (a gung-ho mascot of the sea) and the atom (physicist doctor who likes plans) had to team up together and all that yada. at one point, aquaman calls a white blood cell for a steed to get through the capillaries, and names him 'platelet'. Atom says, 'that's fine, but it's a lymphocyte.' and i realized how much biology i know and what of it Ill be able to use after the AP exam.

yesterday i saw Toy Story, and realized just how amazing certain parts were. the little green men culture with the Claw, Mrs. Nesbit. Treasure Planet was also on today, and it may be one of the greatest versions of that story ive seen/read. The Great Illustrated version is good, and the Muppet version is... the Muppet version, but i mean treasure planet! dayamn that has nice characters.

reading a Midsummer Night's Dream in english. shakespeare makes so much more sense. there is enough information to get the point and story across, but there is also so much that is left to the imagination to fulfill. i, personally, think of Oberon and Titania as a cross between lord of the rings elves, troll dolls, and ancient pharohs.

i came back from seeing Wolverine. I read in the times that it was a bunch of action sequences with minimal story, but i got to check a few things off my list. 'Goddess' was checked off, 'Rejection of the Call', 'Belly of the Beast', 

i got pretty worked up today about not knowing what was happening with the squares of the mural. 'blending colors' can mean so many different things, and overactive imaginations don't exactly narrow down the meaning. i'm glad that i got to get my group to the color-blending point, as in we each had paint and tiles and assigned colors for each side. i wasnt really steady with people going 'what do we do now?' to me, as if i speak a magical language of art. i didnt like my tile. red and green clash too much, and it didn't feel right.

i would have preferred each person has a tile, with Klee-squares of their own color, and some connecting shapes/pattern into the next tile.

i like the tile projects a lot, though.

i'm really trying hard not to 'read people' from their artwork in regular art class. i'm pretty sure one girl at my table thinks people are all the same inside, and another girl sees people as steadiness in a changing (colorful) world. its so interesting.

i may be rejected from taking AP Psych next year due to not-A history grades. i don't understand what psychology, as a course, has to do with history. i understand why i needed to get a B or more in regents bio and chem to get into AP bio, but AP Psych is a whole nother sport. plus i intend to take the course to learn, not so that i can put it on a resume.