Childhood!

This is a MAGICAL AND  BEAUTIFUL AND EXCITING picture that my friend Trisa and I made when we were in like... I dunno, 4th grade? SO GOOD. It's beautiful and I love it. The fact that she had it/found it again makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. 

Those are horses playing in the hills... playing soccer. Ya know. I think that we did it by mostly tracing little bitty horse erasers that looked like this. Though it looks like at least one of them was hand drawn. The dinosaur looking one. CHILDHOOD WAS SO FUN.

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.

YUP.

Even though there are too many posts with my face on them recently, this still has to happen - because in case you every wondered how much I love teal and sparkles the answer is, this much:

Exactly this much. 

I may look slightly derpy in this picture, but make no mistake - I AM ALWAYS VERY EXCITED WHEN I PAINT MY NAILS THIS COLOR. The color is 'Sinful Colors - Nail Junkie' which is a damn exciting title for this nail polish considering the lack of sexy I'm working here. Instead, I am literally trying to show the world even though I know that it will never appreciate it as much as I do.

  WHAT NOW SUCKAS, BECAUSE YOU'RE LOOKING AT THIS REGARDLESS.

Win. 

I suppose that I could take pictures of myself holding onto the bottle of nail polish with the nail color on in dramatic lighting and close up shots like the rest of the internet seems to like to... but then you'd get something like this:

Look, my nail polish isn't even the right color. But it's still sparkly. 

Monster claws and crazy eyes.

No one wants that. Except maybe me, because when I looked at that I after I took it I loled a little bit.

But as you can tell, I like nail polish. I seem to be focusing almost it as much as I focus on art recently (It's not real art... but it could be art too so too bad! I forgot that I'm trying to say 'art' in these posts more). Simple pleasures I suppose, and I look real simple in these puppies... youuuuuuuu're welcome. Because teal and sparkles are so pretty. 

ART. Kinda.

Old School.

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. 

________________

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.  

... and we're loitering too.