It's Official

With the help of some of irreplaceable friends (the saint-like Liz Nugent and the splendid Marisa Seguin) my website is now up and running!  There are still some more pieces I need to add, but right now I'm sewing up a storm and making some super adorable cup cozies--more on that later!

In other news, Gallery Night at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design was last night and it was a blast.  I met some great people and got excellent reactions to my work.  There was a mini-crisis when the drywall my shelves were mounted to began to fall apart, but a young usher man saved the day by running into the 3-D lab and grabbing a screwdriver so I could quick make some new holes and reattach my shelf.  I wish the night would have lasted longer, I love when people start reading my work and grin at a joke or hold their kids up so they can appreciate it closer.

The Ambition of Crazies

...Or maybe just crazy ambition (that's me trying to look on the bright side of things). Coming up next week on Saturday, November 13th, from 10-5pm (*cough*plug*cough*) MIAD is having a student and alum art sale, and my friends and I all wished we could have participated, but what with homework and work-work... and then a certain teacher convinced us it was a good idea. So here we are, approaching one in the morning and printing cards up the bum. I tweaked my Terrestrial Critters to adapt them into Christmas cards- I'll show you those later when it's not November. I also adapted a little guy from my Penfield Croquet Poster that, if I may say so myself, was pretty clever... again, you'll have to wait until after Thanksgiving.

Stressed!

Stressed x3!

Oh, how I wish I didn't have to work at 7:30 tomorrow morning. This is going to be a long couple of days...

Drunk and Drew

On Friday I attended my first (and hopefully not last) Drink & Draw event in Milwaukee with some friends from school. If you're wondering what exactly a Drink & Draw event is... well, it's pretty much what it sounds like. We sit around and draw according to a few chosen themes and then hang them on a wall, all while consuming alcohol. September's themes were Old School, Fall, and what I'm pretty sure was everyone's favorite: Underwear!

Um, of course I drew a cat.

Pants party! Bonus points if you can identify all the topless ladies.

You can see all the drawings from that night in Milwaukee's Drink & Draw Facebook Album. :)

Steampunkerella

If I thought I had a lot of photos to post last week... I was sadly mistaken. Chris and Jamie (or Chris [backwards ampersand] Jaime, if you're Best Western) got married on Saturday! I have a bazillion pictures of them... as well as a bazillion pictures of barns and clouds and birds and stuff, because Marisa hijacked my camera. Here are some from a week or two ago, when we headed off to a "Victorian Steampunk Ball" at Club Hyde in Milwaukee.

I absolutely love Chelsey's hair with those goggles.

Marisa and me, with her earlier "Do I look too much like a pirate?" costume.

Dirty Liz. :)

A small taste of the awesomeness that was there- mechanical wings. (Photo from here.)

The club itself was very neat with lots of wood and leather furnishings, as well as a neat birch tree set up behind one of the bars- perfect for a steampunk ball. Not quite as perfect for the Lady Gaga event they were hosting there a couple days later... (Photo from here.)

Still Turning 21

Here are some more pictures from Chelsey's 21st (and Marisa's, in spirit! their birthdays are only three days away from each other, after all). After Buffalo Wild Wings, cake, our usual inappropriate discussions and some games, we traveled outside to a nearby park where we found out just how much we stink at taking pictures mid-jump. I've tried it before and every single time it surprises me how difficult it is. Boo!

out of all the pictures we took I think there is perhaps one where a person is airborne

...in the rest we're all just in mid-landing position/doing silly things

dancing?

Quotes

In the back of each of my sketchbooks I always save a page or two for the silly things the people in my life say. I was doodling out a poster that I'd just dreamed about, "Giving Brings Us Together" (for a poster designing contest held by Winona State during their welcoming events... other contestants were painting around print outs of Helly Kitty with white out... there were also two little boys (Aidan and Cameron) who were flirting with me/buying me a salad after I realized what I was eating was a fish that still had bones and eyeballs/bringing me a Barbie things to play with!) ...Anyway, I was doodling and glanced to the back of my sketchbook and cracked up remembering how bizarre we can be at times, so I thought I'd start a collection of them here.

(Haha, it kind of looks like I'm naked in this picture... I promise I'm clothed!)

"I've ridden that horse and it left a bad taste in my mouth." -Chelsey

Liz: Elvis apparently pooped while on stage.
Chelsey: Is that why he wiggled so much?

(while discussing web hosts)
"I leech off CJ's ridiculous package." - Liz

(after sighting some ladder golf balls stuck high on a tree branch)
"Check out the balls on that tree!" -Mom

"Is this pie chart a circle?" - Marisa

Marisa: Maybe we won't get Alzheimer's when we're old because we do crossword puzzles...
Me: (doing a puzzle) What? A precipitate whose second letter is A??
Marisa: ...rain.

Most People Probably Don't Make This Cake for Birthdays

But since we don't have any men around that are coming out, we thought we'd use our awesome penis cake pan for Liz's 21st birthday. The fact that it's a rainbow cake is just because rainbow cakes are so damn pretty.

The distribution between colors from balls to tip was a bit uneven, but we still filled 'er up.

Pretty bowls. :) We accidentally washed green through violet before we realized this was a pretty picture.
It looks a bit like a tye-dyed penis.
We decided to go with a nice, pinky peach tone of frosting. Special attention was given to the scrotum texture.
Oh, by the way, Liz appreciated our efforts.

Bus Driver Offerings

Because some teachers are cruel, they assign things like "illustrate an embarrassing moment you've had while going to MIAD" and then I end up drawing things like this... because I am a pervert. Chelsey had forgotten her bus pass so I was merely making the suggestion that she offer the bus driver something else in exchange for his services, however I managed to do so while a big tour of potential MIAD students was being led right past us in the illustration studios. My bad, heh?

These were my two options for how to illustrate that equivalent of shouting "blowjob!"- popular vote elected the second.

Before, when the lines were all brown and stuff.

Finished version. Some things I want to change, but overall I'm happy with it. I changed my embarrassing moment late in the game so that coupled with Easter caused me to rush a little bit at the end, but for something that was primarily done in one night, I like it.