Crayons are Still Fun.

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.

I can make movies too, ya know. Just not good ones.

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.

Ready... Aim...

... JOAN OF ARC IS ON FIRE. 

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... 

EDIT: HOW COINCIDENTAL. Success. 

Curly.

So here this is. 

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.

Every time I get sick all I want to do is post about cats.

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: 

I love Kristen Bell. 

Hyperbole and a Half is amazing.

I laugh. I laugh so hard every. Single. Time.

I'm not sure that there has ever been anything more true than this post about cake vs. pie.


She is also better at 'photoshop master' type art than I am. I WISH THAT THERE WERE MORE NEW ONES. MAKE MORE.

Love, Laura

Cars cars. Cars cars cars.

I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to drawing cars and stuff like that, but I can fake it pretty well. This comes in handy because boys tend to not be as interested in mermaids as I am (to be fair to boys everywhere - it's hard to be as interested in mermaids as I am), so sometimes cars it is. 'Cars' cars to be exact. 

Children can be verrrrrrrry particular about how they believe/know that things should look, so when I did these Charlie very kindly got me his 'Cars' DVD cases so that we could try and figure out what the cars actually looked like... I feel like I got sort of close. Ish.  

He is such a diligent little art maker. I am always impressed. 

He picked out all of the cars that we were going to make and then we each colored half of them (I'll let you decide which of us did which) with some colored pencils. He particularly likes 'Cars 2' and wanted me to do some of the random race cars that are in it, buuuuuut I didn't know what they looked like and we both decided that it would be better if we stuck to the more normal ones. GOOD TIMES.