My new obsession: HONKBARN. The sad/funny thing is, the sounds the little characters make remind me of myself, especially when I'm riding around in the car with my best pal, Kerri. You don't want to be stuck in traffic with us.

Schnerkit.

I'm kind of obsessed with the guy at 1:05 who floats sideways and goes "Wyyawwwgh wyauugh nyauugh nyaugh".  I do that in the car, too!

There he is, in the middle. And i downloaded one of the songs to my phone, so now it's my ringtone. hehe.

Aaaanyhoo. Todd Ramsay & co. have a website at Honkbarn.com, and on his blog you can see some of the behind-the-scenes of his artwork & animation. I love his illustrations!

And the backgrounds for the animations are pretty sweet, too! Check out how he scribbles & paints over old patterns, leaving some parts peeking through.

Now I'm feeling all silly and inspired .... time to get out the sharpie markers : )

A different twist on an old superstition. The original is about 5x14" and is gonna be a bitch to frame. Oh well : )

I divided it up so you guys can see it a little better:

The whole time I was drawing this, I had "Mean Mr. Mustard" stuck in my head. (Keeps a ten-bob note up his nose, hehehe.)

I'm unstoppable, i tellya. The theme du jour has been "Emerging", since this whole concept of supposedly being an "Emerging Artist" is on my brain and i think it's kinda funny, and kind of poignant.

Plus, i like caterpillars.

Did you know that up until this drawing, I had the WORST time trying to draw birds? So frustrating. I don't even like these ones, so i set them on fire! hah!

(Also, Matty gets all titillated when i draw naked ladies. It's kind of adorable, actually. He tries to act all earnest like his interest is purely artistic, but i bet it's probably fun to have a girlfriend that can draw you porn whenever you want, haha)

I've been trying to be a little more detailed, and a little more organic with my lines. It's too easy to default to stripes and stars and polka dots.

Like, see? This one is a little too busy, but i still think it's funny. I was in the cafe up the street yesterday morning and this weird song came
on the overhead stereo, part of which happened to sound exactly like a
dog barking off in the distance. There was a moment when i was really
bewildered, and i was i almost positive there was a DOG trapped in the
CEILING.

And then i realized what a dope i am. So of course i had to draw a picture about it.

In other news:

Yesterday somebody was kind of a jerk to me, which inspired that pulse I wrote about mean people. It got me thinking, and i've been thinking a lot about strenghth of character. What bothered me most was that one person being an ass to me got me all rattled about my own talent/ personality/ abilities, and that really sucked. It also made me resolve change myself, and try to make an effort to be less judgemental and snarky at people. Anyways, all that energy is better used in other places.

Matt's mum got up the gumption to take some of the earrings she designed down to the stores in Ogunquit, and apparently this chi-chi little shop wants to carry her jewelry. She's totally beside herself with excitement. This, from the lady who claimed she "wasn't creative", when really she just needed a nudge and a pair of good pliers. I'm wicked proud of her!

Tonight I'm going to see my friend Sarah's opening at Space 242 in the South End [of Boston]. That probably sounds really swanky, when the truth is we're all just a bunch of art dorks. Sarah was my studio-mate in art skool and she's mad talented and it will be SO AWESOME to see her.
Suffice to say I'm also gonna be "on the clock" tonight and we'll see if i can do some networking of my own. That whole "Emerging" thing, you know.
  

Two new works-in-progress for the Good Luck/ Bad Luck project. it's crunch time!

I got some new sharpies and a whole stack of blank 5x8 index cards at Staples. Now i can crank out the drawings in no time flat!
The simplest things make me ridiculously happy, hahaha.

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Also; check out my new friend, Mr. Inchworm.

Oh, hello.

The most photogenic inchworm in the world!

So Saturday was the Great Lowell Drop-Off, in which we brought four of my graf abstraction photos up to the Washington Ave Arts Association for their upcoming show. That place is so neato, it's a bunch of converted art lofts and studios housed in an ancient industrial mill structure. One of the interesting things about Mass. (and Lowell especially) is that it is the birthplace of the American industrial revolution, so there are all these ginormous old brick buildings everywhere. My father, for instance, worked for a large electronics company which had its headquarters in one such building; everything was brick and wide pine planks, and you can still sometimes see the cast iron machinery leftover from its heyday.

Tres Steampunk, dont'cha know.

And since it was such a lovely day, and we were in the mood for some exploration, we decided to check out the rest of Lowell. They've got quite the arts scene going on.
 
 
These are from the Revolving Museum.

The Owl Stamp Company. There's not even an actual owl in this picture, but it is still so awesome.

Then we checked out "Found", which is the penultimate tchotchke collectible junkus store on the planet. Right up our alley.

(Photo from Venks)

And I found this bowl, for around ten bucks, thinking it would be nice for displays. After doing a bit of research on the internet and a lot of hackneyed italian translation, it turns out it's actually contemporary murano glass from italy, and worth about ten times what we paid for it. Huzzah.

And then we got run over by a locomotive. So sad. The end.
 

I just stumbled on to an open call-for-art from an organization in my old 'hood called "Wrap 'Em". The plan is to wrap the concrete columns under the McGrath Highway overpass in sheets of canvas and then paint it, thereby creating a temporary art installation which is a far sight prettier than the highway. Being a former resident and a big fan of the blue collar kitsch / hipster chic vibe of the place, I entered this submission (clicky for large).

I took my cue, of course, from the bathtub virgin mary shrines which dominate the yards and gardens in Somerville. The place is quickly becoming yuppified (hipsterfied?), but there's a good portion of the residents who have hung on to the old way of doing things, and flown in the face of the encroaching latte emporiums and fashionably retro boutiques. An approach which includes using odds and ends of junk and fake plastic flowers from the dollar store in their postage-stamp sized yards. Fight the good fight, my fellow Somervillans!

Ah, I sure hope i get to paint this thing.

As you can tell, i haven't gotten the buttons out of my system yet. I photographed a whole mess of these kitschy little button rings I've been constructing, and some of the photos came out really swell. Like, you might not even think they were plastic or something kinda swell. I can tell my photography skillz are getting better because less and less I end up having to rely on  photoshop to fix what's wrong with my pics.

Like this one. This one is pretty much delicious.

It's really tricky to get the sparkles in the rhinestone to look...err, sparkly. Sparklesome. Sparklelicious? Especially when the thing you're taking a picture of is less than an inch in diameter. Yipes.

So I'll be loading these up onto the Etsy throughout the day, as an experiment in drawing attention to my shop. I usually dump a load of stuff on all at once in the name of efficiency, but i know that the front page reloads it's freshly added items feature every fifteen minutes. So I'm going to space things out and see if more people are drawn in. Not that it matters, i'm just curious and i like poking at stuff. After all, if one actually had to rely on Etsy to pay the bills, one would pretty much be screwed.

Oh, I almost forgot! In the meantime, you can check out the rest of what I made here on my flickr.

So next month I'm in a group show at the ello Gallery in Portsmouth NH, and I've been a little frantic with the sharpie markers getting some artwork ready. The theme, of course, is "Luck", so I decided to shoot for six pieces total; here's a page of concept doodles.

 

So two of them will be full portrait type pieces, two will be short stories a la Perry Bible Fellowship, and the last two are going to be small vignette dealies, all themed around unexpected or expected good fortune.

Two are about halfway done, and still need some touching up and then color added to them.

Fortune, which i may have shown you already :

And Lady Luck herself:

Of course, my favorite fat sharpie marker just dried up on me, so now i have to go get a new one before i can finish. Gah!

Or I could just play with the button-rings i've been making, hee.

(Bad artist! No!)

The rabbit and i had a bit of a frolic in the yard this morning. The weather has been gorgeous lately, and Ugmoe loves being outside. Romp romp romp. romp in the puddle, romp in the rain, romp in the grass, romp in the sun. I've managed to teach him NO and Come Inside Now, so it's pretty easy to sit back and sip my tea while keeping watch. He never really wants to come in after playing in the yard, however, and will stare at the front door for a while afterwards looking wobegone or perplexed. Danged rabbit is obsessed with doors.

he also likes to hide in corners of the studio.

"Oh hai, i wuz jus halpin you with dis paintin', k?"

Oh, and check out my new owl friend:

I asked Matt to paint me a clock with an owl on it, since I am (as you might have noticed) a little obsessed with owls lately. I also like the yellow and grey color combo, so he did it in the colors i like. I think he's going to live in the kitchen over the pantry door.

hoot! hoot!

I love owls. Don't you? Owls are awesome. Let's learn about owls today.

Some other owls:

from Art School Dropout

from Art of Self Love

Ceramic owls by Chris Stiles (we have some of these in the gallery where i work)

And last, Athena and her owl friend, one of my own drawings : )