As you may have surmised, I periodically do internet searches on myself, just to see how well my standings as "laura kelly art" and "laura kelly mermaids" are holding up in google images (I'm doing okay in case you were wondering... but maybe you should go check it out for yourself to knock my stats up further). One night I did this with some friends and a lot of some wine, and I managed to go deep, DEEP into the void that is the internet's memory.
These are what I re-discovered:
BAM.
They are some weird and specific sketches that I had to do for DCC from FOREVER ago. Almost 7 years I think... Christ. Wow, forever is right... The first is of my sister when I had to draw planes to make the figure or something (note that I decided to completely ignore that rule for her hair) which looks nothing like her really, and the other is a self-portrait of me that we had to do wearing masks. Also a poor excuse for what I look like. Except for maybe the mouth. That looks pretty good... and I guess the nose is okay. The bottom part at least.
I laughed so hard when I found these. I don't remember having them put online, and I certainly don't have the actual drawings anymore, but they are out there, forever, on the internet. AND NOW (thank heavens) SOME OF MY GOOD STUFF IS TOO.
For your comparison I now include a picture of my sister hanging out with some dogs more recently at Christmas and me wearing my raccoon mask from Halloween:
So now there's this on the internet too.
If you want to see them in action via the webpages I found them on, you can do it here or here. There is kind of a good combo of the the good, the bad, and the ugly going on with the pieces shown in them, and I fall somewhere in the middle.
In fairness to myself, I think that they were done in one of the very first structured art classes that I ever did, and the fact that I made it on the DCC/teacher websites at all is pretty good. I suppose. Kinda.
JUST GIVE ME MY MOMENT.
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Oh, and if your wondering why I seem to be wearing the same shirt that I wore in another post, worry no longer: I totally am. I typically write these in my pajamas and that is one of my favorite tops. IT'S VERA WANG AND SUPER COMFY AND I LOVE IT. Now here is a picture of my sister and I being best friends.
Well, I've realized that if I am ever to really have an internet presence, I need to put the word 'art' into all of my posts... that way if anyone types 'laura kelly art' into a search engine, some random thing of mine should pop up. ART ART ART. There. Take that internet.
Now on to the good stuff.
I have been thoroughly enjoying the song 'Holding a Heart' by Girl Named Toby in recent days (because it is amazing), so feel free to give it a listen. And by that I mean listen to it right now... because it is freaking beautiful. I could listen to it forever.
Are you now listening to it as you read this? Good. Back on the art track, I illustrated a couple of scenes from the fairy tale The Goose Girl by the Brothers Grimm, and let me tell you - that is one nutty story with a horrifying ending. Also it was told to children!
The Goose Girl
Colored Pencil, 9"x 11"
Colored Pencil, 17"x 11"
Here is breakdown:
- There once was a beautiful Princess who was going to marry a Prince in a foreign land. As they usually do. Her mother gathered many beautiful and expensive things to send with her, but in order to protect her she also sent her with a maid in waiting (sure) , handkerchief with three drops of blood that she was to keep on her at all times (uh... right), and a magical talking horse (amazing). Yes. All things that I've wanted when journeying, but never managed to get.... but just you wait. One day...
Once they began to travel and had gotten away from the castle, they stopped for a drink in a nearby stream and the Princess promptly dropped her magic blood handkerchief right into the water where it floated away, never to be seen again. The maid took this opportunity to be like, "BITCH, I'm the princess now and you are the maid. Deal with that. AND IF YOU SAY ANYTHING TO ANYONE ABOUT IT KILL EVERYONE/THING THAT YOU LOVE. Also give me that goddamn magic horse." Or something to that effect. They then pull a non-fun parent trap type situation and go to meet the Prince.
- So they get there, everyone is like, "OOOOH, Princess, how nice to meet you. What's that? Give you're maid in waiting a job somewhere far away from you and also kill your magical horse because it displeased you? Sure, NO PROBLEM!!!! :> :) ;} WE TOTALLY TAKE YOU AT YOUR WORD IN ALL THINGS!" and the true princess is put to work in the fields tending the geese with some other dude while the maid lives it up before her wedding.
She went being the goose girl and feeling sorry for herself while the goose... boy who helped her in the fields developed a thing for her... hair. He thought that it was really pretty and wanted a piece of her beautiful golden hair to, I don't know, have and started to try and creep on her in order to get it. To dissuade this from happening, whenever she brushed it she would sing a song that made the wind blow and the goose boy's hat fly away so that he was forced to chase it and she could brush it in peace. Yup.
- The King saw her working her hair magic and wanted to know what was up, buuuuuuuut she told him that she couldn't tell him anything about who she was. In order to get the truth out of her, he told her that inside the castle there was a magical stove that if you sit inside of it and air your grievances, they'll all go away. The former Princess/current goose girl must have a been a bigger idiot than anyone besides the King would have thought, because she believed that wash and went ahead and did just that. The King obviously eavesdropped on that mess and once he realized what had happened, he pulled her out of her field job and plopped her in the castle, telling everyone but the former maid in waiting who she was and dressing her back up in style.
At dinner that night the maid in waiting was surprised to see a pretty young woman who looked vaguely familiar sitting on the other side of the Prince (not noticing that the young woman was the Princess showed that she was apparently as dumb as the Princess herself). The King asked her what she thought that they should do to someone who, ya know, did exactly what she did to the Princess. She then, like a champion, said that if a person did that they should be dragged behind horses in a nail studded barrel, naked, until they were dead. So the King had that done to her while the Prince and Princess got married and lived happily ever after.
THE-stuff-that-nightmares-are-made-of-END
Really and truly.
When I finished with these there were some things going on in the big one full of geese that made me crazy when I looked at it. I mean, there were things in the river one too, but not as many. In order to remedy this: PHOTOSHOP! Oh photoshop, you are so helpful when I am not making a full picture with you and just editing things. Because if I am making a full picture it is not a pretty one. I'm bad at that.
In preparation for making these, I also borrowed the book The Goose Girl from the girl that I babysit for and powered through that in a few hours to see how it was. It was a fun, interesting, more in depth take on an old weird fairytale that actually seemed tween appropriate. I'm sure that the kids reading it will have no idea that it was in fact based off a fairy tale, but whatever. I'll read anything once. No regrets.
So there is this. This is me biding my time on the internet while I organize things before posting some actual art with thought behind it. In the meantime, you get:
MORE MERMAIDS! Aren't you excited? I am sure that you are.
I call her "Crayonmaid" and she is drawn of crayon. And I also drew her on some weird piece of thin cardboard that probably just should have been thrown out. I do like the neat wrinkly texture that all the folds in it ended up giving her... although her shoulders are strangely big... and she's like, hunched backwards or something...
Whatever, I can forgive myself all of the weird and bad angles of her body that I made in this one because I MADE IT OUT OF CRAYON ON SOME WEIRD PIECE OF LEFTOVER CARDBOARD AT WORK ONE DAY. Look at how well that water is (kinda) blended. BOOM. Man, those wrinkles really make it look like water in some places. Accidentally well done, self. Keep that in mind for future mermaids. And I will... Just you wait.
Well, I went to see The Hunger Games this past weekend, and it was AMAZING. I didn't even nerd out too much... I only wore my fab Stella & Dot Arrow necklace and painted my nails like so:
(my bangs look SO GOOD right there... jeeze... sorry internet, but totally worth it)
I have absolutely no complaints about the movie except for the fact that I want more of it... there should have been more of it. So I'm just going to have to see it again next weekend (this means you, Val. You know who you are and what the plan is). In the mean time I'll just be obsessively listening to this song by Birdy.
ANYWAY, back to the fact that I periodically make art but still on a bit of a movie tangent. You know how people can really like something and not personally be good at it? Well that is still true. I am NOT GREAT AT ANIMATION, no matter how much I love it when others do it (which in case you are wondering is a lot. I love animation a lot). It was when I took an animation class and then had to make one that I confirmed this fact. We had to find a way to make a minute long animation of a love triangle in space. Whatever that means.
This is apparently what that means.
But I made it and it took me a long time and now you can watch it of you so choose. HERE IT IS AND YOU'D BETTER WATCH IT:
Questionable love triangle. Definitely took me forever. That one mountain is actually made out of the back of another giant Mother Earth puppet that I made... so... that's crafty of me at least... and I am quite proud of the fact that I managed to make the native made of yarn and feathers actually look as if it was shoving the robots there at the end... yeah, it is what it is. But it got the job done.
Joan of Arc has always been a really interesting person to me. She was just so epically tragic and badass, and maybe just the littlest bit crazy. As she awesomely should be to live on in plays, movies, statues, and pictures that I make.
A lot of my choices are made/based on this kind of badassery, so when I had to read a play for one of the last classes of my collage career last year, my teacher nudged me towards "St. Joan". If you're feeling ambitious and want to read it, it's actually a pretty funny play about Joan of Arc by George Bernard Shaw. I was reminded of how fascinating she was and I got on kind of a Joan kick after that, which led me to watch both The Passion of Joan of Arc (beautiful) and Messenger (badass), and which concluded in this piece where I decided to make her look like some kind of fiery lipstick model...
Colored Pencil, 10"x 12"
I know what you're thinking - "That is not how one would look while being burned at the stake! LAURA. GET IT TOGETHER. MORE BLACK." But you know what? SHUT UP. That's what. As interesting as it would have been to try and draw her charring in agony, that is just not how I roll. Instead I decided to make her all, "I know that I did right because God told me so and so this DOESN'T HURT AT ALL. Peace out."
As a side note, this is one of those pieces where the reference photos that I had to search for would make me look like some sort of pervert if someone had to troll through my internet history or photos folder. This happens to me a lot. There is just no good clean way to make a search term for 'girl bound in ropes'. So I stopped trying. Meh.
ANYWAY, I also thought that this would be a good time to post this since THE HUNGER GAMES MOVIE COMES OUT SO, SO SOON and I keep seeing posters that look like these ones all over the city:
I. Am. So. Pumped.
GIRL ON FIRE MEET JOAN OF ARC. You are both epic and I love you.
Those would have been such good, clean, beautiful, helpful reference photos if they had been around when I made Joan... next time...
I ate a heart shaped pizza yesterday with friends. Then I drank a lot of wine and played the Wikipedia game with said friends. Now you get to look at this sketch! HAPPY FEBRUARY 15TH Y'ALL.
I sound like a velociraptor right now. It is the weirdest thing: I kinda feel okay, not completely horrible, but I sound the way a dinosaur would if it were going through puberty. Talking on the phone is a chore in squeaky ridiculousness and when I go to work the children stare at me like I may turn into a monster at a moments notice. I also have to keep blowing my nose. This is extra exciting/horrible when you have to do it on the subway and you just *KNOW* that everyone is judging you. I AM A HOT MESS OF SOUNDS.
So here are some cats to make it all better. Plus Kristen Bell and sloths.
This cat likes to bite me which makes me fight him.
He may or may not have launched himself at my face after this picture was taken.
This cat lives in the Museum of Natural History
I'm pretty sure that I gave up on filling in all of those spots up there after about ten minutes. So many, many spots. On a different note, I also had a serious 'demon-monster-laugh-of-doom-and-illness' this morning re-watching this video of Kristen Bell on Ellen:
