A New Thing.

I am sure that this post is mostly for my benefit, for I suspect that anyone who had ever read this in any sort of repetative fashion noticed that I stopped caring about this a long time ago and followed suit.  If not, CONGRATULATIONS, you did better than I did.

Anyway, to me or random peoples or friends or enemies, I am sure that you have noticed (or didn't notice) that I drastically altered this blog.  I removed a lot of old posts, and changed the look a tad (I plan on maybe doing more to the layout later) because I got tired of it.  I may have plans for the future, or I may fail to implement them.  

We'll see.

Here is a picture.  I made this (what you see is merely a detail) on my gocco long ago, and recently altered it.

Thanksgiving feast

I know that Thanksgiving is long past, and people are thinking about Christmas and beyond now, but I wanted to show what my good friend Alton Brown helped me do for Thanksgiving dinner. If you've seen his episode of Good Eats entitled "Romancing the Bird", then you know these recipes well. I brined this turkey and used the turkey triangle and everything! You must know that the cranberry dipping sauce is simply divine, I was eating it alone by the spoonful.

I am so skilled!

The pics were taken outside because it was warm enough to have dinner outside. Dumb Denver. I did things a little different from the recipes (click the pics for the links.) I didn't add anything sweet to the brine other than the brown sugar and changed the spices up a bit, and I omitted the maple syrup and replaced it with some sugar (to taste) because the only "maple syrup" we had was artificially maple flavored pancake syrup with butter flavoring...not to tasty sounding in my book! Plus I am actually afraid of maple syrup. Everything was awesome. I am still so skilled! The End!

Art Update (it might be too big, but whatever.)

So! It's been a long summer and now that we are pretty far into the fall, I thought I should post about what's been going on art-wise. I'm going to post some old stuff (from the summer) and then some new stuff. It'll be awesome.

Batik -
So, this summer lisa and I devoted a very long, hot day to batik. It was somewhat frustrating, as our results didn't turn out the way that we would've liked, but we learned a lot and hopefully sometime we will be able to attempt batik again with our newfound knowledge. Here are some pics of what we produced.

this one was one has stars on it. and some lines



i tried to draw a face on this one. you can see it, which is good i suppose. i was really hoping that there would be a lot of different colors on it. the dye that we used was for this purpose, i think we messed up with the procedure (we think we didn't let the dye sit long enough on any of them because all of them ended up being less saturated than we had hoped.) the red dots come from the black dye that i was trying to use there. awesome!



i think this one was supposed to be a design with leaves and little vines, but mostly it turned out to be dumb. learning experience!



lisa did this one. she drew a lemur and a border. i think it was another one that could've turned out better (not because the drawing was crap but because the procedure didn't go great.) the lemur was really cute! the problem here was (we think) the heat of the wax. when it's too cool it doesn't soak through the fabric, it just sits on top, which allows the dye to get under the wax. that's not good because it compromises the design, hence the lack of lemur face.



i did this one with the horns and the bird thing. i really liked the design, and the color scheme was really neat, it was all olive and brown and blue. the problem was that the colors didn't really represent what they were supposed to. also i used a ton of wax on this one and you can still see where the leftover wax is. i don't think that we've got a solid plan for wax removal, which sucks. we'll figure it out, though, we're problem solvers.



this is another one i did. again, all the problems are represented here quite nicely. stupid batik.



this one is my favorite, it was all built up and it looked really sharp. i was using brown and yellow and black, and it went together quite nicely. again, the color problem. but! i think you can easily see where the different lines were supposed to be (for the most part) which means that the wax was applied pretty well. it could use some work, but it's my favorite of the group.



seriously it'll be a good time when we figure out what we're supposed to be doing and how to do it well. it really takes the desire to do it, though, because it's a pretty involved process. anyway, that was the batik thing.

Onto SNOWFLAKES!
so, as you all may or may not know, i like to make paper snowflakes. this past sunday i spent the whole day (and i mean the WHOLE day) on the floor in the living room making these things. it was awesome.

these first ones are awesome because they are actually only 1" big. well, probably smaller than that, as they were cut from a piece of paper that is 1"x1". seriously. it was the tiniest damn piece of paper, but it was fun and neat, especially when you see them together like that. i made 19 of them. thats how much fun they were.















the next 2 are the medium ones, they are 2" big. at first i thought that these were small, but that was before i tried the 1" ones.



this guy is a 3" one. he's the only 3" one. he's a winner. : D



these are the big ones, they are 4". i thought that this size was super cute when i made them the last time (winter 2004.) they were the smallest i made that time. they were the biggest i made this time on sunday. the kinda greyish ones, the ones on the left, they were cut out of vellum. i think that is how i shall do it from now on, the vellum was much easier to cut than the regular paper. the only problem is they tear easier too. oh well.





here is all of them together. there's a quarter to show you the size of the small ones.



so, onto other things. in this case, i am going to show you some of my dumb drawings and such. yep, they're dumb and they're mine.

this are some old ones. they're from the summer, when i discovered pen and ink. i love it!

this drawing was just an experiment with color and how the pen nibs themselves worked. control is hard sometimes. damn pens.



this one was also an experiment with color, i like the way i did this one a lot. it feels softer than some of the other ones.


this one was fun because i drew it all in black first and then i filled it in with color.



these others are also from the summer, though they lack color.

pencil! mouth! eyeball!



archway! thing inside! lines!



it's a weird city. that's what i see when i look at it.



this was actually very tiny on the page. i call them the twins.



these two guys were made this summer (early summer, maybe even spring.) lisa drew a rooster and i made these too. the dog was styled after something in a book, the turtle i made on my own.





this are newer doodles with the pens. i like them! they were also pretty small on the page, they fit in my tiny sketchbook, about 3.5 x 5, though they don't really take up the whole page. the longer ones took up only 1/2.

this thing is ugly. i like it. the scan didn't work out too well, which kinda pisses me off. that's ok though. with all of these guys, and some of the ones from above, i plan on coloring them in, then rescanning them. we'll see how they turn out.


a flying eyeball thing!



another ugly guy. i wonder what it says about me.



i like this guy. i think of him as a "guy" as opposed to a "thing." weird how that works, huh?



this one is one of my favorites. i don't know why, he just is. i can't wait to color him in.



these last two i made over the last couple days. they're prints from a linoleum block that i carved. printmaking is fun!

bird (it's a crow, not a raven.)



GREETINGS!



well, there's a big art post. i hope you liked it. if you didn't, well, then you didn't. but i can say that i enjoyed making these things and that doing art makes me happy. i think that, looking at the group as a whole, i can easily see my strengths and weaknesses when it comes to art (each group having different strengths/weaknesses.) it's kinda cool to look at things as a whole and not just on an individual basis. it's super weird being okay with putting all this up here on this dumb blog for just any old person to see, but i'm ready to be okay with that. now if i could figure out a way to make money with this stuff...
-amber