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2014 - Blog Posts
so holidays are coming, which means more work and more family time, also I'm trying to get on testosterone so that's a lot of dragging my parents into therapy, also I'm trying to apply to grad schools, so I don't know how much time I'm going to have for art in the next couple of months.
To tide over my vast hoard of fans, here are my sketches and color tests for the other alien scouts, who I may one day do more complex pieces for.
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the first sketch of alien moon, fueled by boredom during the closing shift.
originally, I gave them really long fingers, but eventually I decided against that.
and also a very silly short comic.
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My scanner is morally opposed to my use of highlighter markers and my camera phone is only a bit better.
A trilogy of night shift doodles in my teeny tiny moleskine.
A fellow artist once told me "I thought you were drawings hands wrong, but I realized that you were drawings hands that look like your hands."
I guess my hands are a bit odd. Most of the joints on my fingers are hyperextended. Most people's fingers taper, with the fingertip being the narrowest. My fingertips are actually wider and fleshier than the rest of my finger joints.
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!~Pretty Alien II~!
Here's the full body version of my Pretty Alien Sailor Moon. The tentacles on the face are sensory organs, but the tentacles on the chest and lower back are limbs. The tentacles evolved as a way to carry one's young and still have full use of one's hands. The opposable thumb on the feet is what gives the impression that Sailor Moon wears high heels. The "skirt," like the "collar," is a wattle that's inflated during mating displays.
I might revist this as a traditional painting...
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Pretty Alien
Ok, so this is going to be the first in a series of pieces. And it has a backstory.
I was working the night shift and it was totally dead and I was super bored and I got to thinking... technically speaking, Sailor Moon is an alien. She's from the moon. So why does she look like a human?
And then I thought, maybe her Sailor Scout uniform is actually what she looks like, but in attempting to describe Sailor Moon's alien physiology, eye-witness accounts were mistaken for a description of a costume, not an actual body.
So, Sailor Moon's pigtails, bangs, and the little whiskers that I've given her, aren't hair. They're sensory organs, like antennae. The red "gems" described in her uniform are actually poison glands, which are brightly colored to gain the attention of predators. When subject to pressure, they secrete a poisonous liquid, kinda like Cane Toads. The "collar" of the costume is actually a wattle that Usagi's species uses in mating displays. It's inflatable!
Kinda like this:
As for the bunny nose and upper lip... Well... her name is Usagi.
The kanji at the top of the image is bi (pretty) uchuu (extraterrestrial) jin (person) and the katakana at the bottom is the phonetic spelling of Sailor Moon.
I'm sure that Kyozuka sensei would be pleased to see that I'm keeping up my calligraphy skills, all these years after her classes.
If anyone with a better grasp of japanese than me has any corrections, I'm happy to hear them.
Nerd rant over.
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Reaching that point in working on a piece where I lose any sense of reality and my brain just chants "I AM A GENIUS I AM A GOD" over and over. Well, working in customer service until 11:30 pm will certainly beat down that overblown sense of confidence. Off to work!
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"Ugly Love"
based on a dream I had about body-swapping zombie boyfriends
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details from "Pretty Bunny/Ugly Hare"
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"Pretty Bunny/Ugly Hare"
acrylic and stickers on canvas board, 14 x 18
Something of a continuation on the theme of "fuck your fascist cuteness standards."
Inspired by the Playboy Bunny as a restrictive concept of American female beauty, the different connotations of the words "bunny" and "hare," and overhearing a pregnant woman discuss her fears that her unborn child would be born with a "hare lip," because that had "just ruined" Joaquin Phoenix's face.
This is the first time that I've really tried mixing a more deliberately stylized look with traditional painting, and I am very pleased with how that turned out.
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I've been listening to the audiobook of "The Killer of Little Shepherds: A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science" by Douglas Starr.
It's the case of a French serial killer in the late 1800s, Joseph Vascher, and the development of early forensic science by Alexandre Lacassagne.
Lacassagne worked in Lyon, France, where the morgue was housed on a barge in the Rhône. The reasoning was that this would keep the stench away from the city and it was close to the two largest sources of corpses -- the hospital and the river itself. However, there were problems.
Joseph was a problem child...
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details from "Amateur Psychoanalysis."
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"Sharpen and Blur"
acrylic on canvas board, 16 x 11
This is one of those pieces that... doesn't really have a deeper meaning behind it. The body is my favorite subject for art, so the way that scar tissue can alter it fascinates me. I realized I'd never done a painting of someone with a facial scar and decided to do one. As the painting progressed, I started thinking of how my great-grandmother described the experience of having cataracts -- she said it was like seeing through layers of veils. So I smeared the hell out of the background and added layers of matte medium over the sections of the image that I wanted to push backwards.
And so that's how this came about.
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On one hand, seeing an in-progress artwork can be a fascinating and enlightening experience. You can see the steps that the artist takes towards their final vision. You can take comfort in the fact that even the most wonderful piece of art was a scribbley piece of shit at some point. On the other had, OH MY FUCKING GOD DON'T LOOK AT MY SHAME I'M NOT DONE YET JESUS.
"Soft Hands"
acrylic paint and stickers on mat board
12x14
I was looking at a bunch of pictures of 'creepy cute' fashion and I was struck by how... un-creepy all of it was. It was the usual conventionally attractive, cisgender, able-bodied women wearing pastel-color clothes, with the occasional skull or drippy goo thrown in to be 'creepy.' When I saw an image of an ectrodactylic hand, I genuinely found it to be incredibly cute. The skin looked so soft and there were so many different colors in it. I wanted to paint it to show how cute it looked, how anything can be cute, even the bodies and people that others may find creepy or disturbing. Why can't this hand be cute? Why can't disabled or transgender or fat people be cute? I can assure you, they can feel cute and they can desire to be seen as cute by others. tl;dr fuck your fascist cuteness standards.
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a boogie man from my Southern childhood
I distinctly remember, at age five, seeing our family friend Stephen Wade tell the 'Taily-Po' story, accompanied by his banjo. I couldn't find a recording of that, but here's a clip of Mr. Wade doing his 'banjo dancing.'
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"Amateur Psychoanalysis"
self-portrait, acrylic on wooden board, 11.5 x 18
This is the first finished painting that I've done in over a year. It was inspired by the work of Jenny Saville, Francis Bacon, and Nicola Samori. My intention was to create a piece where only certain parts of the image were fully rendered, so as to show the various stages in a painting. In this case, only the left eye, the mouth, and the ear are complete; every other part of the image is left at an earlier stage of painting.
As for the title and the smear of the right eye... I don't know. They just kind of happened. Since the start of the piece, I envisioned the right eye as a smear of white paint. The title is how I referred to the piece mentally as I worked on it.
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"Memorial for a Moth."
glass jar, moth, cork stopper, candle
"Memorial for Nemo."
glass jar, cat hair, embroidery floss, bone stopper, candle
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a gif of the process of my self-portrait
I will post a scan of the finished piece tomorrow, when I feel like I can deal with the undertaking that scanning a wooden panel will be.
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@redangusart‘s Mute Mick, flanked by heraldic lions, haloed by cigarette smoke.
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I NEED TIPS!!!
I’m just starting with anå, what vitamins should I take???
.🦢.
Diet Coke and cigs are the only things keeping me alive. ♡
