paintings...

still life and paintbrush from class

the top corner of my newest painting
i wonder if anyone from tribeca recognizes this elephant.... YEAH!!

Karelyn Seigler is talented, generous, and refined. I love that woman with all of my heart.

This past week has been pretty cool.. I finished a neat book last night.

next on the list- Jane Eyre

that thing at the top- yeah, i didn't mean for it to look so cool, but turns out, i kind of like it. i probably won't like it after about a week or so.... i get over my art too fast i think sometimes. i'm just ready to keep going and learning.

in a way, the house drawing is how i feel about typography. it's a great class, don't get me wrong. i'm learning so many valuable things! .. but some days, i just DON'T want to trace letters!! it seems like some days it takes entirely too many steps to get to one finished product, and once you get there, it's quite possible that your outcome is in a not so great quality, and all of the efforts you made were useless. inevitably you will have to redo it for specialization.

so with the house, it's this huge, long drawn out journey, just to get to the little tiny lamp. and the dern thing's not even plugged in probably! i mean, you go up the ramp, up the staircase, through the trap door and into the first house building thing, up the stairs inside the house, into the top tower, down down down to the other outside staircase and onto the floorboard under the first level.

but it's not all a screaming VORTEX of futility, right?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i was doodling again in art history ( i do pay attention sometimes, i promise!) and this is what i got.

i was scanning it in yesterday afternoon after class and the scanner light made the back of the paper come through a little bit so when i went to fix that on Adobe, i turned the levels the wrong way and it made the writing from the back of the page show even more. i was glad it happened though, because i would have never seen this:


and what's even cooler is that on the page behind the bird and cage drawing were my Manchestustration (Manchester Church+ Illustration) notes from Acts 8- inside the heart (and behind the bird) are the words 'loving and sharing.'
very cool.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

i've been working on some paintings lately, too. i'll be honest, i'm pretty surprised with myself. it could be that i'm finally finding something i'm decent at, or it could be the music i listen to when i paint in my room. it's jazz.

some weeks feel like Home

I decided that a collection of photos would be fit to update you with.

Taken at the Missing You Dearly show. wonderful friends, wonderful music. just a stinkin good night!

Coffee. Culture. Conversation.
- and now really great literature to go along with it!

I felt like we needed to set the Friday Arts Project scene. My favorite parts of this picture are the cheese stick to Carlee's right and the Scrabble board.

Yikes! first painting ever at its beginning stages. I'll show more updated pictures later. I've only just started it.... I'm unopinionated as of yet as to how I feel about acrylics and shadows.

I made this the night when my nap accidentally lasted for 9 hours longer than it was supposed to. I was only going to sleep from 5-6 and then go to Crusade, but I was sick and my body decided to let me sleep until 3:00am. By then, I was very well rested, so I just decided to be productive. I drew it from a toy I found at the dollar store. yay for cheap ceramic models!

There are some girls on my floor who will just dance for no reason- I think it has something to do with Jesus. I'm just sayin...





Hope you enjoyed the update- I don't know who reads this thingy, maybe nobody, but if you are out there, I'm thinking about you and wishing you well :)

convocation pictures

sketchbook happiness!

Between New York city and ra training at Winthrop, i had about a month of adjusting from the busy city life and the more relaxed, slow southern life Augusta had to offer. there was
a lot of time for journaling and reflecting on the summer and also thinking about the future and what being back at school might be like.

A few of the kids from the Friday Arts Project (a new organization at our school) had been sending emails back and forth, and after about 12 pages of conversation, we decided it would be cool to make sketchbooks to promote FAP. the way the idea developed was pretty awesome to say the least... many different people were able to contribute in huge ways, and it became a collaboration across the many miles of the south east between our homes.

i happened to have some reams of recycled paper at my house, a paper cutting machine, and a deep-seeded love for book making. Carlee was able to get a bunch of scrap matboard from Martins (the art store she works at) and she and a couple of other people got together to cut the scraps into manageable rectangles that would match the paper inserts. Mary Courtney Blake was passing through my hometown and brought the box of scraps to my house. Long story short- everybody pitched in and we got a pretty neat looking result!

This is what the paper inserts look like without a cover. There are five sheets folded over to make a signature and there are seven signatures total in a book. The pages are sewn together with off white quilting thread and have strips of linen sewn in to secure the glued covers down with texture. (think sticking clay together)

Small sketchbook from the side- you can see the "kettle stitch" going down the right side holding the signatures in place.

The idea was to have these sketchbooks small enough to put in a pocket. Moleskines are a common choice for illustrators and artist of the sketching type, so we decided that keeping the sizes close would be easier and more condusive for sketching in other sketchbooks once these are all used up.

Once again, another view of the sketchbooks in comparison, this time with thickness and width.

____________________________________________________

Each book took about two hours to finish... surprisingly i enjoyed every minute of it! i'm glad i stayed busy and productive. i think it cut down on post-NYC insanity! i got to mentally process and decompress the summer with just a lot of reflection time.... it was such a neat feeling to be making something specifically to be given away.... i thought a lot about the people who might own the sketchbooks.. just holding those books in my hand and thinking about the changes that happened inside me in the timespan of only one year of classes.. i thought about the freshmen and how they would be scared at first of college, but then they would find friends and be accepted by each of the different groups that would form. i wondered what they would be like and what kinds of things they would put in the sketchbooks. whether they would let it sit on a desk in their room, write poetry in it, copy down their homework, tear out a page to give away their email address, or draw sketches of their friends in a coffee shop. isn't it cool to know that something made out of pleasure might could bless someone else some other day? i prayed for those people who were going to pick up sketchbooks. i hope they learn so much in the next years to come... i hope they find friends who love them and are prepared in such a way that they are ready for anything that's thrown at them. i hope they write down a quote one day that means something to them and later, while flipping through some of their first sketchbooks, find this significant something and remember.
___________________________________________________


when my hands began to cramp up from the repetitive stitching, i went out and did other things, one of being taking some of the kids i babysit ice skating! i had missed them so much! And, i got to feel an entirely different kind of pain- one that involved my derrière crashing onto a very solid slab of ice.

aren't they adorable?!


______________________________________________________

God was definitely working on teaching me patience when i was trying to get these books done. at any point in the process of making a sketchbook, if you try to rush things, something will 99% of the time go wrong. for instance: drippy glue, messy stitches, uneven pages, and just poor craft altogether. in this picture you can see the 'headbands' drying to the now bound and sealed with fabric edges. i didn't really feel like going out to the store to specifically buy 'headband ribbon' - i thought that would just be silly. plus, everything used to make these sketchbooks was stuff we found lying around, were small to be used, or just plain unwanted. so i thought that i would just go into my hair ribbon collection and use what i could find.

once one side of the ribbon was glued, i had to wait and then i could fold it over to kind of clean up the edges of the books and hide any mistakes that happened when i was trying to even up the pages.


_________________________________________________________________

August rolled around and Convocation was just around the corner. i was still working on the books through ra training and in the first part of welcome week, and i finally finished the day before the Convocation Picnic. the Amazing Carlee, once again in her wonderful resourcefulness, brought her camera to my room when everybody got to see the finished product of what they had all helped make.

yay for finished sketchbooks!

Stephen Crotts talking to the group about how we should give them away


Jared White holding a plaid-bound sketchbook. it's definitely him :)

the whole stack! it was exciting to see them all DONE!

And lastly, we all signed a member list for the Friday Arts Project to be an official organization at Winthrop University. God is so cool.

had a dream

i had a dream the other night about what the new world might be like. it involved a bunch of my artist friends and i sitting on a beach and when the tide came in, so did a whole bunch of paintbrushes.

Of Duties at Wofford Desk

7:30 in the morning is too early to tell people to have a nice day. i mean, come on. it hasn't even really started yet.

Manchestustrations

A Church With Compassion
Acts 4:32-5:11
Sep

art history doodlings

i probably won't do so great on my next math test

RUF week 2

i hope they don't think i'm being disrespectful when i'm not looking at the speaker.. sometimes people think that i never listen!

this is uncomfortable

i draw during meetings

Lake Day

nothing beats a sunday afternoon at the winthrop lake- homework optional.

Confidance! It's moving across America!

Ok, so in an earlier post, I mentioned something called the Confidence Dance-- or the Confidance...

Well, I just found out that my friend Julie Lund from Summer Project (she lives in Washington) took all the videos she filmed of us dancing and spliced them all together into one giant 'Of Montreal' music video! It really is fantastic..


Nick Perere, Louisiana native and choreograper of the Confidance is one of those guys who is gonna change the world. Eventually, the Confidance is going to spread throughout the entirety of New York, the Americas, and quite likely all of human population. I have this picture in my head of masses and masses of people Confidancing all in one big place.... maybe an "every tribe, every tongue, and every nation" kind of thing..

(just kidding... sort of...)