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    Sunday, November 8th, 2009
    ikage
         		11:43a
    Don't let them take the Fight out of you.
     Alright guys!
    I will be making mad posts here [info]artspeakeasy  and here[info]art_exhibition

    Ones for Ref, Tips, and Tutorials that I find across or get told about.

    Second for showing off them banging artist you have never heard about but should.
    And don't be afraid to post yourself!


    Current Mood: busy
    Current Music: Ben Harper- Fight out of you
    yume
         		2:35a
    Saturday, November 7th, 2009
    alena_griffiths
         		5:57p
    Kitty
     My kitty, Hermione, has gone to live at my mom's for a while. :( She can live outside there, my mom has a nice big backyard with bushes everywhere. Hermione refuses to go outside here.. and lately she's been mean to Jordan. And it's completely random, too. Sometimes she'll rub up against him, he'll pet her etc.. and then other times she hisses at him and attacks him, for no reason. It stresses him out. And he's afraid she'll attack Jackson one day. So, anyway, she'll have a nicer time at my mom's. I'll get her back when we move. I'm going to miss having a kitty around :(

    We got our photos and stuff from the photographer lady. She gave us a cd with all the photos of Jack, a photo album with all the photos printed out, an 8x11, three of another size. Not bad for a discounted price of $100 :). And since my mom paid for it, I gave her the book of photos. I have the CD, plus a photo printer, so I can print off any that I want.

    I watched "Snow White" from the counterfeit DVD.. or at least I tried. It was crap. The first ten minutes was ok, but then it started skipping and freezing so badly that I couldn't tell what was being said. And they don't expect people to want their money back? I couldn't even watch it. Silly counterfeiters.

    Current Mood: sad
    Friday, November 6th, 2009
    pennyarcaderss 12:00a
    alena_griffiths
         		1:13a
    Shocked
     I just got an email back from that DVD place saying that the full amount has been put back on my credit card.. and they didn't even ask me to send back the DVD's or anything, even though that's what the website says. They must be afraid because they sell counterfeit DVD's.. lol. I wouldn't want to mess with Disney. Of course it hasn't been shown on my credit card, yet, cause it takes a few days. So, I'll be keeping an eye out for that. I have yet to see how good of quality the movies are themselves.

    I've been studying for my pharmacology final.. it sucks. I've forgotten a lot of it. I hate that you can learn something long enough to write a quiz, and then it leaves your head. Grrr.. So, now it's like I'm re-learning it all, but now it's like ten times the amount. Probably more. I forget how many quizzes we had. Luckily I still have another week until the final. And on Monday we're having a review class. Hopefully we don't play Jeopardy again.. I don't think that quickly to answer and I just end up getting frustrated.

    Today I feel A LOT better. Still a little bit of a cough. Congestion is gone. Wasn't feeling crappy. I'll be happy when I'm better. Not that it was super terrible or anything, it's just taking a long time. And I go to school in a hospital, so I'll probably be sick again before you know it!! :P Our teacher says after a while you body just gets used to the germs (once we start working there) and you don't get sick as much anymore.

    Current Mood: optimistic
    Thursday, November 5th, 2009
    royalboiler
         		9:38p
    not until you've heard Rakim on a rocky mountain top


    Hello,

    I'm back from seeing the world. SF to savannah to Seattle and back to Canada.
    I brought back a garbage bag full of comics.
    I'll have to write about it all more as I process it all.

    Here's some of the drawing me and Marian did in SF sitting at the Neon Monster table
    and that's Moritat with a fox.
    fennec fox. I carry that picture in my wallet now.

    and my road sketchbook-

    Isotope comics in SF let me draw on a toilet seat to hang on their wall.

    toilet seats are slippery and hard to draw on.
    you can see the other seats here:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/isotope/sets/789737/

    Also In SF me and my pal Joe Keating got these fucking galactus sized pizza slices and watched the Spirit movie. I enjoyed the shit out of that film--the ass photocopying scene alone should get an Oscar eisner and tony baloney award.

    And then on to Georgia:

    Visiting SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) blew my mind.
    I actually didn't think a place like that existed.
    It felt like Hicksville, the Dylan Horrocks book about the fictinal town where everyone
    reads comics if it was set in Wet moon.(I think it's where Ross based his book off of--so cool to see)

    The whole place just moved different than I'm used to.
    I went out walking along the cobblestone waterfront with a jazz horn playing in the
    distance.I was wondering how anyone could even get into a fight in a town that mellow
    and then the dude playing jazz switched to star wars music--mutherfucker.



    Here's a talk that I was in my first night there--im on the right.

    You can hear it here:
    http://seqalab.com/?p=553

    I really liked the teachers students and the other guests.
    I'm not used to getting along with comic people that much.

    So much good comics coming out of there.
    Here's some art by one of the dudes I hung out with, Jeremy Sorese

    more of his stuff here:
    http://derbyartist.livejournal.com/

    There's that Saul Williams line "not until you've heard Rakim on a rocky mountain top
    have you heard hip hop" that is how I felt about looking at Derek Kirk Kim origonals
    in the airport on the way out of town.

    siiggghhhh. if comics will break your heart then I'm still deep in the honeymoon phase.
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Here's some ish I've been reading since I got back-


    I do like the Sienkiewicz cover but man this just reinforced all my worst
    fears about how there's like 2 dudes that can write decent Conan.

    So Conan falls in a magic time well and ends up in NYC--right. cool.
    But why the fuck do they think that a dude who wore nothing but furs and metal
    would sudenly start rolling as swass as this--

    I don't like--well, pimps.
    Crom...

    and the fucking cat? Was that part of his blending in to modern civilization.
    Like "normally I don't have a pet leopard but this is NYC soooooo."

    Conan doesn't even wear a shirt why would he have a leopard?
    It should really have just been called "What if Conan was retarded?"

    Eventually it just degrades into some warriors bullshit.

    and if that wasn't shitty enough Captain America shows up.
    Is he still dead?

    shit, he's not....


    I stopped by my dear sweet mothers place and grabbed some of my old comics--

    that high water mark of Shirow in the 80's

    And I really like these flashback fantasy shots from Cyber 7


    And along with that What if Conan --Justin passed on a copy of Shonen Jump from 88.
    Nerd gold.

    Jump with City Hunter is about as good as it gets.


    I thought this was funny how in the middle of a chapter of Bastard with the
    dude carying around this girl like so much sholder porn--they just thought it was cool to put in a Margaret ad with an infantchild sholdered the same way.


    And I liked this one page rabbit thing.


    Another thing from my moms place--GRUNTS!
    A mirage (TMNT) Studios anthropomorphic war anthology,


    There's a rad Peter Laird story in it with a Triceraton sargent talking about how
    he lost his horn fighting space bears (Ursids!)
    After breaking his horn off in one of their chests he goes back and
    has it made into a knife. Badassery.


    And here's some early THB, I really like the old Pope stuff when it was all
    furs and coffee. plus it's nice to see a good photo cover.


    Meanwhile back in vanoovverr james and Marley were making some impressive comics:

    Stokoe's forthcoming ORC STAIN




    And some Marley stuff for FORGETLESS, a 5 issue mini-series coming from Image in December.


    I hadn't though about it before now but I like the contrast in how male and female J and M's stuff is. mmmmm

    Also I don't type enough about Justin's stuff on here, one of my favorate dudes on the planet.
    He's kind of the godfather of my group of dudes and he draws damned good too.


    Here's a King city painting he did-

    Here's his Deviantart-
    http://moritat.deviantart.com/
    and here too
    http://diemoritat.blogspot.com/

    And now I'm back in my place catching up on the million things I'm almost late on.
    I think the neweset issue of Wizard magazine has a thing on King city. so weird.

    Here's an Appleseed thing I drew my last night in Seattle.
    All or nothing, this is love.


    Current Mood: home
    Current Music: even though I'm late night now like here's johnny
    Friday, November 6th, 2009
    xkcd_rss 5:00a
    Thursday, November 5th, 2009
    pennyarcaderss 12:00a
    Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
    alena_griffiths
         		11:23p
    Waiting.
     Well, I've already received an email back from the DVD company. They said no problem, they could give me a refund. But, that's all they said. They didn't say anything about sending back the DVD's or anything.. I think I'll email them back in a couple days if I don't see the money back on my credit card.

    Ok, I'm seriously done with being sick. Today wasn't too bad, but holy congestion!! My nose is just.. ugh. My cough wasn't as bad today, which is good. I was drinking Robitusson straight from the bottle :P

    We got some photos done of Jackson from a lady in my mommy's group who is setting up her own studio and did the session for free. Then (since we're part of the mommy group) we could choose three photos for free and she'd email them to us, OR for $100 (regular price $200) we could get all the shots, plus two prints of different sizes and a book. Sounds like a good deal, but about half of the photos unfortunately aren't great because Jackson got too over whelmed and wasn't smiling anymore. Plus he was anxious to get everywhere. Jordan didn't want to get them all, because we're trying to save money. Instead, my mom saw them and loved them and she decided she'll pay for it lol. Good ol' Grandma. :)

    Current Mood: sick
    alena_griffiths
         		6:21p
    Internet purchase.
     I think this is the first time I've purchased something off of the internet and been disappointed. I'm not terribly angry or anything, just annoyed. Gotta expect this kind of thing from time to time!

    I purchased a couple Disney DVD's off of http://onlinediscountz.net/ because they had cheap Disney DVD's. You could never find Disney movies in the stores for those prices.

    Now I know why they're so cheap.. I just received them today and they are counterfeit. The covers look like they're photo copied (fairly well done, but I can still tell) and there is MULTIPLE typos and spelling errors on the back covers lol. One more than the rest. But OMG, have they not heard of spell check at least??

    I didn't bother seeing the quality of the movie itself.. I messaged them for a refund. Let's see if I get it.

    Current Mood: annoyed
    velare
         		2:55p
    Sleepy-Eyed Post Parties
     I was supposed to wake up for 1 today. I don't know what's with this week; I can't seem to get it together. I need to go to the laundromat to wash clothes. I wanted to start up with my Spanish Lessons again. I need to sweep and mop the goddamn floor. And I can't even get out of bed anymore. It's 3 now. I'm so tired of eating meat. I have to cook each night for this stupid Atkins diet which I pretty much shot to hell anyway over the weekend when I downed about a trillion Jello shots and had a bit of crackers and dip. And then at the diner I sat down to a burger and fries. That's right, a bun and potatoes.  As it stands, because I'm writing this, I won't have anything to take to work today. Oh, and yesterday at the store I bought candy. 50% markdown, "coffin drops" Halloween candy and a Reeses Peanut butter cup. Fuck it.

    But then again I was sick. Probably because I opened myself for vile infection from lack of nutrition anyway. Sunday I woke up and felt like influenza had blown in through the night and bit me on the ass. My glands were swollen, I felt feverish, my throat hurt. We didn't do much of anything that day but lounge around on the sofa. I watched Danny play Saints Row 2. Our only outing was to Olive Garden where Danny, Q and I had our fill out the Zuppa Toscana and breadsticks - a meal cheap for the wallet yet filling for the tummy. Q's been fine lately. This weekend she had come out with us for Joe's Halloween party.

    We lazed about for much of Halloween. Nilsa came over for her typical Saturday visits and to borrow money from Danny which basically rendered him broke for the weekend. The night before we had made more Jello shots which raised our tally to something about 300 or so. Aaron had come over sometime during the evening because he didn't want to go to Joe's party alone. We were running about applying makeup and typing up our robes and lederhosen.

    Heather, in true fashion, backed out - this time due to Pride weekend in the city. So it was just me, Danny, Kathleen, Garrett, Aaron. We jumped in our vehicles and gunned it to Dunwoody where we made it by 8:30. The party looked as though it had just begun.
    Turns out it was a bunch of settled down married people that showed up - all of Joe's friends from work yet none of JC's. Apparently, JC had a falling out with some of his friends who usually turn up for their gatherings. Oh well, more jello shots for us.

    Party was okay. There was monster music, a trashy loud-mouth in a gold-digging costume and lots of games which included but was not limited to Bobbing for Apples, a Donut-eating contest and Pin the Penis on the Skeleton. I was forced to partake in the first contest and I ended up losing after John & Kate Plus 8's Kate, Scooby Doo and Danny's Bruno took all of the apples with stems leaving me 30 seconds to push up measly apple. Danny won with 3. I chose not to partkake in the last two either for reasons due to excessive carbohydrate consumption or for directional impairment.
    It appears Joe and Jenell had gone the extra mile - the place was decorated and there was a enough punch and spiked apple cider to last a week. Kathleen's Silk Spectre costume had won for sexiest - she received a gift basket and her penis also was the closest to the groinal bulleye's mark in the game of Pin the Penis on the Skeleton. She won some gift basket for that as well and seemed to have had fun up until Garrett left without her for his own party back in Duluth. She wanted him to carry her gift baskets and he said he's tired of her acting like a princess and that was that.

    She pouted for a bit but we made the most of it. Q showed up with Brittany and one of her friends. She walked into the fridge upon arrival and began to help herself to some cherry vodka and a can of soda. To save ourselves from dealing with our friend acting an embarrassing mess, Danny and I walked away.
    All in all, I'd say it wasn't bad. Had we not brought our own entourage I would have found it a bit dull. Joe's friends were nice but it looked as though they had all given up on life and that always seems to depress me a little.

    Once again, Quinisha had given her friends approval to leave the party early and come here to chill out because the four of us, and Aaron had decided to go to Burkhart's for a bit before heading home. Kathleen, in true classy bitch form, confiscated Danny's iPhone and we all told Q that Danny must have left it somewhere. This wasn't such a shock really because they were all slightly inebriated and everyone loses their phone when they're drunk.
    Case in point, both Kathleen and I don't want Q's friends chilling out at our home while we're not there. She didn't even know that second girl -she sat on the sofa in the Club House by herself for most of the party and didn't say a word to any of us. And as for Brittany, we don't trust her enough. Q spent much of the time at Burkhart's searching the car for Danny's phone and we met up with her just before the club closed. It was very festive and cold out much like you'd expect for a Halloween night. Everyone was dressed up in the bar. A few standouts were Lady GaGa's Red Queen getup, Miss Piggy and the Mad Hatter. It was far too packed in there to have fun. It took Danny 20 minutes to score a beer. Kathleen and I by the time were over drinking.

    We headed out for home. I dropped Kathleen off -it appears she and Garrett had made up already on the phone and he was on his way over. Danny, Q and I had met up with Brittany and her friend Keisha at the diner where they sang obnoxiously and tried to steal money out of someone's wallet that was accidentally left at the table. The couple had come back for the wallet and then came back afterwards to ask if "anyone had seen a 20 dollar bill".  Brittany said no, but when Q's purse was lifted, a twenty fell loosely on the seat.  "Oh! there it is" Brittany joked sheepishly as she handed it over.
    I was glad we had made our decision about barring her from access to the gate.

    Back at home Danny had fallen asleep with his head on my lap as we watched mindless television. I woke up after a time and tucked him in bed. I had no idea that in a few hours I would wake up feeling like Death had tried unsuccessfully to take my breathe away.

    My Halloween, as everyone knows, lasts roughly up until the end of November when Thanksgiving takes its place. So sticking to tradition, Danny and I watched horror movies last night. Well at least one because Let the Right One End seemed more like a vampire love story than horror. It's kind of what Twilight should have been but wasn't. Trick R Treat was meant to be a good Halloween scare but the script was so bad I almost didn't enjoy it and the pumpkin boy at the end was too much.
    We're currently saving up for a Thanksgiving Disney World trip. I need to make the most of my annual pass and I desperately NEED to get away from here. I told mom this weekend that I wouln't be returning home for Thanksgiving and that she should never expect me home for that holiday considering it's the one where the entire family gathers for -and I haven't the desire to see the extended.
    I told her Xmas is up in the air and she said she'd stop in for a visit sometime in January. I guess one day I'll have to make a road trip. I'm starting to wonder why though when really no one comes to visit me.

    As it stands, right now I have two generously portioned Tilapia fillets in the refrigerator waiting to be prepared. I'll probably end up eating tuna from a can.  I'm still sniffly though I do feel a lot better than I did on Sunday. I just need to be motivated to move now. The week is nearly over and I haven't accomplished one thing.  I just stare at this screen sleepy-eyed.

    Current Music: Jay Z & Alicia Keys - Empire State of Mind
    pennyarcaderss 12:00a
    harveyjames
         		1:46p
    Electric Ant #2: Exquisite Corpses
     My copy of Electric Ant arrived! 





    You can buy it from here: http://electricantzine.com/





    I made it to the back cover.



    Awww yeah!


    Also: look, here are the packages I sent y'all




    I have been dipping in and out of this thing on the bus to work, and there's a really interesting article about the Takarazuka Revue in Japan - the all-female form of theatre that informs the sensibilities of a vast chunk of japanese comic books. If you've ever wondered why even the dudes in japanese comics look like girls, Takarazuka theatre is kind of the rosetta stone to understanding about that. There's also a lot- a LOT- of amazing art by some of my favorite people, like [info]deforgeo , Hellen Jo, and Derek Yu, and a collaboration by Anthony Ha and Anthony Wu, forming a creative team which if they've not at least once thought about calling 'WuHa' then something is up.  All in all, i give it three thumbs up. Recommended!

    Oh yeah, and see some more work I did for the zine here: http://blog.electricantzine.com/maybe-next-issue-of-electric-ant-zine-should
    xkcd_rss 5:00a
    Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
    harveyjames
         		1:25p
    New Illustration up at Kotaku
     I illustrated Tim Roger's column at Kotaku.com, 'can videogames be our friends?' The plan is that this is going to be a monthly gig.



    Here's Tim in his Mii Plaza, full of identical miis of the same woman which he creates obsessively. I didn't really have the time to make sure this illustration conveyed the emotions I wanted to capture! PROTIP: in a pinch, a black rain cloud with an x in it is a pretty cheap stand-in for "an undefinable sense of 21st century ennui"

    Hopefully next month's illo' will be a little less dashed-off. It's funny- even though I busted it out on an extremely quick turnaround, this is the most professional-looking, magazine-y drawing I've done in a while. Turns out the visual tropes that characterize modern magazine illustration are also the devices you employ when you want to make something with as little time or effort as possible. Who knew!

    Current Mood: busy
    Current Music: Dizzee Rascal - Dirtee Cash | Powered by Last.fm
    Monday, November 2nd, 2009
    alena_griffiths
         		8:32p
    Sick
     So, just when I thought I was over my cold.. a couple days later a cough starts and what seems like another cold starts. Stupid cold. I felt pretty crappy last night and today. I had a migraine throughout the night. Or what was close to a migraine. It really wanted to be one, but I think the Buckley's cold and flu caplet I took prevented it from quite becoming one.

    I stayed in bed for a lot of the day, trying to feel better. It wasn't until around 6:00pm that I felt well enough to get up and do some things. I was behind on my sweeping, and I did the dishes and made dinner. Chicken caesar salad. Something simple. Jordan passed out on the couch quite early, ate his dinner and fell back asleep again. He woke up in the middle of the night and stayed up, silly guy.

    Tomorrow we're going to Victoria for a visit with his family. They don't get to see us very often, so we thought we'd make the trip down. And then we'll have dinner with Lynsey. Cause, I just gotta see Lynsey.

    On Halloween, Krissy came over. Jordan, Krissy and I watched a couple horror movies and ate junk. Krissy is suppose to be a wimp when it comes to horror movies, but we all ended up talking through them so much that it was hard to concentrate and well, she wasn't scared :P We watched the newer "Halloween" and then "House of Wax". I tried watching 'House of Wax' before, but it was really disgusting, so I didn't make it through. This time I did, and it actually wasn't that disgusting after the part I turned it off at lol.

    Krissy and I went to Coombs the next day so she could do a bit of gift shopping. I went into a couple little stores that I hadn't been to before, and they are quite cute. And there's a bunch of stuff in the Coombs country market that I would love to get, if I had the money!

    Current Mood: blah
    pennyarcaderss 12:00a
    harveyjames
         		4:52p
    Shirt!?
    Third time's the charm, perhaps? From the description: "I drew this to help myself come to terms with the fast-approaching moment of my death, fighting space apes in 2012." You can vote for this shirt by clicking the picture below.






    Current Mood: busy
    xkcd_rss 5:00a
    Sunday, November 1st, 2009
    harveyjames
         		8:38p
    Stickers


    Hey! Thanks to [info]inechi  and Cafe Con Leche, you can now buy stickers of my designs (featuring such popular characters as Qraka Sutin, Sherrif Lava, and a turtle) at http://web.me.com/inechi/cafe_con_leche/stickrshj.html

    Yours for only 20 pesos! 


    Current Music: Scott Walker - Next | Powered by Last.fm
    Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
    pennyarcaderss 1:00a
    Monday, October 26th, 2009
    pennyarcaderss 1:00a
    Sunday, November 1st, 2009
    harveyjames
         		12:45a
    Happy Hallowe'en

    This time last year, I was in South Korea teaching English; I don't know if I ever detailed our Korean Hallowe'en on this blog, but myself and another teacher, Marika, spent all day turning one room of our school into an honest-to-goodness Hallowe'en house, complete with cobwebs, gravestones and bowls of peeled grapes and a jar we told the kids were eyeballs. We even dressed the gym teacher as a zombie and laid him in a cardboard coffin, daring the kids to sneak past him to retrieve a token, redeemable for a green food-colouring witch cookie.


    Somehow this adventure playground failed to ignite the fires of their imagination in the way we intended- I guess if you have no concept of a make-believe haunted house to begin with, no very special garfield halloween specials telling you what to expect, and the only adults charged with passing down the flame of the tradition around are two pale idiots dressed as a zombie and a zombie horse respectively, who don't speak your language, it's going to be hard to see a bunch of chairs with a black sheet over the top as a haunted labyrinth. The one aspect they did get a firm grasp on was that at some point, grown-ups are going to give you free sweets, and so our halloween room quickly became an orderly queue of kids lining up to say 'GIMME CANDY'. I don't even know where they got that phase from! I had taught them to say trick or treat!

    These drawings, here, are from last Halloween. As much as I could, I tried to work drawing-themed games into my teaching, such as asking the kids to describe to me a monster, in English, which I would draw on the board - 'He has a big face, he has seven eyes', and so on. I'd also let the kids take turns to draw, too, and we would end up with some pretty amazing creations- surreal , compound, imaginitive characters with no precedent in either fact or fable. Above right, you can see my redrawing of a doodle one little girl did completely independently of our drawing games. It's an original work by one person acting alone, and yet the tropes of our drawing games are all there- two pig's noses? So I guess I was pretty pleased with how things were working out- their drawings were becoming influenced by me, and mine were influenced by them- a cross-cultural feedback loop.

    The drawings I've posted below are all pretty faithfully based on the kid's Halloween drawings, refined by me whenever necessary, but mostly unchanged from their originals.



    So, our hallowe'en drawing game- in it, I wrote descriptions of the standard Hallowe'en monsters on a piece of paper, and the kids had to write which monster was being talked about, and draw a picture of it. That's where 'Qrakasutin' comes from. The name might need a bit of explanation! See, native Korean speakers have difficulty saying the constenant 'eff', pronouncing it more of a 'puh' sound, which I guess led Jin Jin to think the famous movie monster was called 'Prankenstien.' Added to that her creative, scattershot approach to spelling English words and a backwards 'p' and you've got a pretty triumphant piece of mispelling.





    Above left, my take on what 'Prankenstien' might look like.




    I love how effortlessly the children abstracted and reinvigorated the well-worn visual tropes of the Halloween monsters. For instance, without having learned aurally that Frankenstien's monster has 'two bolts in its neck', they've seen fit to add the bolts wherever they like, and as many as they like. I think this kind of naive irreverence has been very influential to me in the past year or so, informing everything from the cats with hats I drew to t-shirt designs and logos for rap groups. I think I stopped being a teacher just as I started to feel like I was getting good at it- however, through my work, the experience I had there continues to bear fruit to this day.

    Have a great halloween!

    Friday, October 30th, 2009
    pennyarcaderss 1:00a
    xkcd_rss 4:00a
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