Skit, scat, scoodle-doot, flip, flop, flee.

Take a look at this.





Yep. Those are my feet... in flip-flops. I haven't worn flip-flops in YEARS. This is because flip-flops are flat and can't hold arch supports.

But.

I made arch supports. Yes indeedy!

I used craft foam, really good glue, and scissors. Of course I used my arch supports as a sort of guide.




I'm very happy with my flip-flops. Its so nice to not wear a full shoe in the heat!




Also: Kudos to the first person who can tell me what book the post subject comes from. (WITHOUT Google/internet help, obviously.)

Random Pictures

Everyone in costume!


OH NOES ANNILYN IS BEING EATEN.


Together at Brick Oven...


None of the roomies thought it could be done, but I proved them wrong. ALL my books ON ONE SHELF. Though this wouldn't work as a permanant storing methond... I had to give up my idea of reading a bit of Strong Poison before bed because I discovered that I'd very intelligently put it at the very bottom of a stack.

Costumes!

First I will say that, I have just now added a random quote generator to the side of my blog. Over on the left there, see it? The javascript and I had a bit of an argument over apostrophies, but it is there. I've been entertaining myself the last couple minutes by reloading the page over and over to see what quotes come up. There are more Lord Peter and Attolia quotes than anything else right now--whos surprised?--but I think I will add more quotes and it'll even out with time.

Now, on to the actual subject of this entry...

This Halloween season has started a week early, it seems. Since Halloween is a Saturday, people are scheduling parties a week ahead!

This year I decided to dress up as Attolia/Irene from The Thief, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. (Yes, the title character of the second book.) Yes, I know that nobody else really knows who that is. But if I did something everyone else likes I wouldn't have had near as much fun putting my costume together, and really, my own entertainment was all I really cared about anyway.


I was asked to make a Rustic Apple Tart for the Illustration Association party. (They gave me the recipe.) Here is the finished product:



And now some costume pics.


Annilyn, Me, and Brooke:



Brooke, Me, Annilyn, and Caitlin:







Shadow Queen...



I was trying to figure out the 'stone face' look. And failing, but I was trying.



Gotta get a hair shot (even though Irene's hair is supposed to be black...)






Who am I that you should love me?



Happy primary-color-and-metallic embrioidered sheet-wearing cultural royalty:


Stern primary-color-and-metallic embrioidered sheet-wearing cultural royalty (I'd got in some practice by this time, so I really could do the Attolia Stone Face):

Experiments in Gouache

What have you been doing for your July Fourth? I've had mine mostly to myself, since most of the roommies are out with family, to do whatever I want. I decided to spend a bit of time getting a little better acquainted with Gouache.

Ok, so for the first experiment I used very thin paint on smooth white board. The Lovely Anne was the model for this piece--I went through all the picures from the day of Calebs baby blessing and just grabbed a couple that I kind of liked. Though I've learned that it isn't really very good, I don't think I'll ever learn to stop loving pictures with the sharp contrasts you get in very bright sunlight. I wish I had a better way than a cameraphone to show these to you--the colors are in reality a bit brighter than they look here.






For the next experiment, I used dry paint on very rough black paper. I've had this fancy black paper since my first semester when I had to get a huge sheet of it for my 2D class and didn't use it all. Its not really made for painting on, but as I said this is all experimental anyway. Because of its great texture, It was very easy to get the paint to break--the hard part, in fact, was getting it wet enough to fill in the gaps without becoming too thin to see.

Fanarts!

Ok, so this is kind of like a follow-up post to the last one. Because what do I do when I obsess about things? (That is, Aside from being all giggly, and talking about them to people who don't care about whatever it is I'm obsessed with AT ALL or, even if they do care about it, I talk about it so much that they get SICK of them or...
Well, yeah. Anyway.)

The answer is, I DRAW PICTURES.

Aside from my current "obsession", my excuse for drawing these was to learn how to paint in photoshop. Which I'm still kinda figuring out. If you click on them, and then on the little magnifying glass with a plus sign above them, you can see them big. :)

So here they are.

First, we have
Moira From The Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner



I painted this in less than an hour and a half. For that kind of time, I think it looks alright. I kind of like this idea, I might either keep painting on this one or do another one of basically the same thing, but... better. I was drawing it from my memory of the scene, so when looking back at the actual text it is interesting to see which details I got right and which I didn't.


I was walking up steps into a small room with marble walls. There were no windows, but moonlight came from somewhere to fall on the white hair and dress of a woman waiting there for me. She was wearing the ancient peplos that fell in pleated folds to her feet, like one of the women carved in stone beside old altars. As I entered the room, she nodded as if she'd been expecting me for some time, as if I were late. I had a feeling I should recognise her, but I didn't.
"Who brings you here?" she asked.
"I bring myself."
"Do you come to offer or to take?"
"To take," I whispered, my mouth dry.
"Take what you seek if you find it then, but be cautious. Do not offend the gods." She turned to the tall three-legged table beside her. It held an open scroll and she lifted a stylus and wrote, adding my name at the bottom of a long list and placing a small mark beside it.
When I woke a moment later, Pol had dinner ready.

.....

I had been dreaming again of the lady in the chamber; her hair was held away from her face by a string of dark red stones set in gold. She used a swan feather pen to put a second mark by my name, and she seemed concerned for my sake...



Irene Dancing under the Orange Trees



I really should have planned this out better before starting. As it was, I was moving things around and such halfway through painting and trying to make it work--almost just because I could more than anything. (Hey, if you have layers in your painting, why not use them??)

This is a fanart piece for Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen of Attolia. AWESOME book, just by the way.


"Before he died, my grandfather used to bring me to your palace so that I could see it for myself. There was a party and dancing one night, and the palace was full of people. I went to the kitchen garden to hide because it should have been empty, but once I was inside, the door opened from the flower gardens, and you came in my yourself. I watched you walking between the rows of cabbages and then dancing under the orange trees. I was above you, in one of the trees."
Attolia stared. She remembered the night she danced under the orange trees.



And then for the other Obsession,
The Elusive Pimpernel


This is a fanart piece from a scene of The Elusive Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy. Since I'm still trying to learn to use photoshop, that was one of the main goals of this piece. Notice that the pattern on his coat revolves around a five-petaled flower . I had to look up what a chapeau-bras was in order to draw this--thats the style of hat he's wearing. I'm still learning how to draw expressions and ages, so he looks a bit younger/more feminine than I'd want, but then again... this IS Sir Percy we're talking about.


This is the passage illustrated:

"Dishonour and ridicule! Derision and scorn!" [Chauvlin] murmured, gloating over the very sound of these words, which expressed all that he hoped to accomplish, "utter abjection, then perhaps a suicide's grave. . ."

He loved the silence around him, for he could murmur these words and hear them echoing against the bare stone walls like the whisperings of all the spirits of hate which were waiting to lend him their aid.

How long he had remained thus absorbed in his meditations he could not afterwards have said; a minute or two perhaps at most, whilst he leaned back in his chair with eyes closed, savouring the sweets of his own thoughts, when suddenly the silence was interrupted by a loud and pleasant laugh and a drawly voice speaking in merry accents:

"The Lud love you, Monsieur Chaubertin! and pray how do you propose to accomplish all these pleasant things?"

In a moment Chauvelin was on his feet, and with eyes dilated, lips parted in awed bewilderment, he was gazing towards the open window, where, astride upon the sill, one leg inside the room, the other out, and with the moon shining full on his suit of delicate-coloured cloth, his wide-caped coat and elegant chapeau-bras, sat the imperturbable Sir Percy.

"I heard you muttering such pleasant words, Monsieur," continued Blakeney calmly, "that the temptation seized me to join in the conversation. A man talking to himself is ever in a sorry plight. . . he is either a madman or a fool. . ."

He laughed his own quaint and inane laugh, and added, apologetically:

"Far be it from me, sir, to apply either epithet to you. . . demmed bad form calling another fellow names. . . just when he does not quite feel himself, eh?. . . You don't feel quite yourself, I fancy, just now. . . eh, Monsieur Chaubertin. . . er . . . beg pardon, Chauvelin? . . ."

He sat there quite comfortably, one slender hand resting on the gracefully fashioned hilt of his sword - the sword of Lorenzo Cenci- the other holding up the gold-rimmed eyeglass, through which he was regarding his avowed enemy; he was dressed as for a ball, and his perpetually amiable smile lurked round the corners of his firm lips.

Chauvelin had undoubtedly for the moment lost his presence of mind. He did not think of calling to his picked guard, so completely taken aback was he by this unforeseen move on the part of Sir Percy. Yet, obviously, he should have been ready for this eventuality.....was it not a fact that whenever or wherever the Scarlet Pimpernel was least expected, there and then would he surely appear? ...

Aye! it was all so natural, so simple! Strange that it should have been so unexpected!

I'm not sure I want to put these on the "art" blog, because they're not really very professional. I look at them and all that I see is FLAW. FLAW. FLAW.

Painting

So today, instead of reading or watching Avatar or doing whatever after writing my review of The Count of Monte Cristo, I painted. Working mostly on those angel paintings I started awhile ago and will probably hate soon (come save them before I give them flying lessons, mom, because I'm running low on unused boards and canvases and Hated Paintings are almost as good) and a new one, which is mostly finished because its small and simple and was basically just a "I haven't painted in awhile so I'm gonna take things easy to get into the swing of things" painting.

Lisa watched most of the time I was painting and I was actually able to mostly forget she was there, which was a good thing, or I would have been all self-concious and stopped painting. Though apparently watching me paint is rather entertaining...?

I took this picture and sent it from my new phone, just by the way. I'm still trying to get used to the new phone.

Whatever flips your cookie

So now that it's summer I have time to do all sorts of things that I didn't really do much of during school. I've been using most of this freedom time for drawing and reading and watching avatar and hanging out with roommates and such. Today, I decided to do something I love but haven't really done much of recently--bake!













Macaroons and Chocolate Chip Cookies! The recipes I'd usually use for these are in recipe books at home and not in my recipe box, so I searched online for recipes. I'm really happy with the results, I need to keep these recipies for future deliciousness.

http://www.joyofbaking.com/CoconutMacaroons.html
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Best-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/Detail.aspx

Clouds

Everyone says that blue skies are the prettiest, but it is my personal belief that they aren't half as pretty without some nice fluffy clouds.
-SarLu

I'm at FHE right now, and We're dying easter eggs! Here are mine... I did a bunny, an egg (on an egg!) and a baby chick. Crayons are awesome.

Art Blog

Some of you may have noticed that I deleted all the posts from my Art Blog (sarahscanvas.blogspot.com) a few days ago. I have just got some new posts up with some of my most recent figure drawings along with some past paintings. I'll work on scanning and putting more images up over the next couple weeks. I hope that I will also be motivated to keep the blog updated. You can help by proving to me that people look at it by commenting there or following or something ;-).

Thumb drive Nightmare

I haven't really put up any entries lately, but thats because so much has been going on. And I haven't had a whole lot to say. But I guess I could tell you all about my thumb drive nightmare, because it was pretty exciting.

Our most recent project in my Intermediate Computer Applications (for Artists) class was to illustrate a fairy tale together--my teacher found a fairy tale and divided it into 20 sections and each of us chose/was assigned a section to illustrate. We needed to do a good job on these, because the whole story with our illustrations would be put up in the Juvelile section of the library.

I worked very hard on my illustration. My normal tendency would have been to procrastinate a bit more (though not until the last minute! I'm not that bad!) but since I'd never really used photoshop (the program we were required to do it in) and the picture would be on display I wanted it to be my best work. So from the day I knew which part of the fairy tale I would be working on I started work on my picture.

The day before the picture was due I had some problems saving it onto my thumbdrive, which had never really given me any significant problems before. I kept getting an error message telling me that there was not enough space on the drive. I ended up deleting all old/obsolete files, e-mailing the important ones to myself, and deleting an uneeded layer of my picture before it would finally save. Doing all this took time that I would have been in my D&C class.

Fortunately, mom was visiting that day. After hearing a long tearful account of my thumbdrive woes, she took me to the computer section of the bookstore and got me a new, bigger thumb drive. Halelujah, I thought.

So the next day I moved all my files from my old thumb drive to my new one. Most of them I still had in the form of e-mail attachments, except, of course, my fairy tale illustration file, which is like ten times to big to be attached to any normal e-mail.

The next day I planned to watch the George Pratt demonstration. I went to the HFAC early and worked in the computer lab to put the finishing touches on my illustration before printing it to be hung that night. When the demonstration was going to start, I saved the file and went up to watch the demonstration, but it turned out not to be in the place I thought it was going to be. Rather than wander around, I went back to the computer lab to finish my illustration.

It wouldn't open.

It kept giving me an error message:"This file was created in a different version of photoshop and cannot be opened on this computer." A different version of photoshop? No way! I was sitting at the exact same computer I had just saved it from less than twenty minutes before!

Well, long story short, the file had become corrupted. And I had backups of all of my other, less important files, but not that one, not the one that was due in a few hours. I tried whatever I could think of to recover the file--opening it on a differend computer, in a different program, anything... nothing.

So I started over.

But I only had a couple hours, and the illustration didn't look presentable in the least. Since I had done the whole picture before and figured out the program in the process I got much further than I would have done, but even so, the illustration looked... bad.

So in class that night I told my teacher what had happened and, fortunately she was very understanding about the whole situation. She told me that I had until the next Friday to have something up.

A week. I could finish again in a week.

I won't go into all the details of how it happened, but in trying to recover my original illustration file, the one that I had started new with ended up getting ruined. So I had to start over again over again.

And I swear the new thumb drive mom got me hates Mac programs, because it ruined my Indesign File, as well as both Photoshop ones. So I have another thumbdrive, and I'm saving all my files on BOTH, as well as e-mailing them when possible, to prevent another nightmare like this from happening.

So yesterday I finally got the illustration up with the others. And it looks.... not very good. Especially when I compare it to the piece that I was actually able to put the time into. But I did learn my lesson with this.... NEVER TRUST YOUR THUMB DRIVE.

Life is good.

Insanely busy, yes. Often stressful, definitely. But good... undoubtably.

Had another very good week. And, if I stay on task this weekend and don't play around TOO much, next week should be pretty good as well.

Part of this good mood is probably due to the fact that its Friday. My schedule Monday-Thursday is INSANE (less than 3 hours of in-between time through the day) and Fridays is a sudden, blissful emptiness of no classes.

TGIF :-)

Why are Cornelia Funke's books so long? I feel like I'm not getting any reading done because it takes forever to get through all those pages...

What will I read next? I have a hugely long list of books to read, and there are at least five that are fighting for the top position...

In my Illustration 1 class our second still life will be due next monday. This one is in color (Halelujah!)

Lets Play "Spot the Differences"!

I'm making progress! You'll notice I've cropped it a bit closer and moved the horizon line. It's due tomorrow, but I may still make changes after if the teachers suggest them in order to get a better grade. As it is, I don't particularly love or hate this painting... its pretty meh.

Cowgirl Painting

Well, I spent basically all day I wasn't either doing inventory or eating on this painting. Most of that time was just trying to DECIDE ON A COMPOSITION. I decided on one, started painting it, saw that it was actually really bad, started all over. Took alot longer deciding on a composition the second time around, because I didn't want to have to start all over AGAIN. *sigh*



My desk light is over on the right side, that is why it looks alot lighter on that side.

Post Number seventy! (yay randomness!)

I started a new painting today. I was working on my still life for Illustration 1, but... that painting is soooooo boring. Not only is it a still life, but we have to do the stupid thing in black and white. And I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows how I feel about black and white.

Even though I don't like it much, I'll let you see what it looks like. As well as a camera phone will let me, that is.

The assignment was to do a still life about either child abuse or the commercialization of Christmas. I did Christmas (if you can't tell.) Its a manger, but instead of the baby Jesus, it's holding candy and presents. The animal at the manger scene is... a piggy bank.



The painting I started today... well, I was looking though our Mexico pictures and... I liked this one. So I did a painting of it.



An inch or two from the top and like 1/4 inch from the bottom aren't in the photo. But here it is. Dunno when I'll finish it, but I really should do real homework now.

Letterpress Studio

Typograpy yesterday was totally awesome. Gah. I loved it so much! It was really, really hard though.

We went to the Letterpress studio and actually hand-set type to print. How are you at reading upside-down and backwards?

Most people did shorter messages than I did, so they didn't have the problem of multiple lines of type. My own fault, I guess. So, so, so.

It took the teacher explaining it to me twice before I understood in what order we were supposed to do the letters. You start with the first line but at the end of it, then you put in your leading, then start at the end of the second line, etc. And you're putting this all together upside-down and backwards. And if that doesn't get your brain all tied up in knots, you are more skilled than I am.

When I was getting close to finished setting my type, I realized I had my camera and could document the experience with photos... sweet.



They had lots and lots of drawers, each drawer being a certain font and point size. The font I chose was size 36 optima. We were each given a chart, showing how the letters were arranged in the case (if they had been put back correctly.)



Finally, the whole message was put together. It is a scripture, but after getting all of that on there I hope you'll forgive me if my mind was too tied up in knots to transfer it to a big tray just to do another line upside-down and backwards. So I didn't put the reference on there.



I did a rubbing to make sure I did it right. After doing a rubbing, it is still backwards (but fortunately you can turn it rightside-up... phew). To see it the right way you have to hold it up to the light and look at it the wrong way. Fortunately, I'd done it correctly and didn't need to make any changes.

I bring it over the table so I can... well, I dont remember the term for it. You put pieces of lead around each side of the message and get all the letters in snug enough that they don't drop out if you lift it up by the edges, then tie a string around it. More easily said than done. I probably spent more time on this step than any other, but at least it was a straightforward concept (don't let the letters slide out!) rather than an upside-down and backwards one.



I figured out the trick after spending far too long doing this. What you do is get the letters in all snug, then tie a string around it, which won't ever stay as tight as you want when you pull the knot snug. But this doesn't matter, because once you have the knot tied you wedge in a few more pieces of leading on the edges, which pulls it all tight again. Keep that in mind if ever you are setting type. The teacher did comment afterward that my message was the most successful in keeping all the letters from falling out... hooray!

My message was finally ready to print. There was a bit of a line, so I got to watch a few people do theirs before I did mine. Brooke and Tanner had used a really large type face with big letters and they just completely skipped the Tying the Letters Together step, because the letters were big enough that they just stayed down with their own weight. Which was a little frustrating, I'll admit... but I did do it the right way!

I got Brooke to take pictures of me when I printed my message.

I bring my try of letters over, waiting for the previous message to be removed before placing mine on the press.



The teacher helps slide my message off the tray and onto the press.



Here it is, on the press.



I ink the roller...



Then ink the letters.



The teacher checks to see that I've inked all the letters evenly.



I place a piece of paper over the message...



And crank the roll over it.




I do this eight times.





So now I have eight copies... ta-da!

If GOD be for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8:31

That thingy by the D is called a dingbat. Not necessary or even very nice-looking, but I just really wanted to use something called a dingbat. Probably would have looked nicer at the end of the message... ah, well.