eatin' oranges

Well, hi there!

I think it's time to start revamping this old blog. I just started a new semester here at Whitman, and am taking three art classes (beginning ceramics and printmaking and intermediate book arts), along with Art Since 1945 and Spanish. I'm also continuing with my jobs at Kdub (the radio station), WCTS (tech services), and doing graphic design for college events.

My boyfriend and I are also hosting a radio show together, called Manifiesta! We read a different manifesto on air each week, integrating music inspired by said manifesto. If the manifesto is short enough, we may go into historical anecdotes, yada yada. Monday night was our first show, and we drew Dada from the hat. Yess! The Dada Manifesto is awesome, and we were able to incorporate some suitably avant-garde music (namely "Hypnotic Sounds," by Neutral Milk Hotel) between paragraphs. Manifiesta is in addition to my other radio show, hosted with Nathan Liechty, On Rotation.

It's going to be a cray-zee semester, but I'm really enthusiastic about all my classes and am actually excited to do my homework most days!

Speaking of homework, my upcoming project deadline is to make a pop-up book! My theme is oranges, and the art of peeling them. I'm hoping to fully integrate this theme into the form of the book... so far it's going really well (knock on wood). So, part of the process has been photographing oranges. Here are some of the photos, or random in-progress screenshots:

book arts + printmaking + hey, man

It's be so long! So much has happened since my last posts... but I really won't get into any personal narratives. There's too much art to go over! This semester I'm taking Beginning Book Arts, and these are the finished products I've created so far:

A box! The top flap ends right about where my thumb is, and the tab that keeps it closed is the middle flower/leaf. Cool, I know. I AM SO PROUD OF THIS BOX.

And inside the box you'll find some awesome Zombie prints! This was our first printmaking assignment, and the theme was dreams. Recently a ton of my dreams have involved zombies, undoubtedly influenced by The Walking Dead. So I made this little Grindhouse postcard. It took three press runs: once for the silver-grey-black background, once for the silver lead type, once for the red-gold zombie linocut.

And here's the linoleum cut.

This is my first box attempt... it has the same dimensions of the one above, but it was a little flimsy and the fabric was coming up off the paper in spots. Blech. Plus, no cool tab action here.

This is a previous project for book arts, although this photo is in the process of editing the cover. But yeah, bound the cover with fabric, made a little hand stickin' out of the front, yada yada.

The book itself is Japanese-style accordion, and is about an experience in Florida. This is the inner book cover.

I did the illustrations as if I was ten-ish, coloring them with Prismacolor pencils, mounting them on red paper and glue-sticking them in. I also used the handwriting I had in elementary school throughout the book.

And finally, the latest installment of Hey, Man! This is my favorite issue to date. We're moving publication down to quarterly, which means each issue is more precious. I spent way longer than usual laying it out, really getting into the graphic design of the thing. And Sam Alden's cover is even more awesome than usual. So good!

MD Elements

repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition

designs

School's back! Which means my arty-skillz have new-found purpose. Mostly revolving around events, jobs, and biff. Here are three:

My house does fun things!

 My biff does fun things!

I like fun things!

Lips

Yowza!

Here's a new design. This band, Lips, was one of the openers for Princess Chelsea, whose poster is below. They were kind enough to ask me to design their West Coast tour flier! ...I kinda got into it. I'm all about sloppy psychedelia.

princess chelsea

YES!

Design. Back in biznaz.

This is a poster I made for a concert in Brooklyn. A large portion of my job as Kdub summer manager is talking to music promoters. Which can be really cool; they're all pretty chill people who dig music. I wouldn't mind becoming a promoter myself, actually! Anyways, Jenn the Band Mom hooked me up with a gig designing this poster for some of the bands she manages. Supah cool. This the result of a lot of playing around in Photoshop. It's totally different than what I had on paper. I switched out the head for a different drawing altogether, replaced hand-drawn typography with real font, blahdy blah. The really fun part was messing around with layering! I won't get into nerdy details...

Here are two other versions (click to make big):

Yuup.

Not much else has been going on. I haven't really been doing any art, besides this. But I have been messing with photography again, and some designy goodness. Possibly my favorite thing to design is album covers. And I've been doing that extensively, for mixes posted on Mix Tape Files, a website I created with my friend Harry, very recently. It's a really awesome site, check it out! But here are some album covers I made, for mixes made and unmade...

smells like curry (it's a pun on my name... and possibly culturally insensitive, ha)

He doesn't know this mix is happening...neither do I, really. I just love the photo.

And here's a design I did for the site in general. The dots are cut outs of a photo I took looking through a glass of water. Plus some saturation. I love, love love this design -- I love that each dot is different (since they're all from different photos), I love that the dots all have different width outlines, and I love that it's slightly psychedelic while remaining clean cut and modern. I'm not bragging... this design just sort of came to me. It might not even be very good, but hey. I'm still allowed to like it.

Other than that, mostly I've just been listening to a lot of music. Pavement is my newest love. And I finished seasons 1 through 5 of Dexter. So good!!

the curry fam!

I find the white lines on the faces slightly disconcerting, for some reason.

Well, I really haven't been arting around much. I've been pretty well settled, and not doing much. I've been dog sitting every night and morning, which has been fun. And has resulted in a lot less sleep. I've also started up a Dexter marathon which may last several days more. The two, dog sitting and Dexter, don't mix well. Last night I kept dreaming that one of the dogs, Nigel, was trying to insinuate different cops as murderers, but his reasons kept falling through and I began to suspect him of being mentally unstable. Yeah. Who really sounds mentally unstable in that?

I've also been listening to a buttload of music. Michael Jordan Touchdown Pass, tUnE-yArDs, and now PJ Harvey have been filling my ears as of late. I got my music collection all organized last weekend (yesss), and now I'm working to bulk it up some more. Hence, an enormous stack of CDs sitting next to my laptop, waiting to be ripped. Yay!

Anywhos. I'll be heading to Ptown and the coast soon-ish, that is what I am most looking forward to at the moment. Walla Walla is great, but I settle into a lazy, unproductive lull a little too easily. Which is great, for summer livin'.