Art 45

It's 1:35AM, the temperature* is 30° Celsius, and I'm listening to Michael Hurley. And wearing sunglasses. No. Given how long writing these usually takes me, I thought I'd put the time right at the start. The conjunction of that particular time with that particular temperature is a little startling.
*according to the little computer gadget thingy.

2012! A New Year. Hooray! A bit late for a solar celebration, I know, but the lunar new year was only a couple days ago at least. So now it's the year of the dragon. I like chinese dragons, much friendlier than their european contemporaries. The past few years the Australian Post Office have been releasing stamps to celebrate the lunar new year. I have some for the year of the rat and the year of the rabbit, and now this year's issue.

Taken from the Australia Post website.

I didn't get a chance to make an xmas post - ran out of broadband credit. Woe, woe. This... blogging application, or whatever it's termed, doesn't work very well over a dial-up connection. I should probably investigate the capabilities of my fancy new smart* phone. Meh.
*S-M-R-T! I mean S-M-A-R-T!

Xmas went well. New years' celebrations went well. I stayed home, which I like doing. I tried to get roaringly drunk, something unusual for me, but it didn't work, because a) I didn't drink enough, and b) I drank sensibly, with water between each drink, and plenty of food. Bonus - no hangover.

Well then, on to important stuff! At the moment I'm working on the cryptomnesia piece - I have nearly nearly neeeeearly finished sorting all the snippets according to colour, and will soon have to come up with some sort of picture to arrange them into. What represents cryptomnesia? Here is a dictionary definition, from the Merriam-Webster site:

cryp·tom·ne·sia

  noun \ˌkrip-ˌtäm-ˈnē-zhə\

Definition of CRYPTOMNESIA

: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations

—cryp·tom·ne·sic  adjective

Something involving thought-bubbles seems appropriate. However, I've decided to go all artsy and whatnot with it, and put together a sort of mélange of things I've come into contact with lately. So far that means references to Twin Peaks, and mirrors (from rereading Witches Abroad, by Terry Pratchett).

Yes, Twin Peaks... I've been really getting into it lately. Up to episode 14. I already know whodunnit (thanks to various family members), but it hasn't at all detracted from my enjoyment of - and horror at - the show. There's this sense of menace underlying even the most ordinary events within it. Now, is this because I basically know what happened, or is it something about the production itself?

Who killed her?
Pic taken from here.

In other news, I recently made a sketch of my latest role-play character.

For the Mutants and Masterminds table-top rpg. She's known as Ion, and she's a super intelligent cloud of invisible gas. This is her costume. I used a diving suit as a starting point for this. Now I'm tidying it up on the computer - fixing the left foot, for eg. Like all the work I do on the computer, it may well take some time...

That is all for now. I'll try to post something relatively soon about the intriguing stuff I've seen online lately. Which reminds me, I really ought to check my deviantart page... So many online things to do, and I just wanna read webcomics.

Art 35

2011 has begun, yaay! And if you add all the digits together, you get 4. I like 4.

I actually made New Years' resolutions this year. Amazing. One of them is to try and get a little more serious about making artwork (as far as resolutions go, that's an inevitable one for me). Also promoting it a little more... That is, trying to stay more active with my deviantart account. :s Yes, that is thus far the reach of my ambition! I have a print account on deviantart, and I'd like to make more of the stuff that's on my computer into prints. And then buy a bunch of samples to show around.

Also I'd really really like to focus more on the making of comics... I think I'll cover a couple walls of my room with old comic books, just so it's always at the peripheral of my attention. That may mean removing the staples - gasp! I have a nice collection of pictures on my wall at the moment, things I've cut out and stuck up. Hm.

Last year(!) I was thinking a little bit about fractals, and the images they can generate. Maths isn't one of my skill sets, so the algorithms used to generate fractals are a bit beyond me, but I find the images pretty fascinating. One in particular I like - the Koch snowflake.

The first four iterations. To learn more about it, click on the link in the last paragraph.

I wanted to do some sort of colourific thing with this, but I couldn't find an equilateral triangle "grid" on my computer, so I decided to play with the quadrilateral type 1 variant instead, which, being quadrilateral, uses squares instead. Hooray! So I'm doing it in Paint, pixel by pixel.

Restrictions on size and what not mean the edge of my quad-t1 kochies (hehe) isn't infinite, but I can reluctantly accept that. As it is, each picture is effectively 1.55 metres square. With that I can get 8 iterations - the 9th iteration would be smaller than one pixel. 1/9th smaller, to be precise. :)

Well, enough of that for now. I've also started work on a wood-carving project, using the now-defunct Xmas tree. I stripped it of branches, and now I'm stripping it of bark. The plan was to make a staff, but it's a bit short, so I'll make a sort of rod, or sceptre-like thing. It's still quite sappy, will have to figure out how to treat it before I start the actual carving. I had no idea until tonight what to carve into it, but now, inspired by my previous art-specific post, I think maybe fish. I like this idea, and will ponder it more.

So, that's two new projects started, without any of the old ones being finished! Ah well. Such is my mode of operation, generally.

In other news, I am indeed still working on the cryptomnesia piece. There are about 500 snips left to import into the gimp file. Also I'm still repairing my handbag... Actually I've finished the actual repairing, and the sewing on of pockets. Now I "just" need to sew the inside to the outside. When it's all nice and complete I may take a photo.