Enigma in Entropy

Iron Eagle Redesign

Warts and All

The opening sequence to my NaNo novel, unedited, 'cause I'm- how do you say lazy, and make it sound like a good thing....?

PRELUDE

            There’s a woman sobbing at your husband’s grave.

You’ve never seen her before. You’d remember a woman like that, curvy from the candied amber waves of her hair to the brown sugar swell of her bosom, from the twin cherry roundness of pert derriere to the graceful sweep of ample lashes over eyes as blue as saltwater taffy. She is rocking back and forth with the force of her grief, and the heels of her expensive stilettos dig twin gouges in the freshly turned earth. You feel a momentary pang, followed by another: for a moment, you found yourself more wounded by the destruction of her shoes than you were by Caleb’s death.

Eagle Roughs (for Craig)

Just the iron eagle motif, with a few examples of how easy it is to alter the feel of the image by applying filters in Photoshop. I think I'm partial to the second and third, with my only concern being that the skull and barbed wire details will be lost in the simplification of the third. The final image will be hand-colored, so that will add a bit of texture. Open to suggestions!

Thass Alotta Words

Day two of NaNoWriMo, and it becomes ever more apparent: I cannot NOT edit. Seriously. There's a vindictive little critic living in my left ear, just a fraction of an inch beyond Q-tip range, who insists on having extensive debates about every little syllable. My writing buddies are breezing through the experiment, words piling up like the corpses of the valiantly slain, and I'm sitting on a measly 621 words, like an anxious mother hen afraid she's hatched a frog. I wrote an eight hundred word email last night without a second thought. The critic is not only belligerent, he's snobby, too. 

I guess it would be easier if I were writing a plot driven story. I don't know why I'm not; I have no shortage of ideas. I feel like I have something to say- something important (to me)- and it refuses to sit still long enough for me to sketch its portrait. I should probably take the recorder and talk it all out. I tend to be far less tetchy when I hear the words spoken aloud. For now, though, I think I'll take a little mental holiday and focus on something else. I have a couple of songs that could use final touches. I've got the Card project to finish- I mean, start (stupid Major Arcana!). And if all else fails, there's always turning pictures of myself into zombies, which is way, waaaay more fun than it ought to be.

Will Zombify for Brains.

All I Do Anymore is Make Websites

But this one is for a fella who makes zombies!

 I'm pretty stoked to be working on such a fun project- in truth, I'm stoked to be working on anything that isn't related to weddings, as that seems to be my lot in this business. Wedding sites are nice and all, but they seldom allow you to ponder the best method of highlighting the sheen of moonlight on clotted blood. It's very rewarding.

It's also exciting to have tangible evidence that my schooling is going to pay off. As frequently as I've dreamed lately of moving towards a more art-based approach to my education, and as determined as I've become to pursue film making in the long run, it's downright exhilarating to know that there's a market for the skills I already have. As Gawd is mah witness, Ah shall nevvah wait tables again!

In less Things-I'm-Doing and more Things-I'm-Going-to-be-Doing news, I signed up for NaNoWriMo last week (www.nanowrimo.org). That's right- I'm going to write a novel. A good 'un, too. This has definitely been the year of my doing, as opposed to my previous entire lifetime's worth of saying I'm going to do, so I really expect I'll see this thing through to the end. Fear not- I won't ask any of you to read it. I have no illusions as to its publishability. Most likely, it will go in a shoe box under the bed, there to languish in literary obscurity until some time after my death, when it shall be discovered, dusted off, and used to line the cages of posterity's pet birds. I can get behind that idea.

Cross-posting is for Losers, and People Named Katie

Last night, while he was sleeping, she climbed beneath his skin.

She hadn’t meant to do it.

She was lying with her ear pressed to his chest, the thunder of his heartbeat rattling in her skull like rocks inside a tin can. She tried to breathe him in, the slightly acrid smell of his well worn t-shirt, the underlying musk of his skin, imagined the scent expanding inside her lungs to fill the leaden hollow that had lately settled in the pit of her stomach. Experimentally, she slid a hand beneath the sharp ridge of his ribcage, walked her fingers softly down his stomach. She was surprised to feel the flesh yield with little resistance.

There was a brief moment of panic when the skin knit closed behind her. She hadn’t considered how he might feel if he awoke, whether he’d welcome the new closeness or resent it as intrusion. She’d thought only of the wonder of it, the novelty. She drifted through his bloodstream like a leaf on a lazy river, the crimson-tinted darkness warm and inviting. It tasted like memory, and she let his childhood melt slowly on her tongue. She tread lightly through the pale autumn morning of his insecurities, lost herself in the lemon jazz mists of daydream, marveled and grieved alike at her place in the shrine of his passions. She wrestled with his intellect, and retired confused and enlightened to the illusory shelter of his ego. His singularity was a persistent melody played on a myriad of instruments. It whispered, cajoled, and threatened; it rushed and boomed until her head spun and she feared the loss of self that might result from further sojourn in this strange new Eden. Weary and overwhelmed, she climbed into a passing exhalation and allowed a murmured sigh to restore her to her place outside of him.

The next morning, she hadn’t known what to say.

He was as much a stranger as ever. She’d tried to explain it to him, and he’d laughed, fondly, raised her chin and kissed her in the manner of a playful child. She’d let the subject drop, unsure of what it meant anyways, unconvinced that it mattered, ultimately. They went to the farmer’s market and he bought her a box of strawberries, and they’d eaten at the restaurant on the corner, the one he always chose on Sundays. It was all as ordinary as it could be, and yet- there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind, a sense that she had misplaced something.

She was being silly.

But then, his eyes had always been brown before, hadn’t they?

Mah Bou

Oi, Poi!

Pointers Needed

I'm attempting to make another collaged image, and I want to make (what appears to be) a wire frame in a particular shape. Wire isn't quite giving me the effect I'm shooting for, so I thought perhaps using resin in a very, very thin mold and then spraying it with a metallic paint would work.... anybody got any ideas?

Here, have a scribble. It ain't pretty, but it doesn't have to be.

PORTLAND: the Musical: a Snarky Sort of Preview

ART MAJOR

Love Song #1

I couldn't tell you what color her eyes are

I'm not yet privy to hopes and fears and credo.

And so, you might ask me (along with her first name),

how I can be certain that it's more than libido.

But it's not hard to see, why she captivates me,

Why I can't think of taking it slow....

Because she's an ART MAJOR,

that's all I need to know!

For My Mother

Preliminary Layouts

Obviously, the rivulets atop the letters will go all the
way to the water at the top. I still have to figure out
why it looks crooked despite a myriad of
grids and rulings proclaiming it straight.

EDIT: Si. Is mo'betta.

Is exceptionally mo'betta.

Bonfire, Rekindled

As those of you who frequent this blog are no doubt aware, Bonfire has been M.I.A. for almost a month now. I'd intended to spruce up the not-so-junky bits of it and transfer them to a registered domain name, with the view to building some sort of semiprofessional web presence. Unexpectedly, though, I've found I miss it- there's a great deal to be said for an outlet in which you feel no pressure to be "good"- and thus, I'm resurrecting it, all phoenix-style and shit.

In the spirit of my new resolution to revel in the less than perfect, I offer you a quick character sketch from an upcoming roleplaying game (http://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/NECESSARY_EVIL_in_FREEDOM_CITY), in which I play a supervillain named Malignant C. who acquired her powers through chainsmoking alien-irradiated cigarettes. A girl can dream, right?!?

It's a seam. Don't be dirty.

Shhh....

Exciting and secret developments on the musical front.....

Abstractions

Here we have an unaltered photograph I took while assembling materials for the never-completed hybrid project. (For the curious, it turned out the professor only wanted us to merge two images, so my grand designs turned into a mechanized fish. It was fun, but not worth posting.) My goal for the course was to force myself to view the world in more abstract terms. I've always been a very narrative thinker- anyone who knows me knows that everything's a story with me, for good or ill- and I've always found it very natural to "craft" an image. Portraits have been my forte; everything else tended to bore me. In this class, I tried to learn to see the world in shapes, colors, textures... with some amusing results. From my very first assignment, I was pegged an "abstract artist," and it was hilarious to hear my submissions discussed in those terms, or to listen to my classmates talk about attempting photos in "my style." If they only knew....

I think I managed some level of success in this arena, though, and it's been amazing the difference it's made to my other creative endeavors. Weirdly, I think it's made me a better painter, as it's definitely helped me understand spatial relation and the effects of light and shade on an object far more completely than I did before. Plans are grand for some summer artin'!

Dee Eee Vee Eye Ell

Pix and I Make Art

Sometimes, I Just Like to Post Things

Ho-Hum 2: Revenge of the Blargh

I hate this one slightly less. Not through any virtue inherent to the photograph, but because I used most of my hate up on the other.

It is perhaps worth noting that all effects save color are in-camera.

EDIT: This one grew on me, too. I'm kinda crazy about it.

Ho-Hum

This is my annoyed face.
This image is supposed to be blue (blue, dammit!!), but my spiffy new blue light bulb is apparently a broken thing, and I swore (swore!!!) that I would keep my Photoshopping to a minimum.

EDIT: As a matter of fact, I hate this picture.

EDITED EDIT: Okay, NOW I like it.

Newspace

Working in the print studio- or rather, crouching under a desk shooting photographs when I ought to have been working.

Timeliest Fortune-Cookie Fortune Ever

"If you don't finish your work on time, blame the computer."



I'm giving it to my Dreamweaver/XHTML teacher on Wednesday.

Geez, Adam

Happy now?

Tastes like Damnation!

No one tell my mom about this post. Mom, if you're reading this... don't tell you.

I'm not considering any other ideas; concept B has delivered an astonishing victory by being the thing that currently consumes my brain. The packaging is less obvious, so I need to come up with a subtle but clear method of linking the images into a cohesive statement, but the images themselves have crystallized to absolute perfection. Six pictures... six views of the Devil. I want to explore the evolution of man's ideas towards this ultimate incarnation of evil, to show in precise terms how society has long applied the Satanic label to the things they fear, but can't control.

1: The Biblical view: not the cloven-hoofed monstrosity of Revelations, but the fallen angel, the Morning Star.

2: Fear of Nature: bestial, horned, forked tail and tongue. Manimal.

3: Fear of the Feminine, Sexuality: exemplified by the Salem Witch Trials and the near-total eradication of goddess-centric religion.

4: Fear of Authority: Beelzebub as King of Hell. Stand-in for the oppressive regime.

5: Fear of Youth: best demonstrated during the infamous "Satanic Panic" of the '80s. The Devil's in the tape deck!

6: Fear of Technology: the new view, currently popular in books such as "Good Omens" and "Only Begotten Daughter." The slick character in the immaculately tailored business suit, finger poised above the button that looses the atom bomb, the anthrax, and the designer computer virus.

Vote for Your Favorite Final Project!

My Introductory Digital Photography class is winding to a close, and the Final Project is officially assigned. We're expected to turn in a minimum of six images, topic and technique at our discretion. I have quite a few ideas, but I'm waffling- and this where you good people come in!

IDEA A: (and the one I'd most like to accomplish; simultaneously the one that presents the greatest difficulties) A narrative with three pages, six images to a page. Originally, this was a concept dreamed up to accompany the Radiohead song "Black Star." It would be bound comic book style with a front and back cover, possibly accompanied by a burnt copy of the song (I like the idea of engaging as many of the senses as possible. My professor will be lucky if it's not scented as well...).

As the story opens, a full moon is shadowed by a bizarre, orb-like satellite, pinwheeling across the sky over a peaceful rural farmhouse. We zoom down to see a small boy, faced pressed to his bedroom window. As he watches the "black star," he notices what he thinks is a fly buzzing against the glass, but as he looks closer he realizes it actually has the body of a woman. He clambers onto the windowsill and strains to reach it. He loses his balance and pitches forward, knocking the window open. The strange creature quickly escapes, and spirals towards the sky as the boy looks on, longingly.

Years later- the same boy is on some sort of camping expedition, like the Boy Scouts, roasting marshmallows at the edge of a lake. He sneaks from his tent after everyone has gone to sleep. On a large rock in the center of the water, he sees the same woman- fish-tailed this time- but as he plunges towards her, she vanishes once again. The "black star" is high overhead.

A young man now, he stands patiently on a subway platform, waiting for the train. A sliver of sky is visible through the doorway at the top of a short flight on stairs. Through the bustling crowd, he sees the woman staring at him from the opposite platform. He drops his coat and bags and races to the edge of the tracks, then, without hesitation, makes the flying leap across. The lights of the oncoming train silhouette him for an instant, before the scene goes wholly white..... The "camera" pans upward, towards the open air, and, as a horrified crowd gathers below, two tiny, winged figures sail together towards the satellite.

PROBLEMS: Egad, eighteen images, at least. Also, where am I gonna find three fellas of the appropriate age who look enough like one another to pass as the same person? I could collage images from external sources, merging them by hand and then lighting the scene and photographing the results- that could work, and be interesting... but it's not exactly the story as I see it.

IDEA B: Six images, also using collage techniques, illustrating the evolution of man's ideas about the Devil. Starting from biblical sources and moving forward through the many different fears man has embodied and tagged with this diabolical label.

Got a few more, but this post is already faaaaar too long....

On the Road Again

SCENE: a sparsely populated stretch of highway between Sandy and Portland. A car glides swiftly through the night, carrying JOE and KATIE home from an evening's joyride.

JOE: (maintaining a steady 60mph, in flagrant violation of the posted 55mph speed limit) Wha?

(Behind his BMW, an aggressive driver flashes his brights, strobing a violent stacatto.)

JOE: (slows down)

TAILGATER: (continues his incandescent assault)

KATIE: Oh, just let him over; he's only going to get more belligerent.

JOE: (jams on the brakes, swerving into the other lane. He rolls the driver side window down and jabs a defiant finger into the air.)

KATIE: Don't do- (she dissolves into hysterical laughter as the car pulls alongside) You flipped off a SHERIFF!!! Hahahahahhahahahha......................

(Red and blue lights flash.)

END SCENE

La La Leaf

Gathering Materials / A Zooish Interlude

Elefanny!

This fish was madly in love with me. You think I'm being whimsical, but I'm not.


The otter, on the other hand, was not impressed.


The ZooMommies were convinced that this guy wasn't real.
I was convinced that the next child to step on my feet would be testing that theory.

(SERIOUSLY, I don't mind other people's children so long as they walk on THEIR OWN FEET. And refrain from shoving me. Or speaking too loud. Or touching me with anything sticky.)

((Just kidding, BB/BS! See, I told you I was funny!))

Making Monsters, Part I

Our digital photography assignment this week involves blending an assortment of images to create an animal-human hybrid. Ordinarily, I put off my ART140 homework until roughly 10pm on Monday (it's due Tuesday at 9), but this week I'm like an original metaphor for a thing that's fillable, filled to the brim with an original metaphor for inspiration! I've snapped 75 of the required 50 photographs already, and I'm not even a third of the way to capturing all the bits and pieces I see in my head. I'm doing a sort of "Sirens of the Willamette" thing- strange clockwork mer-children grown to adulthood in the highly toxic waters of the river. I know I want rust and gears and scales, tentacles and tubing... reds and blacks and shiny, serpentine metallics.

Thus I spent ten minutes photographing a dessicated frog corpse. For the rib cage- I'll edit the guts out later.

Peek-a-Boo

Oh, Lordy, I'm having way too much fun with CS4.

Still More Last Minute Assignments!

This time, my habitual laziness cannot be blamed- well, not entirely; we got our assignments via email almost a week late. This isn't the greatest picture, but it's unretouched and it amuses me, so I'll share it with you (incredibly nonjudgmental) internet folk.

What you can't see are the racing stripes painted down the sides of this little plastic gazelle. A classmate defined this image as "embryonic," which hadn't occurred to me- but I think it's fitting.

Crutch, or Tool?

When I say that I hate the dishonesty of digital photography, what I really mean is that I hate Photoshop.





So understand how hard it is for me to admit that the Kool-Aid is, in fact, delicious.

Sleight, Issue One

Several pages of a comic script written for JO to illustrate. While something of a thematic departure for me (romantic comedies, not so much my thing), the style is representative of my usual "voice" in writing, so I post it as a contrast to the earlier snippet.

Excerpt from an As-Yet-Untitled Supernatural Noir

Captions from Page One of a 40's style comic script, to explain the dramatic tone:

On the Max

I rode the Max to Beaverton for roleplaying today. I had planned to putz around in the shopping centers near the Transit Center until it was time for my friend to pick me up for our game, but I quickly grew bored and decided to walk the 3.7 miles to her house, instead. I was almost there, too, when I got the text that the game had been called off. D'oh!

On the positive side, it really was a glorious day for a walk, I had plenty of time for a good long talk with my sister, and I got the following picture, which I am fond of-


-so, all in all, a very nice excursion.

Feel better, Admiral!

Tomato Pie!!!

Courtesy of Mr. McIntyre.

Lights Out

It's a new term, and that means two new websites to build and fill with interesting content before the first of June. The first part of the equation is simple; I've lucked out in picking a random major that I actually love, and I often build index pages just for the sheer joy of being able. It's that "interesting content" bit that bites me in the butt. True, I have many, many hobbies that generate a great deal of material, but it's rarely polished enough for presentation, and even less frequently cohesive enough to form the basis for a web page.

So, after last term's marathon final hour programming binge, I've decided to start planning early. I think the first will be a site full of illustrated stories and poems for my two year old nephew, Bishop, who lives too far away for Aunt Bug to read aloud to. The second may or may not be a continuation of Prepositional Phases, my collaborative photography project. If this is to be anywhere near feasible, I have a lot of preparation to do between now and June... maybe too much.... but it's an exciting prospect, and I'm loathe to consign it to development purgatory for lack of effort.

All of which is to say that I'll be posting content as it becomes available. As always, feedback, suggestions, flattery, and brown-nosing are welcome.

I Procrastinate, Therefore I am-

-frequently stressed out. Have some midnight homework!