Monsters In My Coffee.

Again, I'd like to reiterate that I like ceramics but am not a champion of them. That being said, I recently made this awesome mug at a crafty birthday party for my dear friends Sean and Audrey! 

IT IS A MONSTER.

Normally it would have been a lie to say 'monsters in my coffee' like I did in the title (which I did because of the song "You're So Vain" by Carly Simon... 'clouds in my coffee' and all that), but I just got a french press and now I can make it! Success!

Anyway, it was a really fun party where we got to pick and paint our own pottery at The Little Shop of Crafts... so I naturally made a mug even though there is no room for any more mugs in my cabinet. Smart! It was great fun, regardless, with birthday shenanigans and wine and karaoke afterwards. The wine part may have effected my mug-painting skill set but how much is hard to say. Ceramic panting is tricky at the best of times - the paint doesn't look the color it will eventually turn out to be when you put it on, colors all look the same once their laid on the pottery, and there is no going back once it's done. YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CHOICES YOU MADE, LAURA. That is unless you have a lot of time on your hands and are crafty about fixing it. Which I didn't and wasn't.

But my mug is a mug and it's pretty nice and I like it and I had a good 'ol time doing it with these monsters:  

You guys are forever awesome no matter your age. 

TRUEBLOOOOOD

My roommate and I recently had a True Blood themed party which was really fun! It gave everyone a chance to dress up as who they liked best (I was Pam) and me an opportunity to wear a zebra striped, sequined, puffy one shoulder number that I could never wear in the real world for fear of looking like a damn fool. And I'm just slightly too practical for that. 

In getting ready for it, my roommate thought that it would be fun to make posters of ourselves like the character posters that HBO did for the show to put on facebook, so she did hers on an older paintshop program and then tried to do one for me... but my skin is too ghostly white to look like anything and I just looked like a giant squid eye when she was done. So that we could match I had to take matters into my own photoshopy hands... 

I was only going to work on it for, like, 15 minutes. I swear. And then suddenly it was an hour and a half later and I was still trying to adjust things until I went, "wait a minute - what the hell am I doing here still?" and stopped. 

But in the end it kept making me laugh so I'm putting it on here for the world to enjoy: 

 

Mine. 

Not mine. 

I'm not sure that this one really counts as art, but I made it on photoshop, so it probably does. 

Plus during the party there was (among other things) a fun black light that made everything white, including my snazzy dress, glow in the dark! 

 

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! 

Seagulls!

It is summer now (which I am sure that you've noticed) so I thought I'd pop an older, summery...er piece up on here. It's not my favorite piece in the world, but the colors are good and since I've been working seven days a week I don't have any god damn time to make new art! Thanks student loans! 

So I was tasked with recreating a piece of art done by another artist, in this case Erte's "Seagulls" from 1938.

Collage, 9"x 15"

I like Erte, he makes beautiful, patterned, whimsical art full of pretty ladies as well as a lot of things in sequence. It's really right up my ally. 

I, on the other hand, just wanted to fill that sucker with color when I remade it. Her skin is mostly little bitty carpet sample pictures that I chopped out of some catalogue, and the rest is various origami papers, construction paper, and pages out of a old book that I felt less bad about chopping up because it was in a language that I did not speak. I love the look of paper with text on it collaged into stuff, but I always feel horrible when I have to chop up and reappropriate a book that I could be reading. I love books that much. I am that guy. 

Mine was also wider before, but then it looked super stupid, so I sliced off the part with the sailboat and more birds on it and shoved on a new book page side. TA~DA! ART!

Fresh. Well... Fresh-ish.

Sometimes I get home late from doing something fun with my friends in Astoria and sit down at my blog to, ya know, just quickly check and see how popular I am and... get really, really, REALLY distracted. Tonight was one of those nights.

I was all, "wow, that mermaid on the header only looks 'meh' so maybe I should just change it real quick" and then I realized that there were new layouts that I wanted to play with and then I realized that they looked nice for the first 5 minutes but I hated them and thennnnn... I had to back and try and fix it, which was impossible since I just screw around changing and moving stuff until I like it/get bored, so I made a new layout. Which led to how my blog looks now.

Which is like this:

I figured that I'd put a nice little picture in there, since I am 98% sure that I'll be changing it in the morning. We'll see if I forget to or not.

Also it is technically the 4th of July now, so HAPPY AMERICA DAY! Let's all eat some hotdogs, drink a beer, watch 'Independence Day' and look at some fireworks.

Like these. 

I straight up took that picture from here because it's pretty, so thanks Kelly Davenport (whoever you may be) for that picture of fireworks over Louisville. Nice.

TA~DA. 

I am so overtired you guys, and I keep getting surprised by the sound of assorted fireworks/crackers/snappers/poppers/whatnot outside in my neighborhood which I can still hear over the sound of my AC even though it is LOUUUUUD. 

I don't know why I'm still doing this right now. 

SO I WILL STOP.