Music Monday - Take II

Today's musical selection is another song from UCDavis days with Remy Chan on guitar. A cover of "Just like Heaven" by The Cure.




Like most of what I post it's not entirely polished, but it's nice enough to listen to given it's likely no other recordings will be made. It's compiled of multiple separate tracks (I harmonize with myself), and it could use a second guitar track to flesh out the parts with the picked line, but the result is a nice acoustic take on the 1987 alt-rock song. Dinosaur Jr. also does a cover if you like the song and are into them; it's a little faster and more heavily distorted.

This was probably the first thing I learned to play on the concertina that I bought online about 4 years ago. I've learned new material and have improved vastly since then, but I probably don't play it as much as I should. I still consider the purchase to be one of the best spontaneous and intoxicated decisions I've ever made.

Enjoy!

Dangly earrings

A gift for my sister (who has un-pierced ears) last Christmas. She wanted something "dangly" and was having a hard time finding options. Though I found "dangly" to be a vague descriptor, I aimed for something that would hang almost to the shoulder and had multiple points of articulation so that the earrings would flow when the wearer moves their head rather than move as one rigid piece.
The earrings are composed of thick jeweler's wire for the main swoop, thin wire for the attachments, and super sculpey for the twists. The twists were painted with acrylics as were the fronts of the clasps so that the color would match. Not only is it hard to find earrings for those without pierced ears, but it's also hard to find a diversity of means to make them from scratch. . . but it's nothing a little paint can't fix  :-)

A nice tip I got from craft-master Steve Bylsma involves using gloves or latex finger tippers when painting to avoid leaving finger prints on painted surfaces that need to be handled. I got that piece of advice after having finished these, but I'll know for the future if I ever want to make more pieces similar to these.

A letter home.

Today's piece is a Father's day card I "wrote" for my dad last year. It's an image of my parents' Victorian home in California where I grew up and was inked using an old typewriter. It was inspired by other works of typewriter created art, though I must say my finished product looks quite primitive compared to what other people are able to accomplish with the same tools. However, this was my first attempt at such things, I didn't sketch it out before hand which I should have, and I had limited control over where I could put characters. The page could be set to any position on the vertical axis but not the horizontal so, as you may note, the image is separated into delimited columns.

All critique (and typos) aside, I was quite proud of the result. I learned a lot in the process about positioning, character choice, and how much pressure to apply to yield the desired level of "shading."
If you have experience with other forms of 2D art and have access to a typewriter, I would highly recommend trying to draw with one; it's a wonderful exercise.

Music Monday!

I do have a handful of song recordings I've been meaning to share so I figured, "What better way to present them than by kicking off each week with a different song?"

After a rocking weekend spent reconnecting with old roommates and meandering the streets of San Francisco, I dedicate this post to Remy Chan, the song's composer.

Here's "Staying Out All Night":


Remy wrote the lyrics, melody, and guitar parts and plays guitar on the track, I'm on vocals, and our good buddy Erik Spickard laid down the saxophone unrehearsed on the first take. That's right: every note of sweet sax you hear is 100% improvised. For me the song really evokes the late-night streets full of weathered hedonistic individuals steeped in guilt from their weekend bender. . . in a good way. The track is almost three years old and still gives me little goosebumps when I put it on. The piece represents one of Remy's first solo-lyrical compositions and is a part of a project entitled "Once Upon a Greatest Story." The album was essentially a venue to lump any musical tidbits Remy and I had cobbled together while living in Davis.

Stay tuned to future Music Mondays for more tracks off that album, and newer musical ventures since the acquisition of my Concertina!

Micro-Pomp and Circumstance

Today's piece was inspired by Lisa Woods' "Insects at Home" diorama series, and commissioned by my UALR labmate Dr. Robin Verble as a gift for our advisor. Each ant represents a member of the Yanoviak insect ecology lab as we received our respective degrees from the University of Arkansas just over two months ago.

Ants were pinned straight out of ethanol to dry in their poses, though some legs had to be removed and reattached to achieve just the right stance. Mortarboards and diplomas are simply paper with embroidery thread. I actually wrote a short message on each diploma, but the whole thing's been sealed in a bell jar now. Species were chosen with regards to research focus or physical similarity.

The players (left to right) are as follows:
Petrus Moriera (MS) and Dr. Stephen Yanoviak (advisor) - Cephalotes atratus
Theodore Sumnicht (MS) - Eciton hamatum
Robin Verble (PhD) - Camponotus pennsylvanicus

The names link to auto-montage images of other specimens of each species from AntWeb so that you can better see the details of each one. As you may have realized, though I do pursue many artistic mediums, I am not much of a photographer. Luckily most 2D material is scanned, but pretty much everything else is taken with a phone-camera. I may remedy this someday, but for now the blurry basics will have to suffice.

Lego people are easier to draw than real people.

WASTELAND:

I drafted this comic a in Olympia, WA on Hourly Comic Day a couple of years ago. Granted this one wasn't part of the event (it took more than an hour, and didn't fit with the subject matter), but the whole day is a nice way to get people motivated and inspired about the medium and it sparks a lot of ideas. If you haven't participated in an Hourly Comic Day (Feb, 1st), I'd highly recommend it.

After having followed the same drafting formats for so long, this comic was really an attempt to play with layouts a little bit and to go beyond the borders of the panels. I know it's not that radical, but you have to realize that most of my comics before this where perfect 2x8 boxes without any deviation.

I hope you enjoy it!



I'm tagging this with the "Lego" label even though this isn't made out of Legos, aaannd these could very well be Mega Blocks for copyright infringement purposes.

Otch

Today's piece is the second in a series of busts created without any foresight. As with the piece presented 9/12/2010, the only direction going in was that it should be an organism of indeterminate sentience seen from the shoulders up. I've entitled this one "Otch."

As with most posts, please click the photos to see them better.




The bust is about the size of a softball. Otch wears a large winter coat, a scarf, and a monocle. His eyes are suspended between stalks so that they can swivel 360 degrees. He is currently investigating a small stone covered in runes and has a set of tinkering tools for . . . whatever it is he does. The gill-like flaps on his chin and the hexagonal pits on his face could be sensory organs or ornamental--who knows.

As with the previous bust, I haven't painted it yet in hope of casting it someday. I've come to realize, however, that there are too many gaps, loops, and fragile bits to make a functional mold so this one will remain one of a kind. In my future sculpting I need to start taking that into consideration.

I look forward to continuing the series. A story may even begin to emerge with enough characters to draw from!