Mother

Recently I added an old high school friend on facebook. Today I went to her baby shower. I find it so surreal that people my age are married, getting married, have kids or are having them. According to this friend of mine there are lots of people from our year who are married, engaged, pregnant, and so on. One guy has a two year old daughter, a wife and another child on the way. Oh, and apparently there are twelve models from our year. Wow. It's all so bizarre.

Anyway. I drew this for her as a gift and she seemed to like it, apparently they're going to hang it over the crib. Hurrah! Also, a neighbour saw it and commissioned me to draw two similar pictures for her, which is great. I much prefer earning money via artwork than any other way there is.

This is coloured pencil on A3 cardboard.

Arts

The words in this image are from 'The Jeep Song' by the Dresden Dolls. Love this song. Love all their songs, actually. And I am excited to say that I am seeing Amanda Palmer perform in March! Yaay! I've seen her when she was part of the Dresden Dolls and I've seen her solo and both concerts were my all time favourites. So it's safe to say that I'm looking forward to this. :D

I haven't been life drawing in about a year. SLACK. So I've been drawing from stock images recently to try and improve my rusty rusty skills.



Stock from: http://felixdeon.deviantart.com/

I love his stock, it's so creative and the poses are really interesting.

Ugh, I foolishly went to bed at 4:30am. So I set my alarm to go off at 9:00am, 10:00am, 11:00am and 12:00pm to make sure that I got out of bed. All it really did was distrupt my sleep. So I woke up with a massive headache and have basically done nothing useful all day. All the animation that I did in the wee hours of the morning I didn't like and I was too useless to do much today. WIN.

I'm trying to animate Viola playing her back like an instrument. Last night I made three attempts and all three were pretty crap. But they got progressively less crap so it should be alright.

Infinity

When forever means never and never is for forever.



I never seem to draw happy looking people. Perhaps I should draw happy people for my next picture. Anyway, here are more sketchbook pictures! I quite like them, I should do something more polished with one of these. Or both. I should also do more digital art. So many things that I 'should' do.

Hhm, Saturday night and here I am, writing in my blog. Being broke is boring. Well, not too boring, I have been keeping myself occupied, drawing, animating, that sort of thing. But I can't really go out and enjoy my Saturday nights due to lack of funds. I'll be back at Masala Point next week though, so it's all good. So NOT looking forward to waitressing again. Bleeeeeeeeeeeargh.

It'll be good when Viola's done and I can go and find other work. Studio work, hopefully. Freelance doesn't appeal to me much. Making a government funded short film would be pretty sweet though. I've been forming an idea for my next film...it's incredibly rough, very unformed. Very much like a lump of clay sitting around in my mind. But every now and then I poke at it, giving it a bit more shape.

Books and Fruit

There are so many books that I want to read right now. And so many different things that I want to do. My mind is a everywhere right now. I feel like...there's this bit in 'The Bell Jar' where the central character (whose name I have forgotten) is talking about her future. In her mind's eye her future is like a tree, with all these different fruits growing on the branches. But she can't have all the fruit. Each one is a potential future, and she can only have one, or a few. I feel a little bit like that right now. Not enough to drive me crazy (as it did her) and not about my ultimate future. I suppose that I just see that tree for each day. It's like, today I should take this fruit...no wait, that one...no wait! I really need to stop thinking like this, it's getting on my nerves.


Anyway, here's another picture from my sketchbook. Not a very cheery looking picture, I'll put something cheerier up tomorrow. Or the day after, whenever I post again.

This is so much dirtier in my book, it's just a scribble on a page where ink has leaked through. The wonders of Photoshop, eh?

Saw Ben Drake and a whole mob of other uni people yesterday. It was good and makes me miss uni a little, despite the fact that I'm technically still there. But because I don't have schedualed classes and I don't have to go into uni (and therefore don't, because it's quite far away) so the uni atmosphere that I liked isn't there. Just the work. Hhmmmm...Although I do enjoy the work as well. Even the thesis.

Speaking of uni work, it's time I went and did some.

New Blog

It's a new year and it's a new blog. I've enjoyed having my Viola blog http://viola-animated.blogspot.com/ so I decided to make a blog for my general art as well. Especially seeing as I seem to be incredibly inspired just at the moment. I just keep drawing and drawing, it's fantastic.

So, here's a picture to start off with, done with white acrylic paint and blue and black ink. Didn't scan too well, so just take my word for it that it looks nice, okay?

I'm reading 'The Whole Woman' by Germaine Greer at the moment, it's interesting. So far I'm a bit over half way through and there are a lot of things that I don't agree with. On the flip side there are a few things that, for me, ring true.

One of those things is this;

"The woman who is never mated must grieve. If she is mated and left, she remains forlorn. The maintenance of the pair bond too often requires the gradual obliteration of her individual self. 'I want to make him happy,' she says, unaware that if he is not happy it has less to do with her than with any of the other factors in his life. If she tries to treat men as men treat women she toughens herself and tarnishes her self-image. If she bears no child, she is disappointed; if she bears a child she is sentenced to long periods of confinement at home with that child and sole responsibility for any problems that child may face. When it grows up she is not entitled to remain in close contact with it and must mourn its loss. If she terminates a pregnancy she must shoulder that grief and struggle on. She may find satisfaction in her life's work, if she is so lucky as to have work worth doing, but she is likely to be left with nothing but that work."

A long chunk of text, yes, but it really speaks to me.

Well, that's all for tonight,

Lex