Curious Spoon

When You least Expect It

2011-07-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know when exactly it happened, but I realized recently that I am extremely happy. Despite not getting into EATM this year, something I was relying so heavily on and working towards for the last 2 years, I am happier than I have ever been. I would never expect that I could be this happy considering the numerous rejections I have gone through recently(not only EATM, but another more short term animal keeper program at the LA zoo), but I really am. I adore living in the home Ryan and I have created. I am enjoying just being alive right now - cooking wonderful food, snuggling with my cats, watching my garden grow, and spending a lot of time with my friends.

I have always considered myself a pretty pessimistic person. Though I do put on a rather good "optimism" face for the sake of others, I have a horrible temper and react impulsively when things go poorly for me. It usually takes a lot of self coaching to slap the stupid out of me and look at the bright side of things. I don't like to let others see this side of me because it is embarrassing, self absorbed, and childish.

I feel that for the first time ever I am truly optimistic. It is easy to be optimistic when you get everything you want and everything is going perfectly as planned. I am used to getting what I want. In the last couple of months I have had to deal with a lot of shitty things(school-wise and personal wise that I don't really want to lay out here). I have learned a lot about myself and the kind of person I want to be by not getting what I want. It wasn't some sort of conscious decision I made. It just snuck up on me one day when I realized how extremely lucky I am in all the places that really matter.

For a while there I was feeling guilty about where I was in life. I am 25 and still in school (and not because I am getting anything fancy like a PHD). Even "worse", I was going to school at a community college. Taking classes with 18 year olds can really make you feel like a senior citizen... which is entirely ridiculous because I am by no means old (...right?). Now I know that in reality the program I am trying to get into is one of a kind and astounding... but it is hard to explain that to people that don't know about it. Other friends of mine are making good money, moving up the career ladder, getting married, having babies, doing "things". I felt like I was in some sort of stunted life.

Whenever I get the dreaded "please donate money to the Alumni fund!!!" calls from students at Northwestern, the conversation usually goes like this...

Well meaning NU student: *insert initial greetings and pleasantries* So can I ask you a few questions about what you are doing now for the student newsletter??!!???!!?? They showed your animation in my class that you did with the Elephants and circus people and stuff, it was great!!! *giggle* *high pitch tone*" (note... there were no elephants... but it was in the title, so maybe they assumed?)

Me: Oh, um, sure.

Well meaning NU student: So where are you working now?

Me: I am an Outreach Ambassador at a college.

Well meaning NU student: Oh, at a college? How did you go from being a film major into doing that kind of work?

Me: Well, I started going to school again, so I work on campus.

Well meaning NU student: Oh that's great!! It's great to see our alumni going off to higher education!!!! *giggle* What Master's Program are you in?? Or is it a PHD program?!!!

Me: Well... actually... It's not exactly a master's program... hey I'm kind of busy right now....

Well meaning NU student: Oh, that's ok, I'll call back later!!!!!!!!

*click*

And they really do call back later. Consistently. Every couple of days. Right around dinner time or when you are most likely meeting up with friends. Over. And over. Now, don't get me wrong. I may come off as a douche, but this has come after the last 3 years of being fooled into 15 minute conversations with these students, chatting about life and thinking they legitimately are interested in what I am doing in life now.... to then be slyly cornered into the importance of "donating to the alumni fund". I innocently yakked on and on "bonding" with the first girl to call me. We chatted about the joys of stop motion animation and the yuckiness of 3d animation,and how fantastic Triplets of Belleville was("OH YES!! HAVE YOU SEEN WALTZ WITH BASHIR??" she had said after some flattery about one of my senior projects). She really did her homework on me. Impressive. I had to say no about 5 times before she let up on the donating.

Anyhoot, my point is that for a while there I was feeling a tad behind where I felt like I should be by this point in my life. And I am here to tell you, fuck that. I am the happiest I have ever been. Life is less about what you are doing and more about how you are doing it, if that makes any sense.

If this year is not the year where I begin my career, it is the year where I will nurture my relationships, indulge in my artsy hobbies, and travel. I have always wanted to go to Thailand, seeing it as some far off dream that I couldn't afford. I am gonna do it. Ry and I made up a savings plan so that next June we WILL go to Thailand. I have already planned out a wonderful 3 weeks with a detour to stop in Hong Kong to see my Uncle, Aunt and baby cousin that is being born there in September. I also planned a weeklong trip exploring some villages in southern China(Yangshuo, Longsheng, Guilin... might as well since we are making the stop in China). If I can't have one dream come true this year, by golly, I will find another one to put in its place. I am beyond excited. I am a thorough believer that we are responsible for making our own happiness. I will have to wear the same holy pants and stay home to eat instead of going out for dinner at my favorite Indian restaurant to do it, but damn it it will be worth it.

Not getting what I wanted may be the best thing for me this year.

In other News...

My grandma moved away to Arizona. I feel like my umbilical cord was cut. I love my family to pieces, so this was very difficult for me to accept at first. I now feel so happy that she finally has a house where she can grow tomatoes and can live within a few miles from where my baby cousin is growing up.

I never talked about it, but I had an amazing trip in the Desert with Ryan and my Uncle Tony back in March. It was a treasure hunt adventure of epic proportions that no real description could do justice to. Lots of hiking, backpacking, galavanting in old Silver mines and caves, reading ancient languages... It was like a real life Indiana Jones adventure. My uncle creates these massive and elaborate adventures with hidden puzzleboxes, archaeology sites, full handwritten journals full of fantastic stories and crazy scenarios. No one does anything like it. The guy welds his own puzzle boxes using rare earth magnets and inscribes ancient languages on them. It was wild.

Houdini laid two more eggs this summer. She thinks Ryan is the Dad.

Beanie/Romeo died after the move to Arizona with my grandma. I almost didn't want to type this because it still hurts. He was killed by a coyote after escaping from the new house.

Boots, my rat, is very sick. She has a mammary tumor and can't walk very well anymore. Hard to imagine that just a couple of months ago she got me 100% in class for doing this....

Here is a Snail Teapot. I got awarded the Ventura County Potter's Guild Scholarship this year (mainly for the Chess set I made - I will take pictures soon since I finally got my lens back from Nikon Repair. Woot!). So I am now a member of the Ventura County Potter's Guild. Yay :D

Yes, he is missing an eyeball. Some asshat decided it would be a good idea to lay their mask on my teapot while they were on the cart to go into the Bisque fire. Juice/Tea come out of his mouth.

I finished the 4 ceramic classes at school. I am going to miss throwing on the wheel so much. I did sign up for Figure sculpting next semester though, so I will be using the same clay and glazes, just focusing on more sculpture instead of pots etc...

A very big portion of joy I have been having comes from seeing my garden grow. I grew this cherry tomato. My squash plant is growing comically large.

I went with a totally different plan for this year. I am staying a full time student since a) I get to take classes for free since I have a fee waiver, b) I can keep my job as a student ambassador, a job where I feel appreciated, enjoy my coworkers, and have a lot of freedom in my schedule, c) No animal/vet job wanted to hire me since I have a film degree(not even as a receptionist) d) I can take kick ass classes like Figure sculpting, jazz dance, choir, and Anatomy of a murder(taught by a real homicide detective!) for fun, e) It allows me to postpone my undergrad loan payments if I am still a full time student, and f) I have my weekends free to volunteer at a wildlife rescue, rehab, and release in Ventura County. I am uber excited to help nurse Racoons and Bobcats back to health so they can be released back in the wild. How cool is that?

Pictureless Saturday

2011-04-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

No photos today. My Nikon Lens is still in various states of needing to be repaired and I have no clue when that will happen. Going back to a camera phone and my boyfriend's point and shoot feels so wrong.

I usually don't like to post without photos... it's the candy I use to entice people to maybe read. I guess I don't particularly care if people read most of the time anyway, I just hope they like my pictures.

Today though, I just need to vent.

Yesterday I got the dreaded waitlist e-mail for the EATM program that I applied for in December. I know a lot of people I talk to regularly still don't quite realize that I am not actually in the zoo program. I always get the question... "Wait... but aren't you going to school there already?". Well, yes and no. I am taking some of the basic Animal Science classes they open up to regular students... but I am definitely not in the program. The program itself is a 7 day a week commitment complete with a uniform and actual animal interaction. I basically just read books, go to class and take tests. Only a portion of what the zoo students actually do.

I got the e-mail while at school, a good 30 minutes before I had to go to the zoo campus for class. Almost immediately upon getting the e-mail my heart started pounding so hard that I could hear it in my head. I left the building I was in and proceeded to sob like a baby, dramatically sliding down the side of the building until I collapsed on the floor like a pile of limp laundry. Dramatic? Oh yes. I am not someone who likes to flaunt my sadness around, and I hate public displays of emotions that draw attention. I don't like the attention. It was embarrassing.

It sounds especially over dramatic when you consider that I was at least getting put on a wait-list. It wasn't an outright NO, that's true. But the wait-list is over 90 people long, which doesn't exactly instill a sense of hope. I will find out my exact number on the wait-list sometime next week.

I debated not going to class. It is my favorite class(Primate Behavior), but the thought of going to class immediately after and having to face my EATM friends amidst fellow classmates that I know just got accepted made me feel nauseous. I decided to go anyway.

As I was walking into the zoo grounds one of the EATM students passing me told me to make sure to answer my phone if it rings in a rather cheery tone. Salt. Wound.

I spent a good deal of time washing my face and trying to look strong. I was doing rather well until I saw my friend Kristen in front of the classroom. The waterworks continued to flow with every single EATM buddy I knew that came and gave me big, sincere hugs and words of hope. I really like these people. They are wonderful people. They welcomed me into their world even though I wasn't "one" of them. A huge part of why I am most sad to not get in this year is because I wanted to continue to see and work with this class of people. This is my dream, and I know I will go through this program eventually, but these people will be gone after next year.

It feels like almost every other prospie I knew from my classes got into the program. I know that's probably an overstatement, but most of them did.

Overall I was glad I went to class. I did not end up feeling embarrassed like I thought I would. I felt really loved. People were so supportive and were so kind to me, and riled up for me. If anything it just solidified to me even more how badly I want to be there, to not give up hope.

I don't fail in things very often. Before this, I had never gotten a rejection letter from a school I applied to, I never get a bad grade on a test, and I do well at a lot of things. I am a classic overachiever. Maybe that is why this stung so hard. In my gut, I believe that if you try at something hard enough, that you can do it. I tell this to people all the time. In this case, no matter how hard I tried, how well I did in my classes, how far I have come to get here, it all didn't matter. My decision was literally left to the luck of the draw. Complete, random, lottery process. It just seems so unfair.

There are a lot of wonderful people that got in. People that have been waiting longer than me, people that have applied 3 or more times.

There is still a sliver of hope for me. Every year a bunch of people decide not to start the program and the first 1-10 on the wait-list have a very good chance of getting in. Some years it goes as high as 20. I am assuming it is another lottery to see what your number on the wait-list is. I have a small chance, and while I am trying to come up with a plan B for this year, a large part of me is hanging onto that hope.

Plan B was to try and find a job at a place like Underwood Farms and take the Horse/Equine classes at Pierce College while volunteering at a wild animal rescue of some kind until the year comes that I do get in to EATM. Underwood is one of my favorite things about the area I live in; they have animal shows, pick your own produce, fall festivals... most of all it is a job where I can be active and work outside in an atmosphere I really enjoy. Pierce has classes where you can learn to train horses, ride horses, and care for horses. It's not the worst plan B in the world, but I still hope for Plan A.

Chin up. I've been through worse in my life. I will carry on. This is not the last that school will see of me.

Spring!

2011-04-21T20:05:00.000-07:00

Due to the tragedy of my SLR Lens breaking on my birthday(BOOOO), I bring you a shoddy camera-phone image of the strawberries I have been growing.

Notice that color! My boyfriend and I each ate one today. They were small, but incredibly juicy and delicious. I wish I had snapped a picture of Ryan's face when he popped it in his mouth; he confessed that he thought they were going to be sour and hard. HaHa!

This is a wee little peek at the chess set I have been making all semester. Non of these have been glazed yet, but you can see what they look like as greenware and bisque.

I am trying to keep myself as busy as possibly to keep my mind off of the fact that within the next couple weeks I will know whether I get into EATM (The Exotic Animal Training and Management program I applied to). I have been so anxious, nervous, and worried about it lately. When I was little, my mum used to call me a worry wart. It is definitely true. I worry about everything.

Captain Obvious: Food is Delicious

2011-04-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

We have made some delicious meals since we have our own kitchen again; some so delicious I forgot to get the camera out to document them before they were gobbled up.

Exhibit A: Further Proof of my boyfriend's awesomeness. He made me sushi from scratch on Valentine's day. Tempura sweet potato rolls with cream cheese, spicy brown mayo, avocado, cucumber, and Unagi sauce. While I love the Shrimp and crab rolls too, those Sweet potato rolls are my favorite, an inspiration from our favorite sushi restaurant in Chicago.

Exhibit B: After trying Indian food for the second time a year or so ago (The first time involved some dry Tandoori Chicken and gritty Samosas), I have been on a journey to learn how to make it at home.

I took a Korma base, and then added a bunch of my own ingredients. Add some Naan from Trader Joe's, and Voila! Not exactly fully home cooked... but that Naan from Trader Joe's is so delicious I can't imagine replicating it at my Indian Cooking Skill Level yet.

Exhibit C: Not food related. Just an Obligatory Cat Picture.

Nesting

2011-04-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

I've been in my own apartment with Ryan for the last 3 months now. I think most of you know how good it feels to finally have your own place. I am a nester. I love to collect little items that remind me of all the things I have done and places I have been. I think it is really important to make every place you live in unique to you. Even when Ry and I were moving into a new apartment every year in Chicago, I always took the time to put up pictures and decorate it to feel like home. I need to feel like it is my own nest, not just a place I am passing through.

One thing I have always craved to have was a little garden space. It didn't have to be big, but I wanted a little private piece of the outdoors all to myself (and Ryan of course). I have a wee bit of an obsession with plants that goes beyond a hippie-ish need to sit under trees. I like to know their scientific names and how they grow. I enjoy knowing all the different kinds of plants I see. I competed in a Horticulture contest in High School (Identification and the like) and got Third place in LA County. I love plants hardcore.

Sadly I have killed nearly every plant I have ever owned. Even Cacti.

Shame.

Proof that I have the best boyfriend in the world: With full knowledge and disclosure (even personal observation) of my black thumb, my boyfriend decided to give me the gift of plants when we moved in to the new apartment in January. Passion Flower vines, Jasmine, Ferns, Bougainvillea, strawberries, tomato plants... many many wonderful things. He gave me a little trust.

And in the past three months, even though there was one casualty of a rainforest plant getting scorched in the sun... I have managed to make most of my plants thrive. Here's to achieving little goals :)

Since moving in I have undergone many a DIY project... including buying cheap used furniture and fixing it up into something more me....

Every day when I walk through my front gate I smile. Every single day. I love having a place to call my own again.

Why Hello There

2011-02-11T18:59:00.000-08:00

My dearest bestie peeks out from an old crusty shack in Malibu Canyon

My busy little hands are sore from all the furniture staining and ceramics making and reupholstering I have been doing this past month. So pardon me if this post is all over the place.

A Tagine! I am uber excited to make some Moroccan food in this dish...

Marinated Chicken with Apricot couscous? Yes.

I have recently switched the kind of clay I have been using from Recycled Soldate to B-mix with no grog. In basic terms... I have gone from a clay that is dark with a lot of iron and "bits", to a white clay. As you can see in the Tagine, it means I can use translucent glazes and they look more vibrant. More contrast = awesome.

I have no grand excuse for my absence except to say that I have finally moved back into my own place. It feels damn good. I didn't turn on my computer until a week ago eve though we have been here for a month already. I have so many pictures that I have been hoarding up of the new place, my new projects, and life in general.

My wonderful bestie came to visit this past month and I took her out to Paramount Ranch for some galavanting. She is always fun to photograph.

Life has been so exciting lately. I have been cooking a lot, battling my black thumb in my little garden, and trying to keep my mind off the fact that I have only a few more months before I find out whether I get into the EATM program at the Teaching Zoo. It is unbelievably hard to keep my mind off of it when I am at the zoo campus taking classes 4 days a week, but alas... it is out of my hands now. Application is in. I just wish it wasn't all based on a lottery. I feel like my future is out of my hands right now. Being an obsessive worry wart since childhood, I am practicing my patience and focusing on all the wonderful things I have in my life.

One of those things is my new found love of gardening. I always like to joke about what a black thumb I have for a person who loves plants so much. I went to an agriculture high school and competed in horticulture identification contests in LA county in high school (yes, no joke, some of my friends don't even know I have a statue awarding me for placing third in LA county from a high school competition. I once read 5 books on different types of wild grass last year). Despite all this, I have killed every plant I have ever owned. This includes everything ranging from ferns to cacti. I tend to over love. The usual culprit I have a problem with is over watering, which eventually has rotted the roots of my plants to death.

After much care, and a lot of resistance to bring out the watering can every day,I finally have the makings of a delightful little garden. I compiled a menagerie of resilient plants (i.e. pests and over growers that you practically have to butcher to stop from growing) and sprinkled in a few delicate ones to try out. So far, a month and a half layer, I have not killed a single one. My Jasmine vine already grew over a foot of new growth! I squealed.

I love my new apartment. It is tiny, and has no bedroom door(which is interesting at 6am, living with a very talkative parrot), but it has a small private patio, and a wonderful cozy feeling. It is by far the smallest apartment I have ever had, and by far my favorite. I love my new home.

I have been feeling inspired again lately. Some time around November last year I started to feel an itch again to make things. I wanted to paint and draw and make things. I have been in a slump for a while... not having any ideas. I really feel that now that I am studying something I love, I feel inspired to do other things I love. Art itself doesn't seem to get my juices going. I am just happy to feel excited about making things again.

I have no delicate way to end this post other than to say I am tired and feel like eating some chocolate covered almonds. Adieu!

Flies should not be breeding in my Pumpkin

2010-11-05T16:47:00.000-07:00

a few of my recent ceramic adventures and glaze experiments. Click to Biggify!

My dear rotting pumpkin. He got more and more sinister as the days went by. This is him at his freshest. Day by day he contorted and dried out... his grin growing more sinister as his teeth shriveled into pointy evil nubs and his nostrils enlarged into a full flare. Yesterday I decided it was time for his removal when I saw a bevy of flies escape out of his eye holes.The green mold was a tad much as well.

And now a couple more pictures of the pieces up above... Trust me when I say there have been a lot of busts lately. I have been experimenting with my glazes more and it doesn't always lead to greatness. I should probably put up an example so you can see what I mean.

I brought back the owl in mug form to test it out for the possibility of making something that is quick and easy to sell. Everyone loves mugs right?

Zig Zag Road

2010-10-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

An Aerial shot from my plane window on one of my numerous flights to and from Chicago

Sometimes I forget that I have been essentially living out of a suitcase for the past 2 years. It can be liberating realizing that the huge pile of stuff I have in storage is not necessary for my everyday life. It appeals to the roaming nomad yearnings in me. Look at me! I have no ties! I can up and move wherever I want! Woohoo! If only I had an endless bank account that allowed me to take advantage of my loose rootedness, wah wah.

The other part of me can't stop thinking about finally having an apartment again. Ryan and I have been taking tours of apartment complexes for our move out in December/January. I daydream about getting an apartment, decorating it just the way I want.... a place where I can dance around in my underwear in the living room listening to embarrassing music. I want to fill my apartment with hanging plants and terrariums, cook curry at odd hours, and open all the windows when it rains. These are things you just don't do when you are trying to be considerate of your ever generous family that is letting you be a bum in their home.

2 years. I can't believe it has been 2 years. So much has changed since then. Sometimes I look at how far friends I had in college have gone in their careers and lives and I feel like a stunted child. I am still in school, and it's not with the excuse of getting a Master's or PhD. People often mistake me for an 18 or 19 year old because I am in a community college, which makes me feel like I am going backwards. I have had dreams where I was suddenly transported into high school again, adults treating me like a teenager, not believing me when I tell them I am not. These sound like ridiculous emotions to be having. I feel silly for having them.

At the same time, I feel more like myself than I have in a long time, years. While I loved college, when I look back on it now, it seems like I was living someone else's choices. The relationships I made, the adventures I had, all very real and important and mine; but if I am entirely honest with myself, the real reason I chose to go to Northwestern was because Ryan was in Chicago, not because Northwestern had always been my dream school, not because I always wanted to be a great film Director. I always hated to admit that, it seems so silly and girly and lovesick, but it is true. I am ok saying that now because I know I made the right decision for me. I would never change my decision, wish that I hadn't gone to film school, or redo anything. It was an experience and part of my life that was vital to me.

My main point here is that I am finally learning that there is not a perfect path to follow to get to an end. No Recipe. No order. I have been sporadically panicking that when all is said and done, all my efforts this year could end up in me not getting accepted into the Exotic Animal program at my school. No matter how hard I try, no matter how much effort, no matter how badly I want it... the selection is at random. What if I don't get in?

As hard as it is to accept, I can't worry about things that are out of my control. It may take a while, I may not take the straightest, quickest, and easiest path, but eventually I will get there. And I better damn well enjoy myself along the way.

He Wanted Wings Too

2010-10-10T19:04:00.000-07:00

an illustration from Leo Lionni's Fish is Fish

As a wee little Nessa, I adored this book. I vividly remember tracing my fingers over the illustrations trying to feel the deceptively rich, chalky textures that were absent on the glossy pages. When I eventually saw the animated version of it, I would watch it over and over. Sitting far too close to the television set, the glow of the images painted my face in a rainbow color as I would watch, rewind, and repeat the ritual over and over. The little animated tale stretched out a a book you could read in 2 minutes into a full 5 minutes. Delight.

Surprisingly, I remember loving the sadness I felt in the story. Basically, when a minnow and a tadpole grow up, their lives begin to separate and change... the tadpole turns into a frog and goes out into the world, leaving the minnow behind. The frog would come back and tell his good friend, the fish, all about the wonderful and beautiful things on land. Longing to live in his friends world, the fish jumps out onto land.

As a children's book, it naturally ends up happy and well. Still, I have always been really drawn to the way this story dealt with jealousy, longing, loneliness, desperation, and friendship. The animated version really draws these emotions out more than the book(which is very short). My mom gave me a copy of a bunch of Leo Lionni animations a couple of years ago, long after losing my good old VHS copy. Happy Happy.

A few weeks ago, my very pregnant and brilliant aunt asked that for bridal shower gifts, we each sent a copy of our favorite children's book. Loving the idea, I sent Fish is Fish.

In a bout of hilarity, the only version I can find online is most definitely not in English.

When I try to think off of the top of my head, 15 books that left an impression on me, this is what I get. I am sure there are better ones, I don't even know if I would still like some of these anymore, but this is what comes to me first.

Fish is Fish - Leo Lionni
Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'dell
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
Stiff - Mary Roach
The Giver - Lois Lowry
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Most things by David Sedaris
The Shawshank Redemption - Stephen King
Scary Stories - Alvin Schwartz
A Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
A Prayer For Owen Meany - John Irving
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Various writings by David Foster Wallace

I would be mighty curious to know some of your fav/most memorable books. Please do share.

Like a Slap in the Behind

2010-09-06T18:51:00.000-07:00

Woooooweeeeee. My butt has been majorly kicked this month. Sore just thinkin' about it.

For a whirlwind update of some random things I have done in the past 4 weeks: I attended a wedding in Lake Tahoe, parasailed way up on a 1200 ft rope under a skull n' bones parachute, toured around the old west town Virginia City(where our dear friend in the picture up above was spotted, around the corner from a place where I bought some petrified dinosaur poop the color of a rasberry creamsicle), had my car's AC, headlight, and convertible top all go defunct while stuck out in Big Basin Redwood forest (which I macgyvered the shit out of to get the top working again using some duct tape, a piece of string, and a bungee cord - no joke), planted an apricot tree, went on a safari, moved out of one house and into another, made 10 bowls in ceramics class, memorized 60 scientific names for an assortment of animals from their Phylum down to their species, and sang copious amounts of Disney songs(on repeat) on the way to school while simultaneously trying to ignore the check engine light displayed so politely on my dashboard.

Overall, notorious VW problems aside, this has been a good month. No, a GREAT month. Despite the fact that I am taking a class which is known for flunking people into taking it 2 or 3 times, I am in love with all of my classes. I am taking a slew of Animal Science classes with all of the 1st year EATM students ( Exotic animal training and management ) - Animal Diversity, Animal Diversity Lab, Animal Health and Safety, Wildlife Conservation, Resumes for working in the animal industry(Specific right?), and Ceramics 3 (for fun :) ).

Like the wishful Eatm prospie that I am, I sit up front and try to fit in as best I can. As terrified as I was in the first week (they are notoriously cliquey and close) of being one of the few non EATM students in the Zoo classes, I have found a bunch of them to be awesome, really welcoming, talkative, and extremely supportive of me applying to the program. I think a small part of this might have to do with the fact that I come to class wearing my work clothes most of the time... which conveniently happen to look exactly like their uniforms at first glance. I noticed that on the day I wore my work shirt to class, people started to talk to me. Coincidence? perhaps. Perhaps they are subconsciously more accepting of me when I look like one of them. Whether it's true or not, I feel extremely relieved that I can go to class on the zoo campus and feel welcomed.

My days have been filled with studying for my Diversity tests. Since grades are a part of what determine animal assignments (and yes, even though I am not in the program yet, since these are required classes for the program... they will carry over), I am determined do well in this class. I have always been of of those disgusting people that never had to study to get an A on a test. With this class.... I am not willing to take the chance. Luckily all of the information is extremely interesting to me, and I get a thrill out of being able to ramble off the scientific name of a White Rhinoceros, an African Jacana, or a black widow spider.

Nerdcity. I know.

Hoot.

2010-08-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Fish Bowls and Dusty Pants

2010-07-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

As I type this, my nails are rimmed with Red Ceramic Stain and chipped in all sorts of unevenness that would lead you to believe I have been clawing my way up a cliffside. This is my current excuse for being a very negligent blogger. 20 hours of ceramic class a week.

At least I finally have something to show for it. Lo and behold, Fish bowl! It is a bowl, sculpted to look like a fish. Har har.

NOM.

I can't get enough of this Turqouise glaze. I love the way it sparkles like stone in the sun. The White Crackle glaze I use on his eye gives a bit of a veiny effect.

This below, is the bisqueware version of my Dragonfly teapot set. The body is the handle, the mouth is the spout, and the wings are the lid. His body holds about 2 cups of tea.

And those are his complimentary tea cups

I do have a tendency to lean on the side of making things that are just slightly too gross or odd to actually want eat out of. I like it that way.

Oh, and I used a doily to imprint that texture on his wings.

Wings come off as a lid!

This is another bowl I made with a foot... seen here upside down so you can see the carvings on the base.

For mother's day I told my mom and grandma I would make them each a piece of pottery that they wanted. My grandma wanted a serving bowl in red and black,

I combined the black and the red glaze in the middle to get this odd blue/purple design.

This is my attempt to make something easy and simple to eat out of when I want soup or cereal. I already christened it with some curried chickpeas.

That odd green olive color is the combination of the red glaze and the turquoise where they overlapped.

Just a Jar.

These are two more jars sculpted to look like owls. One will go to my mom, and the other one to me. An owl is what my mom requested for mother's day.

And an arabian inspired teapot.

Bodie Ghost Town, Beautiful Decay Pt. 2

2010-06-07T20:55:00.000-07:00

There is something special about Bodie. "Enchanting" and "Haunting" don't really do it justice.

Plopped among the bush speckled hills, a wee bit outside the eastern end of Yosemite, Bodie rests - a graveyard of chipping paint and stained floral wallpaper and splinters. Unlike other ghost towns I have visited in the past (like Calico), this is not really touristy despite being a tourist attraction. It has all the good ingredients for a good ghost town: Large, ominous factory perched atop a hill, soil so dry it crunches every time you take a step, layers of colorful curling wallpaper singed from multiple fires that ripped through the town, chinese brothels and cowboy saloons, an intact mortuary with child sized coffins laid out waiting to be occupied, school rooms with sun bleached plastic pumpkins sitting in the windows for halloween.

The beautiful thing about Bodie, is that it is mostly untouchable.

To preserve it, almost all of the buildings are sealed off the way they were left when the city was abandoned between the Great Depression and WWII. To get a look, we had to wander around peering into fogged windows on our tippy toes, barely making out the labels of Best Foods mayo jars and old trojan condoms on counters...the banality of the items making it that much more tangible than any ghost town that clutters its buildings with stock creepy ghost town items like old dolls and gas lamps. Oh trust me, the dolls and the lamps were there... but it's those everyday items you wouldn't think to mention that made it more haunting.

Peeps on Pumpkins, Beautiful Decay Pt.1

2010-05-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

One of my biggest inspirations has always been a beautifully decaying object. Paint peeling on doors, vines overtaking an abandoned house... all extremely satisfying to me. There is a bit of rebellion in it, like mother nature is saying "yeah, you tried to beat time, but that just isn't how things work, and you are gonna like it... move on."

A decaying object is intimate and exposed, showing its age and past.

This kind of mentality and fascination has led people to tell me I am a bit gothic and morbid. I hate the word gothic in it's modern context (let's all go shop at Hot Topic and talk about how miserable we are) because I love life so much. I love joy and life and beautiful flowers.... but I also have an odd habit of reading about how dead bodies decay, serial killers, ghost towns, and cannibals. I think that if our world was all full of pansies and brand new shiny things, it would be a boring world. We need death to appreciate life, we need dark to appreciate light, and we need to recognize that sometimes things we consider to be dark, can be beautiful too. I guess this is a Yin and Yang thing. I don't like to think of it as dark and depressing.

If you ever have time to visit the Los Angeles Artist Colony known as The Brewery, then you can witness some of the ways the residents there have chosen to embrace the urban decay around them into whimsical little gardens and cozy studios. This place used to be an old Pabst Brewery, and now it is one of the largest artist colonies in the world.

This peep is choosing to live out his last days(which could be a long time based on the sugar content) in an overgrown garden atop a pumpkin. delightful.

This little display, while cobwebbed and old, has a lot of feel to it. The rust adds texture and color.

Surrounding all these rusty bits, vines with beautiful flowers intertwine themselves between cracks and broken walls. The contrast is exciting to me.

I have always had a morbid fascination with old dolls. I can't STAND dolls. They freak me out. Yet I can't seem to stop taking pictures of them. Is there perhaps a bit of sick joy in seeing them humorously rotting away in a planter? Perhaps. Perhaps.

I fell in love with this succulent so much, I bought a baby one for my terrarium. Dark and beautiful.

Fish is Fish

2010-05-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

Anyone remember that lovely Leo Lionni book/animation from back in the day? I love fish. I think they are beautiful and alien and magical. You may think I am excluding those ugly carp found in Lake Michigan and other, similarly bleak, species... But don't underestimate how full of awesome a fish can be to make up for a lack of visual charm.

One of my favorite Aquariums is the Long Beach Aquarium. I must say though, I can't wait until I start Scuba lessons so I can take photos and swim amongst them in the wild.

Speaking of fish, a fellow blogger and Los Angeles artist out there, Robin Charlotte, makes stupendously whimsical and appropriately humorous jewelry made from taxidermy fish. It is so delightful it needs to be seen to be believed. Truly unique and fantastic... Go take a look at her website and blog for some fishy inspiration.

Look at this belt buckle!

Corsets with Sneakers

2010-05-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is that time of year again... I can't resist a Renaissance Faire.

I go for the belly dancing, and for an excuse to dress of like a gypsy. I love all of the exotic oils, beautiful clothing, glass blowing demonstrations, and seeing people combine elaborate bustiers with crocs and flip flops. There is something really charming about the odd bunch of people it brings together.

My plague of greasy hair. And yes, I did use a Sharpie to do my eye makeup.

This is the essence of Renn Fair. Stuffed owls appearing to suckle from bosoms large enough to balance beer stein.

Children are especially cute when decked out in bonnets.

Obligatory, yearly, Turkey leg consumption action shot.

This little girl was belly dancing. It was awkward and adorable all at once. Note the sneakers.

And, of course, who can resist a baby goose?

Semester Over, I love Port and Cheese

2010-05-17T12:50:00.000-07:00

I have had a busy week with finals and my brother's 21st birthday(which led to copious amounts of delicious food and a trip to Los Olivos Wine Country).

Here are some pics of my Fish Pitcher and Bird Whistle.

The orangish color is Red Iron Oxide stain.. brushed on and sponged off. Where it sticks in the crevices it goes a metallic black. Where it is thin, it stains the stoneware a lovely rusty color. The head is dipped in Turquoise matte, with Poisonous Patina Green brushed on the tips of the feathers for a limey, yellow color.

This fish pitcher didn't turn out at all as planned, but I like it anyway. I was hoping for more dark blues and none of that orange to come through. I like it anyway, just takes some adjusting to appreciate it for what it ended up being. Control freak must be kept in check.

that's the handle amidst the fins, the hole to pour liquid in is between the fins too. The water/juice/tea, pours out through the mouth.

I have a thing for lazy eyes.

This week we found out Ryan didn't make it to the interview stage of the DGA Assistant Director Training Program. He had been hoping on this for over a year, and applied back in November. While we were both heart broken, we are trying to look at the positive side of things... making a vow to spend this year exploring all the things he has wanted to try and do and never had the time or money to (at least he finally has a full time job - it's been a rough couple years of temporary stuff). We will take scuba classes, he is going to join me in ceramics since he has been pining to try it out himself ever since I started it, and he is gonna take a class on TV production to learn more about the film/tv world of production(he is coming from stage managing in theatre). I don't like dwelling on opportunities lost... instead I think it is really important to be thankful for every little thing in life that makes life beautiful. He will try again next year, and until then, enjoy life.

I know it's not an easy mindset to stay in. I spent a year and a half full of rejection from every single entertainment industry job I sought out in the animation world. I was full of all sorts of gloom about my future... feeling like I was running against a wall. But it is really important to think about the small things that make up happiness. We tend to wrap up all our happiness in big bundles like "career" and "marriage". They are important, but they are not everything... and just because it takes a little longer to get exactly what we want does not mean we shouldn't be enjoying the journey to get there.

Today I am appreciative for the delicious aged Ports and cheese fondues I consumed in Los Olivos, and the oven roasted mushrooms, asparagus, and homemade Falafels made by my uber talented gramma. I know it's not the answer, but a good falafel can heal a bit of the soul. Man o man.

What little things make you happy?

Kitty paw prints on dirty car windows

2010-05-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

Hi, my name is Vanessa, and I love kitties. Even when they look demonic.

While walking to class today I saw a dirty, filthy, car in the parking lot. It was absolutely covered in kitty paw prints, making a curvy little trail up the hood and windshield. It made my day.

I find kitties irresistable. I take way too many pictures of them, and I even had the balls to submit one for an assignment in an art class when I was at Northwestern. My teacher said... "Normally I can't stand when people bring in pictures of their pets, it is a really amateur move... But there is something about your cat that is really special." And it's true, Master Bails/Bailey(not the crazy nugget of a kitten pictured above...) is quite special in his cantankerous, obsessive, talkative, bratty, entitled, needy, way. He has the personality and stature of both a cat in a french painting and a thuggish bulldog. Everyone thinks so highly of their pets, I am sure. But it's true with mine, lol.

For a few months I tried to convince myself I was turning into a dog person. Instead of watching youtube videos of Maru the cat from Japan diving into boxes, and kittens playing surprised, I pined for puppies. It didn't last long. I don't know what this says about me, but I didn't like that I didn't have to work too hard to get the puppies or dogs to like me. Kitties are a little mysterious, a little wild, and I always feel honored when they find my company pleasurable to them.

There is something uber delightful and delicious and soul soothing about coming home from work and plopping on the bed and closing your eyes, to have a wet little nose dab at your eyelids and tickle your cheeks with the vibrations of purring. Puuuuuuurrrring, the most calming sound.

I am going to stop before I really start to sound like crazy cat lady. Before I go into depth about how I used to quiz myself and write extra curricular book reports on cat breeds... write pages of lists naming my future cats (including show names and breeds) and designing maps of fictitious lands where everything was wittily named after cat vocabulary (The Purrcific Ocean....). Yeaaaaaah.

Little Worlds Encased In Globes of Glass

2010-05-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

   I have always had a love affair with plants. Actually, love affair implies that the plants loved me back... and that would be, sadly, untrue. Not a single plant that I have ever cared for has lasted longer than a few months(and those were ivy and ferns... only gross abuse can kill those.. I still swear it was the space heater that did them in). While a friend of mine in Chicago was on vacation she trusted me to care for her basil plant. By the time she got back all of the leaves were brown. I killed a cactus too. Let's not talk about how ridiculous that is.
   Seeing as how much I adore plants and nature, this black thumb of mine is upsetting to me. Gardening is one of those things I desperately want to do well, and simply can't.
   For my birthday, my friend Alissa got me a beautiful terrarium. I love terrariums. There is something so magical about how a bunch of little plants sit encased inside their own little self contained world. Mist and foggy glass. Moss and little animal figurines. Big surprise, I managed to kill it within a week. Soggy, limp, cooked, leaves of lobelia greeted my when I came home from school. I think I may have given it too much sun :(
   Soooooo, it may be a bit surprising (what is it they say if you keep trying to do the same thing over and over expecting different results? Pshhhh), but yesterday I spent a good chunk of my day creating some terrariums. Not only did I refill the one Alissa gave me, but I bought 3 more terrariums and a plethora of plants to fill them all. I made two open top desert ones, and 2 closed top tropical ones. I am going to remain optimistic. They look so beautiful all bunched up next to the window. I have a little bunny figurine in one of them, and I am going to buy a monkey for the other tropical one, and dinosaurs for the desert ones.

We shall see what happens.

I also potted some succulents that my mum bought at a gem and mineral show(75 cents!) into my shrunken sugar bowl. Sugar bowl found a use! My kitten has been nomming on them periodically.

To segway from plants to pottery... I haven't gotten much back lately since I have been working on making my final pieces rapidly before the last weeks of class. All I have gotten back is one mug bottle thingy...

Other than some drippage problems, I like what the two glazes did where they combined in the middle. I love these wild glazes. I have some crazy pieces waiting to be painted right now, one being the whistle project. We had to make a sculptural whistle/ocarina. Super fun. I decided to make a bird. Since I worked on it at home, my kitten also nommed on on this as well. I had to reattach the wing tips numerous times.

That hole is where you blow into

That is where the air comes from and goes out. Half of the air goes out the bird and half goes into the belly before coming out. It takes a lot of shifting around to actually get a sound.

I have 3 holes on the side for making different sounds. I have no talent at playing this thing... I simply get uber excited it makes a sound at all. I will need to make more of these in different forms. This bird is getting cooked into bisque right now and I am quite terrified it is going to crack or break. I will find out tomorrow. Eep.

I have so much more to say but I have to go to class.

I think it is almost time for some camping, weather is behaving :)

Pollen all over my shoes

2010-04-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

Decided to go on an impromptu trip up to the Carrizo National Plain for Easter to peek at some wildflowers. All romantically, I thought it would be a glorious idea to take my car so we could have the top down and stroll through the fields. I didn't quite take into account that it was hours away. To add insult to injury, hours of driving on a horrendously bumpy roads full of rocks and dirt were what awaited us once we arrived.

We weren't able to drive into the mountain range because the roads were not ACTUALLY roads (slightly trodden path would be a better explanation). Since we were not in a 4x4, we stuck to the main road(road, haha) and just explored the yellow flowers around us, tried to make friends with cows, and laughed at our bad luck. It was still a beautiful drive, even if it was poorly planned and way too long of a drive.

It smelled fantastic, and the absolute quiet in the fields is breathtaking. It was sunny and rainy all in one day.. which makes for great photo opportunities.

My village just got a little bit smaller

2010-04-02T08:07:00.000-07:00

I just found out a few days ago that my bestie is moving back to California after moving to DC since we both parted ways with Chicago almost two years ago. This fills me with the greatest joy! Ever since the first day we met in the 9th grade we have been inseparable. She sat behind me in English class. She had blue lipstick on. We both said "here!" when the teacher called roll for "Vanessa". It was all set from there.

I have a bit of a theory that one of our problems as a society comes from the fact that we are so disconnected from all of the fundamental things about our lives. Our food sources, our family, our friends.... before planes, trains, and automobiles, all of these were within close range. For the majority of our life as a species, we have not really evolved to cope with living on the other side of the world from our closest loved ones. Granted, I love that I can fly to Thailand or Egypt or Peru and experience something so different from what I am used to.... but something great about being able to see your friends and family all the time - or something even as simple as knowing the farmer who grows your food, or the tree that made your coffee table- is lost in this crazy, massively global village we live in nowadays. It is both a blessing and a curse.

Before she decided to move back, I was talking on the phone with her about how guilty I felt for wanting her here, but she really wanted to be here too (oh how we hated living here in high school, and oh how we realized how much we loved California once we moved away -classic). We have ingrained in us this notion that we have to be super independent, and grow up all on our own without the help or comfort of others... or else we are weak. That just doesn't seem entirely true to me. On a very basic animalistic level, that causes a lot of unnecessary stress to be separated from the pack. With so many options of places to live, we are used to the idea that we can disperse across the country, finding an ideal environment, or job. That is all fine and dandy, and the ability to choose that is fantastic. But I know that for me(and I think a lot of people), the benefits don't always outweigh the cons of being so disconnected from everything. I think a lot of our priorities are shuffled up. I know mine were. It's just hard to find that good balance between being independent, and knowing when it is ok to rely on others... being conscious of the decisions you make and why you make them.

I like to romanticize the way humans used to live. Having a part in the food we eat, living within walking distance from work, friends, and family, being closer to nature, not worrying about all the problems of people on the other side of the world. It is a terribly romanticized view... full of horrendous ignorance and blatant lack of knowledge for how difficult life was "back in the day". It's easy to say life was "simpler then".... but I know it wasn't. There was a lot of sickness, lack of choices, life for women was terrible. I love living in this modern day. I love living it because we have choices. Unfortunately we have so many choices that I think the best ones are not the most obvious. Luckily, I can choose to take the good things from the way we lived in the past (being more connected to the things in everyday life - which instill a sense of purpose and responsibility), and mix them with benefits of the present day. I am just grappling lately with the idea that not every "advance" or "convenience" is beneficial in the long run.

Bah. I don't think I can quite explain the benefits and problems of modern day living in one little post. I sense myself simultaneously trying to connect my best friend living nearby, with my craving to be more involved in my community, my hate for the life wasted in commuting times, as well as my love for farmer's markets and the want I have been having lately to know where my food is grown. Waaaaaay too much to be combined in one post, even though they are all connected under the idea of forming a "local community". My point is, my best friend is moving back, and damn it, that makes me super duper happy, and I don't care if it seems codependent that we are happier when we can see each other all the time, it just feels better. Woohoo.

Ceramics!

2010-03-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

(Coil Pot with 3 legs, ended up cracking down the side)

I finally got around to taking some pictures of the ceramics I have been getting back... it has been a mildly frustrating experience(colors don't come out the way I expect... too much glaze, too little glaze, cracking, etc...) and yet an extremely gratifying experience.

I find that the things I don't like(the unpredictability of glaze causing muddy ugly crappiness) coincide with the things I love(the unpredictability of glaze creating joyous new things!). I am learning slowly each time I get a batch back, of how I should glaze my next pieces. I am quickly learning less is more when I have a complicated form.

This is a mug that I expected to come out mostly rusty orange, with a red rim and a couple red splashes.
See all that white? It was a side effect of the red being too thin(when Cranberry red is thin it goes white). I also learned I put way too many iron filings in the clay which littered it with all those metallic dots. This is a perfect case of Goldilocks. Last time I had too few, now I had too many. NExt it'll be juuust right.

I did end up loving the weird rockiness of it, happy accident.

Here are a few more of my coil pot. It was not thrown on the wheel, I placed a whole bunch of thin coils next to each other in a bowl and then smoothed them out on the inside to connect them. Then I had to put 3 feet on it. This piece was supposed to be allllll rust orange on the outside with red highlights(like on the mug above) with teal on the inside, but of course the red turned white since it was too thin... and also the orangey red turns metallic the longer it sits out before firing... soooo not exactly as I hoped.

On top of that, it cracked down the side, luckily it is stoneware so it is still very strong(like granite).

This is one of the cases where less would have been more. I should have dipped the outside in only one glaze so I didn't mask all the coil work I did. Bah. At least I learned a lesson.

I love the Turquoise matte glaze. It ends up looking like real turquoise stone if it is thick enough. Unfortunately if it is thin, or TOO thick, it turns into black.

Another case of Less is more. The crazy glazes I did(that pink should be red), masked up the carving work I did. Oh well. Cool effect anyway.

Here is another mug I did in the same colors as the orange/red one up above. I made a pour spot, and two lip grooves for sipping.

I actually like the massive amount of iron filings on this one since it didn't go quite as dark, still that White should not be there.

I am really sad all the intriate carving I did got muddied up by all th glazes I tried out in this blue bowl... Also, the glaze ran onto the bottom of the bowl and messed up the base... BUT, I do love the color.

I HATE this mug. It looks way too patriotic to me, and since it shrunk so much, the handle barely fits a thumb.. And I hate the baby blue with the red. Oh well. I like the psychadelic feeling, just wish the colors were different. totally my fault.

I really like this mug below. I did only 3 colors. A black matte on the bottom, and a Red cranberry on the rim and inside. I splashed on a bit of crystal black on the outside which gives that blue crystal look in spots. I enjoy what the glaze did where the red overlapped the black matte.

Underwood Farms

2010-03-29T16:54:00.000-07:00

Mature is overrated, lets knock down all the ceiling popcorn!

2010-03-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

This is why I have been with my boyfriend for almost 9 years and love him just as much as I did when I was a giddy 15 year old girl....

When I got home from a late shift a few nights ago, smelling like stale popcorn and preserved Sheep Brains(more on that later), he was waiting in the driveway with a look of glee on his face and said to me....

"Wanna go look for frogs?"

Unfortunately a series of cars driving by terrified the usually loud frogs nearby into silence, and we weren't able to track them down with our little flashlight in the middle of the night. That's besides the point, the point being, no matter how small the event, I love that he asked me to do something I haven't done since I was about 10 years old. When I was a kid, we used to go look for frogs all the time, and I don't really remember why I ever stopped. Childishness is fantastic, oh so healthy, and extremely gratifying.

One of my fondest memories from this past week has been throwing around a giant beach ball in my friend Alissa's house with a bunch of my good friends. We knocked over glass candle holders, tipped lamps over, caused a bloody nose, and showered ourselves with ceiling popcorn... but hot damn it was so much fun.

Maybe it's because I love spring, and seeing the wildflowers blooming all over the place have put me in a really good mood lately, but I just feel really happy. I think I have been realizing in the last week or so, exactly what a good decision I made in going back to school. Cheesy as it is, as I was driving to school on Tuesday, top down and radio up playing Priscilla Ahn's Dream (so cliche it makes me sick,lol), and I was trying to sing along to the music, I couldn't because I kept getting really choked up. I couldn't stop smiling. I feel like a little part of myself has been muffled for years, the part of me that was so sure of what I wanted to do with my life as a child.

For me, growing up has been a journey to reunite my "adult" self with my childhood self. It's hard to demonize the path I was on, towards Big City life in the film/animation industry. The animation industry is full of delightful people, and going into film is already considered a dreamy thing to do... I felt mildy rebellious and like I was taking a chance on living the dream, but it just wasn't MY dream. It was not me. I tried to convince myself I would love living downtown, moving to New York, going out dancing, making movies... The majority of my life I had wanted to work with animals, there was no question. And somewhere along the way I decided I might try out film, because I might be good at it, I love making art, I really enjoyed editing my own home movies, and it seemed romantic. But I always wondered why I had to try and force myself to work even though I enjoyed what I eventually produced... albeit in that very gradeschool "look ma! I finished my school project! Aren't you proud?" Kind of way.

At heart I am someone who gets the greatest joy out of sitting in the woods with the people I love, laughing at rabbid racoons, riding horses, and letting my long hair get tangled and muddy. I am not naive enough to think every single day is going to be a walk in the park on my new path, that it is all daisies and fluffy bunnies... but I am sincerely enjoying the path now, and I am not having to force myself to work toward it to eventually enjoy some end. It's almost comical how identical my new wants match up with those that I had when I was 10 years old.

The child in me was right all along.

I have Crayfish guts in my hair, and a kitten in my lap

2010-03-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Not much to say. When things are going really well, I usually don't have too much to comment on. I did get my first two sad little shrunken bowls back from ceramics. While the colors came out nicely, they were not what I had intended for, and the glaze was too thin in a bunch of parts.

There she is, the very first bowl I ever made. This is my squatty little sugar bowl. That top part was supposed to have a lot of cranberry red on the rim, but the winds got into the kiln, and that makes it hard to get Red colors(I think they mentioned it has too much oxygen, not entirely sure)... which turns them clear.

I put a Turquoise matte on the bottoms half, dipped the top half in a Patina green, and drizzled it on the edges, then dipped the rim in Red, which ended up turning clear, with a faint tinge of red on the left side of the picture.. better luck next time. I do love the unpredictability of these glassy glazes. The way the glaze runs and combines.

I love how the colors came out regardless, but since the bowl is so small, you can't SEE the colors. I have since learned, and from now on I am making things gigantic so that the 17% shrinkage doesn't end up making everything teacup sized.

Here is my second bowl... which was way too thinly glazed on the inside... resulting in the stoneware orange color peeking through where I wanted it to be ALL turquoise.

I topped it all in turquoise matte(which you can't see at all.. dipped way too thin), then the rim in a Green, and in a Brilliant blue on top, which created a cool starry night affect in some spots where they mixed. I also spotted it in a Crystal black... but the crystal part didn't show up since it was too thin.

Since I have had 2 pieces go through the glaze fire, I have learned a lot about how to glaze properly, Next week I should get 4 more back :) Here are some process pics.. sorry they are so dark, but the room in dark and I didn't want to go flashing about when people were in there working.

This one has been glazed and is in the fire right now.

This one too.

These two cups are also glazed and in the fire.

See all those spots? Those are Iron Filings that the school gets from an Auto body shop, once Glazed and fired, they should create cool effects on the Glaze. I tried very hard to make nice lips for the mugs so they are comfy to drink from.

Mug number two! Also in the Kiln!

These mugs don't have handles or designs in the picture, but I did the handles and decor yesterday. I will get more pics up once they get out of the first firing.

Also, the first and third mug were such awkward shapes, that when I attached them(upside down) to the wheel to trim the bases(which was after this picture was taken), I had a few issues in trimming. I accidently pushed the pedal to SPEED UP when I meant to push it to stop... making the two mugs fly off at great speed into the table in front of the wheel (yes, I did this twice, at separate times) . They were all mangled and smashed in certain parts. Luckily I molded them back together, and covered up the messed up bits with decor, swirls and little balls of flare. You will see.

Since I was using recycled clay, I also found a press on nail and a seashell in the 3rd mug. That pissed me off a bit, since I had to patch up the holes they made. All is well now though. Hopefully the inconsistencies don't leave enough air bubbles to have them blow up in the first firing. I will find out on Tuesday!

This is a Coil piece, meaning the whole thing is made from coils and balls, which are smooshed together on the inside to hold it together. I also added 3 big coiling legs to the base. When my teacher saw it he said "Wow! Nice piece. I'm scared." Apparently it is possible it might crack because of how huge, and detailed it is(I told you I was going to overcompensate for shrinkage) and how twisted and gnarly the legs are. But if it does make it, it will be epic :)

I also visited the Moorpark Zoo last weekend to get a little taste for where I will be when I eventually get into Eatm. I fell in love with the intimate and quiet atmosphere, and was really pleasantly surprised with how alert and active the animals were. I finally met the Siamang Gibbon that I hear in the mornings in Ceramics class.

This is the baboon, she made the most hilarious, raised eyebrow, open mouthed, shock face when the Capuchins were causing a ruckus next door. I wish I had my camera out at the moment, but alas I didn't.

This is one of the squirrel monkeys with one of the students. This is the kind of monkey that pooped on me in Costa Rica when I was standing under it trying to get a good picture. It smelled like Fruit.

And here is a pic of their Coyote CJ

Microscopic hunting adventures and Whooping Gibbons

2010-02-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

Yes I know that is not a Gibbon. Turns out that more than one Ape will be mentioned in this post.

I have had oodles of juicy goodness to write here, but seeing as I have taken on another freelance project I have been a tad M.I.A.... well, when I haven't been frolicking at Disneyland or the LA Zoo(Annual passes, huzzah).

Unfortunately my new freelance project is something I will have to keep very hush hush about in the meantime. All I can say is it is a very thrilling concept that I am doing character design for, and that I really hope becomes something in the future so I can tell you all about it. I am always intensely nervous each time I start a new project. Ever see that film "Blank Check"? You know, where the little kid gets a whole bunch of money by finding a blank check and pretends to be a millionaire business man... running a business from a computer in his house... no one suspecting he is only a little kid and completely incompetent? Then eventually they find out and it all goes to hell from there? Well, I always feel like I am that little kid, posing as a professional, that will one day be found out. I even try my best lately to disclose that I am a student, with very little time to focus on projects... but surprisingly that didn't deter the last two people that found me on Youtube.

By the way, isn't it crazy that Youtube can actually bring in actual animation jobs? I can't tell you how many times a week I get asked to do things for free(good lord I will never do that again...), but occasionally, something legit actually pops up. Sometimes I wonder if all the anxiety I get from it is actually worth it though. In the long run, I think it isn't(for me, that is)... because I don't feel any stress or anxiety from the long hours I am spending in school right now. It just feels right.

It took a really long time for me to figure this out... the difference between satisfaction from being good at something, from what simply makes me happy. I really enjoy having created something beautiful when I animate... but I don't enjoy a lot of the process. I, at best, tolerate being indoors... and the majority of life as an animator is inside a windowless room.

I remember when I was younger, I used to go to sleepaway camp up in the Angelus Oaks at a place called Camp Cedar Falls. For about 7 years I would go there for 1-3 weeks at a time. I always picked "Horsemanship" as my main activity during the day. I loved everything about it. I loved cleaning the horses hooves, I loved riding them, I even enjoyed the time mucking the manure out of their stalls because it was a really great bonding time to be in the stall with them. It was a kind of happiness that sits far deeper in my soul than the kind I get from creating art.... even though I would never want to give up art in my life either. It just isn't the most enriching of my favorite things.

Speaking of Art, I have now successfully had 4 bowls pass the first Kiln test. Note my first, sad little bowl below. It is rather small(since the whole process shrinks the clay in each firing), fitting about the size of a fist inside. This was my 2nd bowl I ever made (the first being destroyed for the sake of seeing what was inside)... and I made it before I could pull up a cylinder - a critical point in making anything larger than a frumpy little sugar bowl.

In the stoneware ceramics we are making, the clay goes through the kiln twice... once after it is made and once after it is painted/glazed. Having my 4 pots go through the first firing was a bit of a nerve-wracking experience since the first firing "weeds out the bad pots"(I always imagine that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory with the Golden eggs weeding out the bad eggs.. and children.. eep). There is a little rack next to the kiln, full of dejected and forlorn pottery that either wasn't strong enough to even make it INTO the kiln, or crumbled/cracked/blew-up, after the first firing. Luckily... All 4 of mine made it through *squee*. I will have more pictures next time, it's a tad difficult to hold a camera when hands are covered in sticky clay.

Like Intaglio Printmaking, Ceramics is quickly becoming one of those art forms that I absolutely adore. I love how so much of it is left up to chance. I love that there is a lack on control. I love that the glaze is unpredictable and can run down the side of the pot without my choosing when in the kiln... I love that I don't have to think so much about what I am making, what character to draw or what "concept" to portay. I just play with it. It is therapeutic. Must ask Santa Clause for a wheel and kiln one day(And Santa must be feeling especially rich).

One thing I also love about my ceramics class is that if I head outside at the right time to walk to and from the class to the kiln area... I can hear the Gibbons from across the campus. The Ceramics building sits on the top of one hill, and the Teaching Zoo sits on the top of another across a big dip between that has the sports area.

(this picture is one I took from my parking spot on the edge of campus, but it gives you an idea of the landscape on a very rare, rainy, Los angeles day... and a very rare green period of time.)

Last week, while carrying back 3 pots stacked precariously between my chin and arms, I heart a really loud whooping sound coming from across the hills. It is the most delightful little sound you can imagine. Not scary like the howler monkeys, not hyper and wild.. just beautiful whooping. Here's a litle video courteousy of Youtube

Now, on the topic of Apes... I also thought it would be a good idea to get an annual pass to the LA zoo. Ryan and I went last weekend and spent most of our time looking at the Primates(for me) and the Birds(for him). The Zoo was nauseatingly full of hyper children and their grumpy parents(while I love kids in small bundles... large quantities of children with their parents is something I try to avoid). Trying to see the Gorillas and the Chimps was a tad futile since kids were yelling and screaming at them - which didn't exactly invite them to come over and interact. Luckily, the Orangutan habitat is hidden in a little nook of a path away from tons of stroller wielding armies. When we found it, we were the only ones there.

The gal in the picture up top is a mom. She would run over to the side of the enclosure where the metal netting is(most isn't glass, so they can climb up to the top on the netting since orangutans love to climb) and stare right at me.

Unfortunately there is also a little pond by the netting that the orangutans can reach if they stretch out real far... the unfortunate part being that people have a habit of dropping trash there.

The momma and the baby(5 years old.. but still so small) both took this trash pond as something to be explored and procured both a plastic sprite bottle for the baby, and a ziplock sandwich bag for the mom. I was worried at first that the two of them would eat the trash... clearly I wasn't giving them the benefit of the doubt. Instead, the baby climbed down to the bottom of the enclosure and put the opening of the bottle up to a small hole in the wall. She pressed a button next to it and the bottle filled up with water(!). She then carried the bottle back up to a sunny spot, sat down and starting drinking the water out of the bottle like any old human does. The mom took the ziplock, filled it too with water, closed the top with her lips, and went to sit by the baby, drinking the water from her bag. Only one word can describe this. Bitchin.

Now, Speaking of Bitchin, in my Zoology class this week, I saw one of the coolest things I have seen since I saw the Blue heron hunt and eat a Rat on ventura Pier last December(um, yeah... seriously). Under our microscopes, in a little petri dish, we put a live Hydra(related to sea anemones... but this one was as small as a few grains of salt) in with a very small crab type thing(a Daphnia.. also only a few grains of salt). Under the scope we watched the hydra reach out it's tentacles, GRAB the wild thrashing Crab, paralyze it, and start to consume it. This is hunting on a scale so small, you would never see it happening if it was right in front of your nose. It was the coolest thing I have seen under a microscope. Go ahead and youtube search "Hydra eating daphnia".... but I guarantee you none of those videos portray the epic battle I witnessed on Tuesday. Trust me, I looked.

On Pond Scum and Failed Pottery

2010-01-15T15:53:00.000-08:00

I must say, I am only a week into Project Let's See if Vanessa Can Handle Class and Homework After over a Year and A Half of Trying to Be an Adult, but I am already overjoyed to be back in school. If last Thursday is any indicator of what my days will be like for the next 5 months, I will be the happiest little clam around.

My Thursday went like this...

I spent 3 hours in the morning learning how to use a Potter's Wheel. After two horrendously failed attempts(both including the rapid propulsion of clay into my hair, pores, and clothing - a fashion statement of which I can proudly say is nothing new to me) I managed to produce something that could be categorized, even if in the most primitive archaeological way, as a bowl. At the end of class, our teacher proceeded to cut all of our masterpieces in half to show us how even or centered our work was. Mine, with no amount of irony lost on me, had a fat bottom. I was beyond ecstatic it even had a bottom at all.

The rest of my day resulted in looking at tiny Pond organisms wiggling about under a microscope. I am talking TINY. We each had one drop of Pond water on our slide, and within it there were SO many strange little one celled organisms. I was in awe.

Because I am the product of a less than wealthy high school, and somehow managed to bypass a single science class while attaining my Bachelor of SCIENCE degree at Northwestern(ok, that's a mild lie, I did take ComputerScience/3d Animation), this was the first time I had ever looked into a microscope. Everyone around me kind of chuckled at me as I was oohing and awwwing in amazement over the Pond Scum under my scope, so blasé as they took a couple glances and sat back in their chairs for the next big thing. I squeeled when I finally focused in on what looked like little halved avocadoes doing the jig under my lens. I can't even imagine how weird it will be once we get bigger animals under there for dissection. We will be moving our way up the little animal totem pole(worms, pigeons, jellyfish, rats, sheep hearts etc..) during the Semester. The squeamish part of me(that can't stand watching gore films and turns away

during surgery scenes in Nip/Tuck) is a bit nervous, The sick part of me(that loves reading about how bodies decay and has an unhealthy interest in serial killer biographies) is more than a bit excited.

To cap it off, I took the rural route home from Moorpark to Oxnard, driving on the two lane highway through the cozy farmy hills that go through rural Moorpark and Somis(a place that earned my love by having more than one Alpaca farm, a plethora of citrus and Avocado groves, oodles of Horse Ranches, and a "Nut Hut"). The landscape right on the other side of the mountain/hills is so vastly different, with it's Ticky Tacky Track housing and Chain store vibe, that it is hard to believe I am so close to home. It feels so far away.

Driving with the top down, it was more than a bit chilly, but I saw at least five cowboys on horses, and the air smelled so strongly of Cilantro and Rain that I didn't care how cold it was. I am so happy I decided to do this.

No picture really does it any justice on Google images- so I will have to take my own pictures soon. This picture was not taken by me, but it is of a barn I passed by.

Year in triptychs

2009-12-29T13:57:00.001-08:00

1 Year3 pics for each month

A few words
Click to Biggify

January 2009

Digging for Sandcrabs right before the wave comes in.
Frozen Yogurt dripping down sunburnt arms.
Dancing on the top of Topanga Canyon.

February 2009

A damn good Tuna Melt on Venice Beach. A major spelling Fail.

March 2009

The Loud Crunch of eating Rice Crackers in a Meadow.
Suspicious Gophers eating Banana Chips.
Finding treasure in the mountains above Malibu(also
known as the nerdy hobby of geocaching. hellz yeah)

April 2009

Melted cheese oozing onto greasy fingers.

The smell of Sweat and Funnel Cakes.
Kicking up Dust and watching Belly dancers.

April 2009, Pt. 2

Oh Grunion Run, you deserve a whole part to yourself.
Easily one of the coolest things I have ever seen.
Thousands of flopping, wriggling, rainbow colored,
fishies mating on an empty beach in the middle of the night.
Grunions do it on Land.

May 2009

Super Soaker battles in the Ruins where Lions and Monkeys used to live.
The smell of urine and Mustard Seed.
"Did you just say, Go back to AFRICA!?" says some irate stranger, realizing
only 5 seconds too late that we were playing Risk in the park.

June 2009
Walls covered in bubblegum.
Rabid Redwood Racoons really love Popcorn and Cheetos.
Bold squirrels steal pretzels.
Eating a Sandwhich while sitting in a chair in the Big Sur River.

July 2009The Best Bagel I have ever eaten was in Mammoth.
Brine flies buzzing and flying in swarms around Mono Lake.
Standing on top of a boulder in the middle of a Yosemite Lake.
Cooking Pad Thai over an open fire by the River and Seeing the Milky Way.

August 2009Bodie Ghost Town. Foggy windows and old jars of Best Food's Mayo.

September 2009Adopted that sweet little BananaHead on the left.
Hippos gliding elegantly under the water.
Kitties walking on Leashes and Dolls with Razor Teeth.

October 2009
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

November 2009Everything changed in November.
I quit the job I hated. I enrolled in school. I went to lots of Zoos.

December 2009

Blue Fingernails and Arm socks.
Red lipstick and Hats in Thrift Stores.
A Heron eating a rat is just not natural.

In 2009 I...

Bought my dream car, my first car, with my own damn money.

Decided to follow my dream in Wildlife Documentary, and go back to school for exotic animals.

Reconnected with some amazing people from highschool. Many a good gamenight.

Successfully completed a bunch of freelance jobs.

Interned at a stop-motion animation studio.

Learned how to make stop-mo puppets.

Taught myself how to make jewelry.

Went geocaching for the first time.

In 2010 I want to...

Apply to the Exotic Animal Program at Moorpark.

Teach myself traditional animation and use my lightboard.

Do more crafts and art and sell things on etsy.

Volunteer at the Wildlife Waystation.

Go camping lots and lots.

Finish hand-painting my car.

Learn to Scuba Dive. Scuba Dive.

Learn how to Weld. Make metal sculptures

Learn how to use a potter's wheel.

Goodbye 2009!

I almost forgot!

2009-12-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

I almost forgot to mention that "Everything" is online now for the masses. It is in that lovely cruddy Youtube quality, and looks like a lot of frames got cut out in the downgrade from full to small quality, but enjoy none the less!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBsmtKHUcU8

My Interview for DPI Magazine

2009-12-19T09:17:00.000-08:00

So much has happened in the last few months that I feel like I have been neglecting this blog.

I will explain further down below, but for now I wanted to post up the Interview I did for the Taiwanese magazine, DPI magazine. Enjoy! Click on each picture to BIGGIFY!

So In short... within the last few months...

-I finished my internship at Buddy System Studios(sad face, those are some great folks)

-I discovered a lot about what I want to do with my life in the shadow of the death of someone I knew that was my age.

-I won't be pursuing any full time work in the entertainment industry like I had planned/thought I wanted, I will only do freelance projects.. and even then, when I please.

-I will be going back to school starting in January to take the prerequisites to apply for this amazing exotic animal program, my eventual goal to be that I graduate from The Exotic Animal Traning and Management program at America's Teaching Zoo(which happens to be 20 minutes from my house... there is nothing exactly like it anywhere else)... so that I can pursue something I have always yearned to do and never thought was possible for me, Wildlife and Natural History Filmmaking(think Planet Earth and March of the penguins... but with my own style of course - perhaps combine animation with documentary etc...)

-This blog is going to be a bit more of a mix of artforms - Crafts, photography, animation, creative writing about my adventures in exotic animals or about any of my adventures in general... you get the jist.

I am not leaving the world of animation, not at all. I love animation. But I don't want to make it the only thing I do, and I never want it to feel like a chore. I simply always felt myself aching to do this wildlife thang, and so I am going to do it.

Busy Bee

2009-09-02T20:11:00.000-07:00

I feel like I dropped off the blogplanet a wee bit. I have been super busy both interning at Buddy System Studios, and working on this commissioned wedding bit I will explain below.

A couple weeks ago a friend from college contacted me to do a super quick animated sequence of shots to insert into a wedding slideshow for a friend of hers. My goal? 50 seconds of animation to be completed in 2-3 weeks. woooweee. I like a challenge, so here we go.

The style I am doing is in the vein of my paper cut out animations. I finished drawing all the elements last week and photoshopped them all in the past couple days. Ideally I will have everything animated in the next 6 days. If not, I technically have a few more days after that... but shipping would be involved if I wait that long. It's tight, but I know I can do it.

On to the project!!!

I've never showed my process with my cut outs before, mainly because I am very self conscious about showing my sloppy "pre-photoshopped" drawings/paintings. There is a method to the madness. Since I animate in After Effects, I see no point in wasting time and paint in fine tuning the images on paper. I simply do my quickest drawings in pencil, paint rapidly a few layers in watercolor, ink everything with a black pen, and then photograph it all. It is much quicker to strengthen the colors and labor over the "likeness" of the characters in photoshop.

Here you can see my quick general drawing of Ash, and then the version I tweak in photoshop using the Transform warp tool to push and tug her face to resemble the real person more.

I put the photo as a layer underneath to use as reference.

Once I get the likeness, I start cutting out things and making movable layers for all the moving parts... eyebrows, irises, mouths, hair etc...

same thing with Dirk, sorry I don't have the photo of him up here.

Ash's father, Valentine

Scotland pre and post photoshop

castle before and after

Jamie, do you prefer the blue sky or sunset sky for the castle wide shot? Both will have sunlight inserted in after effects either way

wedding dress and bouquet- I need to elongate the dress, she looks a little squat

I know there are no hands. That is because to save time, I have a stockpile of hands and feet and other things from previous projects that I will reuse by simply adjusting the color and skintones in photoshop. Trees, hills, etc...

To Jamie:
There are a few things here and there I haven't put up, but these are the main things I wanted your input on Jamie - I didn't have any images of Ash face forward with her mouth closed, so I am still iffy on the likeness of her mouth from the front in resting position. If you have any pics of her without her teeth showing it would be great- or if you have tips on how her lips look if they are different from what I have. Any other likeness tweaks, let me know. Dirk from the front isnt done yet.

wee

2009-08-09T12:14:00.001-07:00

I am the new intern at Buddy System Studios, which is a place full of awesomeness and stop motion goodness.

I know it seems like it's been awhile since I posted any progress on the music video, and that's because it's basically done but I can't post the final version here. You will have to wait until the band puts it up online, when I will promptly publish a link to take you all to see it.

final day of animating

2009-07-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

I am on my last day of animating! I can't believe how quickly this project has come along... it wasn't even a thought a month and a half ago. 3/4 is done being edited and color corrected. I will have a first cut up for approval in a few days. Til then, here are a couple stills.

The last week has also been really lucky regarding what I am gonna do next. I will have a couple pages of interview and pictures for DPI Magazine(a taiwanese publication that looks really neato), I have an interview on tuesday for an internship at a lovely little stop motion studio here in LA, and a few people have contacted me that are interested in possibly working on commissions. I say "interested" and "possibly" because I never like to get too excited about things that aren't in writing, but I had a few interested groups so maybe at least one will pan out. We will see.

Bubblegum and Lip synching and Color Correction, oh my!

2009-07-14T20:55:00.001-07:00

Only one more week of animation left. I can't believe how quick this project has flown by. I have never done a project with this much to do in such a short amount of time. Yesterday alone I animated 30 seconds. I didn't have to, but I was on a bit of a role.

Some more stills....

Once I cluttered up her apartment with all the assorted goodies I made and acquired from ebay, I was highly pleased with the outcome.

You can't tell in this picture... but when the camera rack focuses onto Isadora stirring something in a pitcher, you can see all the cool kitchen stuff I got on ebay. there is even a miniature working cheese grater!

String man is about to pull out the gum,

a little example of some of the post production before and after work...

I do quite a bit in After effects with my footage, I usually add all of my practical light sources like lamps and suns etc... using the "generate, light rays" in after effects. It is a fabulous little effect that is so customizable, and even refracts light on items within the image as they move. Really sophisticated effect. You can see it here in use by the lamp and the sunlight from the window. I also use desaturate and curves in color correction a lot.

Here I add light rays to the objects in the background to give a glow, and I adjusted the Curves to give the image the "tealish, red, and yellow" hues I picked out for the film.

I used a new technique today when animating to get light on the puppet faces without putting a light below them... for a nice soft bounce of light on their faces, I put a paper towel down on the set floor, it bounced light nicely.

I am always open to questions on after effects if anyone needs any help.

And here is a tad little bit more animation... some lip-synching! I have actually never done much lip synching before, so it's been a really fun experience. The pig did a line in Siberian Farmland, but I am doing a few lines this time around in both stop motion and traditional form. This isn't entirely done yet, since I am adding the mouths in after effects, I have to move the mouths around while his head moves. It's not perfect yet, needs a bit of tweaking. I am really happy with how the gum flops around though! I apologize again for the cruddy, washed out internet quality.

buttons and paper dolls

2009-07-09T17:16:00.001-07:00

I don't remember if I mentioned before, but in the "floor sequences", that Isadora creates for String man there are paper cut out versions of them that move around to create the memory sequence from their past. These will blur out, then blur back in with the real memory and real 3d puppets.

Ryan gently pointed out while we were shooting that it looks like Isadora is doing the "soulja boy" dance. You have no idea until you see the video. Either that or the Hula, but Soulja boy is much more funny.

Um... yes, that is a mouth in the floor made out of a wad of gum. Yes, it sings. And Yes, it spits out a bunch of stuff when it is done singing. It's made out of Sculpy actually, which I had to put in the fridge so it wouldn't melt to itself so quickly with the hot lights.

The gum is one of those weird things String man finds in a jar on her side table. He takes it out, gets it all stuck on his hands and then drops it on the ground, where it rollspast the carpet and forms into a snail, slugs along to this one spot, and then forms a mouth.

a really bad Flash picture of the paper puppet next to Isadora.

string man's puppet. I'll have to take a pic of the back of the paper puppets to show how I connected them together in a way that was animateable. I drew and water colored them on watercolor paper, cut them out, reinforced them with cardboard from a Cereal box, then glued and taped rubber bands onto them at the joints.

In the end of the memory sequence in the flower field, string man kisses Isadora, only to find that he gets stuck to her lips with this blasted gum(a symbol throughout the video of things that just won't go away... and one of the lyrics in the song), and that the gum lips are attached to a pile of stuff, no longer Isadora(Howard's idea!) It transitions back to the paper puppets on the floor, and that's what you see here.

The last shot in the video. After String Man takes her back to the flower field, in the last 4 seconds of the song after the last line is sung, the image transitions back to the paper puppets on the floor, who float up off screen. All the items on the ground scatter off screen. She lets go of the flower as they float away and te flower tumbles off screen last.

I am alllllll done with the floor animation, now onto the real puppets.

Good morning

2009-07-07T08:31:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning to a lovely e-mail from Chris Walsh, a teacher at Sheridan College, telling me he was going to write a little blurb about my blog and my work on his animation blog. You can see it if you go here http://walsh-o-matic.blogspot.com/2009/07/curious-spoon.html

Ever since I started blogging my production work, I have really enjoyed making more connections with animators. It doesn't seem such a lonely place anymore! Without further ado, I give you the first 7 seconds... I know the very end is a tad offbeat, I have since fixed it, just haven't exported it. I have just started noticing this minor sound effect in the background of Howard's song that sounds like scissors cutting, pay attention for it!

First stills

2009-07-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

Started shooting, and while I can't put any footage up yet, I thought I would just give a couple stills from the opening shot. I must be off to continue!

Set Progress

2009-07-02T17:33:00.001-07:00

I am almost done with the sets. There are only two of them this time, but the apartment set is very detailed so it is taking me a bunch of time to do. I am still waiting on some miniature items to arrive from ebay(cork bottle jars and a small persian rug as well as some other accessories). I have finished all the main pieces, so now I just need to clutter it up and fill it with piles of stuff.

This is the main part of the flower field, I painted brown paint, then hot glued all these flowers in. This is where the main action will take place, but there will be more grass and flowers surrounding this board that will have lots of real wheatgrass that goes into the horizon.

the backdrop. Originally I wanted it all yellow, like in that painting that inspired the feeling and colors of the video, but now I think I want a light blending of teal in it as well to bring the teal into the sky. More of a teal tint to an orangy yellow sunset sky.

Great little aside... I have massive amounts of this pink, firm, yet spongey, foam that I got for free when I bought an old 1990's Super Soaker on Amazon Marketplace last month. It was used instead of packing peanuts. each block is about 1"x 4" x 2" , so I have used it in several instances to glue together and carve into things. Here I am using it in conjunction with cardboard to make a couch.

Before I hot glued the hardwood floor panels, I spray glued a piece of thick paper to the wood table. I did this so I can reuse the wood table in the future, but still have the set floor sturdily joined to the table..

the flowers before I added brown paint. If I was smart I would have painted it first. I somehow thought once I glued the grass down I wouldn't see blaring white. Ah the things you learn.

hardwood floor. Now to make these floors, I went to the habitat for humanity re-store store and bought some wood blinds for 3 dollars. they were easy to cut up into smaller pieces and I kept some of them whole to make the close up floor. I stained them a darker brown.

The close up floor. Looks black in this pic, but it's brown

Cheap baseboard and wall molding? Buy a bunch of plastic frames at the 99 cent store and cut them up.

I just plopped him down to see what it would look like. I definitely would not have the lighting be so flat in the real video.

drove my car around the corner to an overgrown sidewalk and did a little weeding. I have a bag full of this stuff which I am hot glueing between the fake flowers and on the ground so it looks less manicured and more wild.

The apartment is coming along, still needs more stuff, it is too clean rigt now.

I bought a little baggy full of little animals, spray painted them gold and am putting them around the room.

PLOT
Here is a more concrete plot to the video (Howard, this can still be changed within the parameters of the sets if you want within the next week, so if you want to add some specific moment or other in here, mention it now :)

The video starts out in a close up aerial shot of empty hardwood floors, a bunch of items(buttons, paper, pens, tissue etc) come together to formulate a picture of the string man's face, the image turns into a real life image of him sitting on the couch of Isadora's abode. You see he is surrounded by all of her oddball things(golden rabbit statues, string of pearls hanging from the ceiling, piles of collections and papers). He looks a little uncomfortable and concerned looking at all of the items. Isadora, across the room getting them a snack from the kitchen. While I imagine that they have been together for a long time, this is the first time he has been to her apartment in a long long time, if ever.

Isadora notices that String man is looking out of place and this is when she grabs the pile of items from the table and leads string man to the empty spot on the floor. When the items formulate the image of them in the meadow of flowers, it is a memory of the time that they first met - Isadora was picking flowers and String man was playing his guitar. Isadora is wearing her teal skirt to signify that it is a different time, and of course everything is a little extra saturated in her memory. They seem really happy.
The final image of them transitions back into the collage of items on the floor. Isadora's hand reaches out and grabs a crusty, dried up flower from the pile and holds it close to her. Even though it's just a flower, it means a lot to her as a memory of a time she really cherished.

String man, while understanding the importance, thinks that she's gone a bit overboard to the point where she isn't embracing the moment because she is too concerned with collecting her memories and putting them on a pedestal.

He tries to take the flower from her to have a moment with her but she is too occupied with her things and feels hurt that he doesn't seem to understand. After looking around a little more he goes over to her and ask to take her hand. He ties some fabric across her eyes and leads her off screen.

The next shot is a close up of her face with the blindfold, we see his hands remove the blind fold and her eyes light up, pulling out we see that he has taken her back to the flower field that they first met in. She, begins to look around the field and begins to pick a flower when String man stops her, pulls her to him - wanting her to spend the moment with him and not trying to collect more tokens. For the first time in the video since the memory she really looks at him.

And that's how it ends. They way I figure it, him taking her to the field is his way of meeting her halfway in appreciating the sentimental value of her memories, but he just wants her to remember that she needs to live in the moment. It's a bit of a problem that I deal with myself... being a photographer I obsessively take pictures of things, worried that one day I will forget something, but sometimes I live a whole day or event behind the lens and forget to actually enjoy it.

Within the main plot, there will be several times where we ct back to the spot on the floor where all sorts of items will come to life and dance around on the floor, corresponding to the items mentioned in the lyrics that he finds throughout the apartment.

Off I go!

She's almost done

2009-06-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

The puppet is almost done.

To make the hair: First I rolled out a bunch of the yarn, folded it over a bunch of times in the length I wanted her hair to be, held together the folds on one end with sewing thread, then threaded it through once through the latex on her head. I did this three times with equal bunches of hair and then glue it all down to her head with gorilla glue. I know that must be impossible to imagine from my description, but it really was much better than how I did the hair on the other puppet last time. I am going to be putting her hair into the two buns I described n the other post, but if I had want movable hair I could imagine that I would easily be able to weave thin wire throughout her hair easily with the thickness and curliness of the yarn.

Her eyes were made from sculpy(a mix of the pearly off white and the regular white), which I rolled out into ovals, made a hole with a sewing needle, and baked in the oven. When they were cool, I printed out some varying iris images from the internet and modge podged on the ones I liked. To give them a nice realistic shine, I paint a little nail polish on them before popping them into her head.

The background in these images is the wallpaper that I made for her apartment. I took some images of striped wallpaper off the internet, then mixed a couple types and changed the colors to fit the color I wanted in Photoshop. The yellow flowers in the background are the flowers I will creating a whole meadow out of for the memory sequence. I recently finished up the precise moment by moment plans for the film and will go over that a bit in my next post.

I have two sets to build this week... Her apartment and the field of yellow flowers. I will also be making another outfit for her that is primarily made of teals for the memory sequence in the flower meadow. I should be animating by the end of the week!

Hello my little Poppets

2009-06-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

It's been a very busy week. I had to hit the ground running since I am going to be doing this music video in 2 months. I like a bit of a challenge :)

Only one new puppet for this video, since it focuses on the relationship of String Man from the last video, and the new female character in this video... for all intents and purposes let's call her Isadora, Dora for short.

As I said before I want her to look like a fusion of circus/flapper/chinadoll/ballerina. She was actually really fun to sculpt and clothe. I finished the clothing last night and baked her eyes in the oven(not seen yet). Her hair will be two messy buns made out of this crimped black knitting yarn I found at JoAnn's... you'll see. In the drawing she appears to hair 4 buns all over her head.. I was just trying different locations for the buns.. I decided on the lower two. One large one by the nape of her neck below her ear, and one smaller one above and slightly behind her other ear. On the small one I will put a little colorful cloth flower thing.
She has no eyes or hair in any of these pictures. Patience my precious!

Here we go! I will be finishing her up today, and making the sets this week.

As usual, I don't spend much time on sketches for my stop motion... just the general idea...

like before, sculpted the heads from oil based clay... I find it helpful to do a basic sculpt with my fingers with it at room temperature... then put in in the fridge over night and sculpt the details with my tools when it is harder.

the mold, thats a water based clay at the base, then her, then some PAM before I layed in the plaster. That box is made from a trashbag box.

To save time, I only did a good 5 or 6 paperthin layers of Castin Craft liquid latex this time(since it takes so long to dry in the mold(assuming it's because the plaster side doesn't get air to dry faster) this actually proved a bit more taxing because the face was so flimsy that when I filled it with the insulation foam, her face puckered and wrinkled when the foam dried completely. I had to do a bit of plastic surgery to remove her face, paint in a layer of Gorilla Glue to make a skull, then glue it back onto her head

this time around I didn't use foam on my bodies, It was a lot quicker and cheaper to simply wrap her body in pantyhose.

Latex build up on arms and legs, this is her with the foam insulation drying onto the wire of her neck. I also want to note that to do the insulation foam head, it was important to have her neck ONLY 2 twisted 1/16th wires. I tried with 3 this time to strengthen her neck and spine, but her neck wasn't turning smoothly when the foam dried(too much resistance). I simply cut out a wire on the neck part and reglue her head into the foam with gorilla glue.

String man had a body transplant... Because I didn't know he was going to be in more than one video, I didn't make his spine strong enough to withstand such use. I gave him a new stronger spine made out of a stronger wire, wrapped with a smaller wire. Same goes for his left leg. is right leg is 4 pieces of 1/16th aluminum wire wrapped.
Also this time, instead up using balsa wood for the chest and hips, I used plumbers putty. It's stronger and saved time even though it is more expensive.

and a little bonus photo from Siberian that I found. It shows the humorously haphazard setup I used to do the octopus legs coming out of the pig's mouth.

Time to start again

2009-06-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

This is a proposal for Howard, definitely subject to change depending on whether it is approved or not- stay tuned...

Inspiration
As far as the look and feel of this video, I still want to stick with that pop surrealism type of feel that you referenced for the last video when you referenced Mark Ryden and Scott Radke... but instead of the darker moodier colors of Radke, and the more macabre tone of a lot of Mark Ryden's work, I picked a bunch of my inspiration from Joe Sorren... still staying in the world of the surreal and whimsical, but definitely brighter in tone to fit this song. Color inspiration comes from here....

I love the golden feeling in this Sorren piece, the combination of reds, yellows and a pinch of teal is similar to what I was telling you before... bright without being tacky. I want it to be a little oddball, but still with a lot of heart.

What I imagine from the lyrics is that this is a song about a man, in this case "String man" from the Siberian video, who is really in love with a woman, but the woman seems to be distracted with her odd collection of things. A lot of the things she collects and keeps are silly, the tissue paper, the old underwear, but they have a lot of sentimental value to her that the male doesn't quite understand. She is a little bit eccentric, a bit with her head in the clouds, but she means well. Undoubtedly though, he would prefer she spend less time focusing on objects, and more time realizing that it's not about the objects.

The woman in the video looks a bit doll like, with porcelain skin, dots of rosey red on her cheeks, and pinched red lips... she looks like a mix of a china doll, a 20's era flapper, and a ballerina - like she came right out of a music box or a silent black and white film- but with a bit of a zany edge.... she wouldn't care about mixing stripes with polka dots, she loves color and unique things. Her apartment and herself are a bit like Amelie if you have ever seen that film. Some of the inspiration for her can be seen below...

This girl seems to have a bit of an obsessive collection problem herself...

See amelie's weird collection of photos? She would have something like that...

She would also have something like a honey yellow brocade wallpaper I would imagine.

Now as far as the man goes, we will be using String man from the last video, but he will get a new wardrobe... also Howard, since I am redoing his body, do you want him to still have 4 arms or should I cut it down to 2? It depends on how out there you wanna be with his character in this. Either would work since I imagine this is more of a prelude to Siberian farmland, and this is string man in his life before he ended up in that other world. Like in the other world, he is still in love with strings and music, but he plays a guitar type instrument.

Synopsis

The general setting of the video takes place in the woman's abode. She lives in this wonderfully cramped city apartment. When They enter her apartment string man is stunned by the sheer amount of stuff piled all over the place, her "collections": piles of papers and buttons and jars full of all sorts of things. It is full of stuff, but it has a bit of a magical quality. String man looks around the apartment, picking up weird objects he can't possibly imagine why she would have kept. She, noticing his concern, leads him over to a spot on the floor. she grabs a pile of stuff randomly from atop a heap of thing. Sitting cross legged on the floor, she splays it all in front of them in a mess on the ground. They sit and look at the pile like two audience members at a play.
Focusing on the objects in an aerial view, the objects begin to move independantly, swirling about in a dance of sorts. Scissors cut up pieces of paper and items come together(buttons paperclips, string, those guitar picks that are mentioned in the lyrics etc..) to create two flat "paper doll" characters that resemble string man and the woman. The other objects move to create a bricolage/collage scene of them sitting in a meadow full of flowers. The image morphs into a real image of them(a memory of their past), sitting in the meadow of flowers where string man is playing his guitar like instrument for her.

The video goes back and forth like this 2 or three times with different memories that are tied to these bizarre collections of junk she has, to the objects moving on the floor, and them sitting watching this "play" of sorts. Everything in the memories is a bit more saturated and colorful than in the real world. I'm not entirely sure how I want the ending to be... I want to get across some idea that the objects don't matter as much, but that he has an appreciation for the beauty in her memories... We have a couple weeks before I need to hammer that down while I start building the sets.

A good example of objects animating themselves to create pictures is in Svankmajer's DImensions of Dialogue Part 1-

and lastly, some of the other images I found as inspiration - Big Fish is definitely an inspiration as far as movies go with it's classic feel, mixed with the whimsy of memories... as well as it's mix of unique characters and bright colors.

There ya go, let me know what you think Howard!

My new Demo Reel- hmm

2009-04-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

today I cut together a new demo reel that includes footage from my last two projects. I am not entirely sure I love it... I may have liked the upbeat tone of the other one better... but alas... I like it in a different way than before. Criticism is always welcome.

Ta da!

2009-04-07T08:43:00.001-07:00

EDIT: Hey folks- I needed to take own the video online because the band Minster Hill is gearing up to release their new batch of songs and promotion for the song and video.. be patient! You will be able to see it again in the future and possibly buy a full quality version of it through the band. Til then, just enjoy the demo reel :)

Here it is! I wish you could see the full quality here, but the internet is not a friendly place to the quality of video... this is better than youtube though.

Howard, please make any notes for what you would like changed or adjusted with approximate minutes and seconds so I know where you are talking about. Hope you enjoy!

intro without sound

2009-04-02T00:53:00.001-07:00

It's not much, but I was putting this 20 second intro online so my sound designer could have it for creating sound and I thought "what the heck, why not put it on the blog?" The little titles are notes to him, it also doesn't have the 10 second credits in the lower left hand corner yet, but it's the first sequence for you to see!

I am about 75% done color correcting and time tweaking- should see a finished product(ready for final approval) before the weekend :)

Woohoo!

2009-03-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

I have finished animating 75% of the shots - only one more week to go! I am very happy with how my raw footage is turning out... generally my technique is to animate as best I can, then tweak the timing in after effects my stretching and shrinking the shots where I think it seems too fast or too slow. Rarely I will reshoot if time allows, which I already know I have to do for only one of these shots. I try to animate so that I only have to speed things up if anything, so that I have more frames to work with.

I don't have pics or video of near all the footage I have shot- but I hope this is at least appetite wetting.

Most of these shots have not been tweaked to a finish yet in after effects for timing- but they are maybe 70% done in regards to timing and color. I like to do a general pass while I am in the animating process, then finely finish everything after I have all my footage done.

Here is a mix of stills and video. Sorry for the TERRIBLE youtube quality- it's youtube, what can I say. The originals are crispy and clear. It gets somewhat better with their "High quality" button, but not much.

For some reason I think a lot of frames got cut out because it doesn't look nearly as choppy in the file I uploaded. I am including links where you can download a better quality version too.

In general chronological order..

so after the girl gets pulled into the carcass of a dead pig by the arms of an octopus(which is being shot at the end), she wakes up to see these folks standing over her

The better quality download....
http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-testFootage887.avi

this is a close up of the bee lady looking at her on the operating table

better quality download...
http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-moreTests673.avi

then things start to get a bit weird as we cut back and forth between the scene on the "operating table" and a scene where the girl wakes up on the ground to find herself in an empty cavernous room. There is a wooden box in front of her. She gives it a quizzical look.

She crawls to the box and opens it to find it full of different eyeballs. She picks one up.

The interesting glowy fuzzy look here is obtained by using my fisheye adaptor lens, and then zooming in so that the image gets distorted. I use it for the POV shots.

she looks into the eyes

through the first eye she see the bee lady moving about "playing" music on the flowers.

The video cuts back and forth from shots of the girl at the operating table and her looking through the different eyeballs. Each eyeball shows her a different view of one of the 3 characters. The next is time pig man. he rolls around in circles like a mad man banging on clocks like drums.

next is string man who walks around in this room full of floor to ceiling strings plucking the strings to hear the vibrational sound they make.

here is a short clip, some of the vibrational instruments from pig time man are at the end of the clip.

Better quality download...
http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-stringPlay753.avi

through the last eyeball she picks up she sees herself in an empty room with strings attached to herself and no eyeballs

Better quality download...
http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-string797.avi

at the sight of this she gets really disturbed and faints. The eyeball drops out of her hand and rolls on the floor.

we cut back to the operating room and the bee lady pokes the girls leg to see that she can't move her legs. They all look at one another, deciding something needs to be done. This is the string man's look of approval. There are two shots here, I just filmed them consecutively.

Better quality download...
http://blip.tv/file/get/Playdohartist-realString232.avi

So that's what I have for today. I am not happy with how youtube is playing the footage, I will have to find a better way to show it next time. Something gets lost when youtube compresses it for the internet.

Shot over a minute already!

2009-03-06T17:52:00.001-08:00

I am so excited!!!! I have shot 64 seconds of footage in the last 4 days, which is excellent considering my decrepit state of health. I can finally talk again(though I won't be karaokeing for another week or so) and I am getting my energy back.

This is a dead pig. He is made from clay, with a mix of acrylic paint and beige spray paint. You can actually see his storyboarded self in the lower left corner

in the short intro, I have some establishing shots of the farmhouse. This is one of them. The light from the window crawls up the wall and over this picture to signal a passage of time.

aha! Yes, that is the puppet, masking taped to a chunk of granite. For most of the dining room shots, you can't see the girl's feet, and also she was a tad short to make the shots work(you couldn't see her behind the table when she was standing). I was feeling a bit anxious and not wanting to deal with tiedowns in conjunction with her lack of height... so I just took this granite sample and taped her to it. The granite is very heavy so she stayed in place... and the tape was shockingly strong.

a headless farmer

Pig getting placed

I realize this all looks very sloppy,lol. Such a sad sagging backdrop... but you can't see that part in the shot.

a shot from between the dslr and the cheapo videocamera(used for grabbing frames into animator dv so I can have a reference for each move - I use the onionskinning option but don't use animator dv for anything else)

another establishing shot of the crucifix and the little kerosene lamp. there is actually a match stuck into a blob of clay BEHIND the lamp that was lit. I couldnt put the flame in the lamp, it was too small. But this way I got the flicker and reflections of light in the lamp I wanted.

the first establishing shot inside the house. This is that grandfather clock I made. The face of the clock is from a watch. The lens I am using is an opteka fisheye lens that attaches to my nikkor lens. I zoom in the give it that weird hazy circular distortion. The shot goes from a complete out of focus shot to this. The effect the lens has is really beautiful and eerie. When it is out of focus the lights and colors look like paint.

These are frames from the film, yet again I am playing around with color curves in all of them with photoshop- still deciding on what colors I want to have in the final edit. Just quick color touching.

this milk is actually hair gel mixed with white paint. It oozed beautifully to allow me to just put my camera on continuous shooting as it dribbled out of the milk pot and onto the floor. It gets knocked over by the farmer's head which the girl drops on the table after it falls off his body. Complicated. Don't try to understand now. This is a surreal video.

Next I animate her getting swallowed into the pig after being pulled in by these octopus tentacles that come out of the dead, singing, pig's mouth. Just normal stuff, you know.

Shooting has begun!

2009-03-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

I began shooting today! I was planning on starting shooting yesterday, but I caught the dreaded bug my whole family has this week, so things have been relatively slow the last couple days. While I normally work 10-12 hours a day, I can only manage to squeeze out 4 or 5 hours a day since friday without feeling queezy and ill. I think it's strep throat or possibly tonsillitis. Blech. It should be over soon, but thankfully I am ahead of schedule so it's not affecting my work flow in any great way. When I feel sick I just resort to sculpting things or doing small relaxing tasks. Thankfully Ryan was here to help me set up the lights and table this morning.

I finished two shots this morning (about 10 seconds), which I will show you a shot from in a moment, but first... the progress from the last few days...

the finished wall for the pig/time man. Some of the cogs turn and the hands on the clocks. That big evil spikey thing spins as well. It looks like a saw/wheel of death. I don't know what it is to be honest. You can't see the sharp razor edges on it from the picture.

this is that magical insulation foam I talked about filling the puppet heads with before. the red one is firm, and the blue one is like packing peanuts(flexible and squishy)

I used it to create the underground walls, give it a rocky texture.

there are pipes and grates that will fill the space too - and I added some rusty color on top of the black

the hill

after the plaster, I painted it brown, then put a layer of glue and sprinkled some leftover cactus dirt I had in the garage.

broom grass got glue on in bundles in a sort of forced perspective height gradation

this is what the grass looked like when I found it at the dollar tree(normally 8 bucks a piece! I love 99cents stores.

the grass gets a bit sparse in the back since you can't tell on the angle I will be shooting at.

building a grandfather clock from a smaller grandfather clock and some extra wood and the sticks left over from the broom grass

I made the clock face bubble shaped by dribbling some hot glue on the wood.

Ryan helps out with putting the table together. Apparently, Ryan wants to be my apprentice :) For those who don't know, he is normally my sound designer and my only other collaborator in all my animations. he was with me when I first tested out some stop motion with a chunk of playdoh a few years ago.

setting up the lights- the background is made from a vinyl window shade that I spray painted beige and then added transparent layers to. the house is sitting on top of a trashcan and a coffee filter box.

testing out some angles to set the house just right

I am adjusting her eyeball

and finally some shots from the real film!!!! This is from the opening shot. All of these have different color tones since I was playing around this singular images to try and get a feel for the colors I want - so they are all different here.

this is supposed to be a tad later in the day.. 20 minutes or so. All of this takes place at about sunset.

testing different colors

that's all for now. Off I go to continue :)

Last week of building and making

2009-02-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

By Monday I should begin filming! I have finished all the puppets(only small details and cleanup left), and have a few sets to build. So far I have built this table and 3 chairs out of wood bought at salvation army, and some foamcore...

I stained it with some acrylic paint, then sanded it back to get some of the original wood color.

here is the dining room drawers(originally a bright colored jewelery box I painted and sanded and aged) with some of the plates and props on top

a plate on the table

two lovely ebay and thrift store finds. A small kerosene lamp and a teapot that was once a saltn pepper shaker.

the back wall to the farm house, made using fabric and print outs of wood. The wood planks are paper print outs that I bent and folded to look 3d- since I don't get close up on it to need it to be real wood. I made the molding out of foamcore board painted to match the wood printout. On this wall will hang a crucifix and a portrait. the drawers will be up against it with the lamp, and a grandfather clock on the other end.

the farm house for the wide shot of the prairie/farm. You don't get to close to it, it's a background prop

since you don't get close to it, I just printed out some textures of brick and shingles and then wrinkled them up and pasted them onto the foamcore model.

beginnings of a hill

plaster and paper towels to form the hill

looks like snow, but it will get brown tall grass

the beginnings of the wall background for the time clock pig man

it still needs clock faces

o look! a finished octopus!

and a rolling pig man!

the bee lady got some hair

the girl got new eyes(made using paper print out of irises, which I glued onto the old hardened clay eyes, then covered with clear nail polish), and some hair. The hair is made of thin sheets of latex which I embedded with armature wire and got glued to her head then painted black.they naturally became wavy when the latex stuck to itself.

Characters almost done!

2009-02-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

While none of the puppets have hair yet, I have almost finished the puppets, which is wonderful because it is the most time consuming part of building(though, admittedly, the most fun). On to the good stuff...

Oh Victorian Bee lady ... here is her skeleton and mask. I glue all the parts into balsa wood blocks using my favorite adhesive, gorilla glue. Gorilla glue has been many a savior. It expands to fill in all the gaps in my pre-drilled holes, and dries as hard as a rock. Very important since I don't want these limbs jiggling out of place after I sew clothes on.

See that string wrapped around her lower body? I was a dumbnut and didn't use enough wrapped wires to support her upper body weight. This string doesn't work well either, which you will see I had to reinforce in a moment. The build up on all hands is Mold builder latex over plumbers epoxy and wire.

Oh, the heads proved to be particularly troublesome.... I detest the idea of using foam latex(time? money? machinery? I dunno), so in the plaster molds I created masks by building up the latex layer by layer. Many a time I was impatient and globbed it in the mold, only to be punished by it never drying underneath the top layer. Blowdriers are my new best friends.

After they all dried, I pulled out the masks and tried to figure out the best way to attach them to the body... I tried something new and bought this foam insulation spray from Home depot called "Great stuff" that is meant to be used in closing up gaps in your windows and walls etc... It expands and hardens into a hard styrafoam texture. I sprayed this in with the masks face down and the neck wires propped up into the empty head cavity.

Actually, at first I bought the "flexible" kind which ended up being as soft as packing peanuts. I had to carve it out of the heads and spray in the "rigid" stuff. It hardens in 8 hour, but after about 4, I was able to shave away the excess around the craniums to be some sort of skull shape. It was perfect and not heavy. I can move the heads around with ease without the heads coming loose.

I love me some knobbly fingers. This 3nd layer of skin. I mixed acrylic paint with latex and started first with a white layer, then a translucent brown, then a pale greeney blue, which is what you see here, there is another light brown layer I add next for the shadows and dirtying up. but the hands here need more pale color to soften the hands.

this is the reinforcement I was talking about. My mom kept calling her the bobbleheaded bee lady, so I went wild with the wire wrapping and now she is secure and animates more easilly.

aha! the eyes I made out of sculpy (an eggshell color), and posed holes in them before baking with a toothpick. They need some shine so later today I will put a gloss on them. Around the eyes I placed some purplish sculpy I mixed and then painted a layer of clear latex over it to keep it in place and glue it to the face. the eyelids will be in the same color clay when I need them.

fixed the hands

hellooo. She needs hair badly. and her wings have not formed yet. I didnt get a good pick of the outfit yet but it has oodles of black lace and looks quite swell.

here is our farmgirl. The mask with these temporary wooden eyes I tried out. Many a corpse in the background after I put the heads on with that foam insulation stuff.

this is during one of the MANY failed attempts to fix her eye socket area. I did some plastic surgry here and gave her eyebrow implants with some clay and latex. It was bad. looked swollen. But her outfit is done!

these swollen eyes! Ever seen Rainman? "It's bad... it's bad..."

I know you may not be able to tell a difference here, but I can, I punched the sockets in so they go deeper.

now they still look "blackeye"ish, but not swollen. I am considering buying some realistic doll eyes today to separate her from the other world figures. we'll see. the black isn't working for me. I want an unsetling realistic eye.

the praying mother. needs gray hair in a low bun I think.

the father. no eyelids yet. You never see them with their eyes open anyway.

the farmgirl's future legs. The first 3 coats(a pale blue, then a purple, then a white). It already has the next 2 layers, not pictured here(a red/orange, and a translucent layer of yellow latex)

octopus. he needs to be paled down and a layer of transcluent yellow latex to make him look slimy

So, in the middle of all this working, sometimes I need to eat. And on this particular day I wanted pancakes(the crepish kind, but of the swedish persuasion where they are a little thicker and eggier, but with german toppings- lemon and powdered sugar). This is ENTIRELY on accident... but after pouring I noticed they look like two heads back to back. Don't they? see the silhouette?

Pig time man. I made a mask for him, but wanted it elongated, so I ended up adding foam and cotton on top to make it a longer face. no ears or mustache or top hat yet. he will have cogs and wheels on his lower body and will be a bit of a steampunk character.

string fate man- you can see here how I cut holes out in the sockets and have a layer of van aken clay behind the eyes. I put this in before the foam insulation. I like a bed of clay for the eyeballs to have some traction .

dude only has half an upper eyelid, but that's ok for now

I am gonna start updating more often so these aren't in such big bunches.