Scanner Success?

    Well, I tried scanning some of my jewelry pieces tonight... finally. It worked very well for some and very poorly for others, which is basically what I expected. There were some nice flat pieces that turned out well, like this blue and brown polyclay bracelet I made:

     But a lot of my pieces are too three-dimensional to be captured properly on a scanner, so I wound up with lots of blurry patches, like in this fishy necklace that I loooove:

     Lame. Anyway, I have a lot of photo cropping and editing to do before I can put these new pics up on the site. Look for them sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Wasting Time

"There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations." ~ Benjamin Disraeli

     I am alive. Sort of. As much as someone with no motivation whatsoever can be alive. There's really not much for me to say, but I'll try to draw it out so I can look like I'm accomplishing something here. That seems to be my approach to a lot of things in life. Anyway, my corner of the world has thawed out a little, so even though it's still cold, at least we're not all trapped in ice anymore. I feel like I've kind of been floating through life halfway asleep lately, but I'm trying desperately to drag myself out of this giant rut I'm in and do something valuable with my time. I did manage to post some of my artwork on my website, so that's new I guess. Also managed to make a few bracelets, but nothing I'm particularly proud of. Tonight when I get home from work, I'm going to force myself to make a necklace... as long as the two little girls I watch don't beat me up or something. Yeah, there's always that "if" factor in my life. If I'm not too tired, if I feel well enough, if there's nothing on the tv that requires my attention, if if if. Anywho, I'll try to post a progress report later. For now, off to work. Super Babysitter away! Woosh!

Hell Has Frozen Over!

     Oh wait. It's just Georgia. Never mind. Though if the Devil went down to Georgia, does that make Georgia hell? Hrm. In any case, my little corner of the world is covered in a sheet of ice and the bottom of my driveway resembles a hockey rink. Too bad I don't ice skate.

     In other news, my trip down to Florida yielded some interesting materials for me to work with. My brother and I took a walk along the beach and I picked up some rather nice shells along the way. I'm going to attempt to drill some holes in the flatter ones and see if I can use them for focal pieces in my jewelry. Of course, that won't really work out with the shells that have a spiral shape, but I'll find some use for them I'm sure.  They were just too pretty to leave behind. Anywho, my aunt and uncle gave me some sand dollars to work with as well, which I'm pretty excited about. I'm going to see if a lovely friend of mine would like to paint them and make a collection of sand dollar jewelry with me. I'd paint them myself, but Jess would do a far better job of it than I ever could, and it would give me an excuse to have art jams with her. It would be nice to get Amanda from Balagan Art in on the action as well, but that might be a little difficult considering the fact that she's still at Berry. Oh well. We'll see how it goes.

     Anyway, I think I'm going to try to scan some of my jewelry. It seems to be a pretty effective method for other jewelry artists, and since my mother has a nice scanner that's pretty new, I suppose I'll give a whirl. It would probably make my father happy since I'm pretty sure he's tired of coming up to my room to photograph tons of jewelry every time I make a new batch. I wish I could scan some of my drawings as well, but we definitely don't have a scanner big enough for that. I think maybe I'll put up some of the photos I've taken of my portraits on the site, just to get rid of that empty art page. At least it will do until I can get images of a high enough quality to start selling prints. But yeah, that's all I have to say right now. Guess I'll try to get some work done. There's a novel idea, huh?

New Year Blah-dee Blah Blah

     I really have nothing good to say here, but I thought I should let the world know that I'm alive. Been busy with the holidays, a little bit of drawing, and the Sims 3 Ambitions which I got for Christmas. I had a good Christmas and New Year's Eve (everyone should play Apples to Apples when they're drinking), though tonight I'm feeling rather stressed, angry, and depressed. Personal problems. Sometimes I really think I should be a hermit, or at least just stick with one or two people who are actually capable of being there for me when I need them. Speaking of which, my old college roomie is back in the area, which means that I'll hopefully be having a lot more fun and getting more work done. She tends to inspire me and keep me motivated. Honestly, I don't think I would have survived my senior project without her. So yeah, she came over the other day and we had a good time being all creative and stuff together. She paints, I draw, we swap ideas, etc. She's doing this new collage/painting thing that I can't wait to see when it's all done.

     So anyway, that's all I've got really. I'll be leaving tomorrow to visit family in Florida for the rest of the week, so I probably won't have any good posts until next week. Still, family can inspire you to say some weird things, so who knows? Maybe I'll write something interesting if I can find an internet connection while I'm there.

Oh Google...

     This is kind of a short, random, slightly amusing post. I don't really have anything to say, but I was looking at the search phrases that have brought people to my little blog, and I found some of them rather funny. Some of them actually make sense, like "art at Gordon College" or names of people I've quoted like "Jann Semkow" or "Margo Buccini." Others, however, make little to no sense at all. Let's see what we've got.

* "I guess today" -- You guess today... what? Who searches for a phrase like that, and just how many million hits did they get on the search engine?

* "that I have my shopping cart" -- Um... complete phrase anyone? And why are you looking for info on who has a shopping cart?

* "and stone chips in" -- This person is apparently also a fan of fragments that make no sense. Now I'm wondering where I was talking about stone chips...

* "Berry College and Dada and Neo-Classicism and drawing and..." -- Ok, I admit... this one was me. I wanted to see how many random art-related phrases I had to type into Google before I could get my blog to come up. Here's a hint... it's a lot.

* "What do I do when black stuff is on my shell collection" -- Seriously? Wtf? How did this pull up my blog? Where was I talking about black stuff on shells? Did I drunk post again? Jeez. And how should I know what to do when you have black stuff on your shell collection? If it was me, I'd assume my shells had caught the black plague, don a Hazmat suit, and carry them out to the dump to bury them six feet under the ground in a pretty (yet safe) little shell collection funeral.

Uninspiring Inspiration

     Well, I feel compelled to write something here tonight, but I have no idea what to write. You could say that I'm bored out of my mind and trying to motivate myself to actually work on something. I thought about telling the world a little more about myself, but it seems a little self-centered and boring. I'm really not all that interesting to talk about, even if I try to act like I am. Anyway, I suppose I should talk about something art related. Let's see where this takes us.

     Occasionally someone feels the need to ask me deep, artistic questions, and most of the time I don't have any good answers for them. I think for some reason, people always assume that all artists have these deep, expressive, passionate, creative souls that defy logic and order. I really wonder what a scientific genius like Leonardo da Vinci would think of the modern view of the artist. For instance, my mother can't stand that I like symmetry and balance. When we have to work together on decorating or setting up a display, she'll often say something to the effect of "You're an artist! You're supposed to be creative with it, not have it all spaced out evenly! Put down the ruler!" Really? When did that happen? Apparently people who are obsessive-compulsive can never be artists. It's a good thing no artist ever relies on ratios or perspective or rulers. Other people will stand in front of one of my pieces and ask things like "What does it symbolize?" or "What does it mean?" or "What inspired this?" That's typically when I blink slowly at them, point to the piece, and go, "It's a face. It was pretty... so I drew it." Ok, so maybe not all of my pieces are that simple. But seriously. Why does everything have to mean something? I get that some people create really abstract, symbolic, or meaningful work, and that's awesome. If that's what they want to do, cool with me. But why do all artists have to be lumped into that group? This part of my rant is starting to sound like my previous post on art. I'll stop sounding like a broken record now.

     What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Deep, artistic questions. Ok, so I can't really answer questions about meaning and parts of my soul being in the work and all that jazz, but I can answer questions about inspiration... sometimes. Sometimes it really is just as simple as "I really liked that person's face, so I drew her," or "I saw these really cool beads, so I brought them home and just put them with a bunch of other beads that matched." Other times, it's slightly more complex, though often not much more. Sometimes, I'll see another work of art that inspires me, so I'll take an element of that work, whether it's the style, mood, technique, or materials, and I'll try to incorporate it into my own piece. For instance, I really liked all of the elegant but unrealistic swirling lines in Linda Bergkvist's piece entitled "Kareena" so I tried to incorporate a small piece of that in the hair of the vampire in "Blood Moon" (forgive the glare at the top of the photo; the original drawing is in a frame).

     Continuing with this piece as an example, other times I simply take inspiration from the things I like. I love vampire mythology and novels (no, not Twilight... sorry to all you sparkly vampire fans, but I stick with Anne Rice... just don't mention the movie version of Queen of the Damned... that might actually be worse than Twilight). I also love Amy Lee, the lead singer for Evanescence (ok, maybe I don't love her personally since we've never met, but I love her voice anyhow). So for this piece, I took some basics from Amy Lee's appearance, added in features of my own appearance since I had to use myself as a model for the shading, and turned the resulting creation into a vampire. I also happen to like the full moon and cherry blossoms. Ta da! You have the whole picture. Combine Linda Bergkvist, Amy Lee, vampires, cherry blossoms, a full moon, and a little touch of yours truly and you get one of my pieces. No deep, meaningful experience abstracted on paper, just a logical stream of thoughts and preferences. Uninspiring inspiration. Gotta love it. Anyway, that's enough about inspiration for one night. Maybe I'll elaborate on it more or cover it from a jewelry standpoint later on, but for now my fingers are tired and I need to find something less exhausting to keep me entertained.

Happy Rut Day!

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing -- that's why we recommend it daily." ~ Zig Ziglar

     So I'm pretty much in another rut. I have fragments of ideas but no motivation to turn them into complete realities. I think maybe I'm just a little burned out from my job and the holidays and some personal issues. I get burned out pretty easily. I finished my commissioned project (hopefully I won't break it again) and made a few beads, but aside from that, I haven't created anything. So, instead of providing interesting details about some amazing thing I'm creating, I'm just going to put up a pretty picture I made several months ago so you don't lose interest in me while I'm rolling around in my rut. This piece is called "Siren's Gaze" and was made for my "Visionary" collection at Berry College, same collection that this piece came from. Thanks to my lovely friend Miranda for modeling for me.