Yes that means update

Allrighty, guys. I'm doing it. I'm updating. It took a long time, but thanks to good people like Josh Fronk, who tell me the right way to JPEG for web viewing (which is really easy and I should have already known that. It's funny the sense in what I know and do not know.)


Since my last post I played around with that oil transfer method, and it tanked. I'm glad I did it, because now I know that oils loose their color with that method in about a week and it gets dry and stale. Maybe I'll post the effort? Maybe. Anywho, now I know better and I feel like going more digital. Once the program stops throwing away my pictures as I'm drawing them.


Anywho, here's some of my stuff




Acrylic and Oil at Rock Canyon.

Guash and what turned out to be some poorly chosen "Permanent Guash Acrylic Polymer". Yes, it exists, it looks just like guash, is sold right next to guash at Utrect, and I don't recomend it. Permanent Guash is what happened with the blaring pink...I'm going to have to change the bg I think...

Guash and Acrylic; I'm going to need to change the bg on this dude, too. As well as other little noodly things I didn't do as I was trying to get the type right on the book labeled "David Archuleta." i think I have a background problem. I can do a background when I only do background (as in the first painting.) but together with figures I loose all initiative once my figure is decent. Anyone else have that problem?

I think I'm going to get out of guash.

hm

I'm figuring out how to post things. Its probably stupidly obvious. I'd make a shoutout to my blogger community but I've happened to notice that near to no one comments on anyones so what I'll do is um...force myself to not update until my work is reproduced well. I really can't figure out what I'm doing wrong...

im pissed

I spent two hours today converting image files to have a portfolio to show but instead, they all converted to 72 dpi--I dont' know how I missed that. They look awful. Anyways, I hate my computer it really is giving me a hard time, and for some reason I feel like posting that. Its good, because I thought "Ah, I'll just post that other aspect of my future BFA, my Zshiki book project" because I really am writing something. I don't have the thing I wrote becuase my computer sucked, but at least I wrote it, and I should be happy about that and I am making a post to say I should be happy about it. Because no one even knows about this blog so I don't really have to post anything interesting in here. Because I can't. My computer freezes when I open painter. I finished my sketchbook. This was one of the good things that happened today. Everything else kinda fell out from under. But that would involve talking about my personal life and I have promised myself to make this blog entirely art related--and I write way too much as it is even talking about that. Anyways, I'm going on a Hiatus until I get a new computer or something. and I'm pissed.

Update 1 of 2. The second part might come in like 4 months at this rate.

I wish I hadn't been uploading my blog for a good reason, like getting into a really amazing relationship and with my large-nosed foreign boyfreind painting from the top of the eiffel tower and eating some really good gyoza. Or getting doused in chemical waste on my way home from school and turning into a pool of mercury and saving the planet one nuclear plant at a time. Unfortunately I've got no good reason other than my bad computer, which has made me afraid of computers. I avoid them all the time now. I even handwrite sometimes, and if you knew my handwriting...you'd know the gravity of that. I wish I was uploading with things that were more current, but right when I went to finally upload my picture card to a computer in the library, the sun went down and I didn't feel like battling it out with the halogen lights. So this will be the entry where I work out with myself what I want in life. Artistically.


So don't get me wrong, I love realism. In fact, coming into illustration it was all I did and its sort of awful what came out my weird illustration 1 stupor. see this and this:

(a cup of food coloring and small muffins. It still sits in the kitchen so I can look at it every day and ask myself why, oh why couldn't I have just moved the plate up .2 inches?!)



(a laundry detergent and his best freind. Krystle wanted it to hang above the washer and dryer of our old house but I ingeniously forgot to mention anything about it until we moved here and the washer and dryer are in open domain)

I hit my realism peak as well as my boring peak. So dull. Anyways, I kept doing that, and it was about the christmas card that I realized...



...that I wanted to quit illustration because it was getting too boring--that and I can't paint fire to save myself. We'll come back to that. Anyways, I was doing 350 R Figure drawing like a good girl, so I decided to switch it up with head painting to just focus on color. Unfortunately, all of the paintings I had in my camera were my bad head paintings! So here are the few that didn't completely suck. Even though they still need a lot of improvement. They're all about 12 inches in oil. Some a bit bigger. The big ones turned out better.


I discovered pthalo blue and it was a big deal. I got a big swipe across my eye and the model kept trying to tell me and I didn't get it. Later I found out it doesn't come out very easily and I felt like I was in 6th grade. Because I had eye shadow like that in 6th grade. Boys didn't talk to me.





This is an unfortunate piece that my roomates like that sits on our wall, made with pastels and acrylics its about 40 inches long and fits perfectly in its IKEA frame. Because it was made on top of the cardboard that backs the actual frame. The tricky bit is finding all six letters. Yeah, its not tricky and its not unfortunate for how it came out, its what I accidentally did with it. So: talent awards. I thought talent awards were judged by the same people who judge the student contest every year--which is basically the entire studio department who don't really like any illustration to win anything. They put us off on the side when they need extra space and if your an animator your basically screwed because I've never seen any animation in there. So I put this in my talent award portfolio. As well as other things I have dubbed my "studio portfolio" and by the time I found out it was the illustration faculty judging the talent awards I could have gone back and changed the work I sent, but at that point I was too swamped with work. So, regrettably, this unfortunate peice was looked at by the illustration faculty who probably said

BH: Thats Rachel? She doesn't do that in class assigments...
BB: As a matter of fact...there isn't a single class assignment except for these head paintings and these figure drawings from last summer.
BA: Give her money anyway!

Anyways, I don't know how much I got or when I get it or anything. A little bird told me I got some talent money, the mail has not confirmed such bird.

Anywho...I was inspired a couple years ago--before I even really considered illustration--when I was in Music Civ when I was cramming for a test because I was a freshman and never studied before the night before. My eyes rested on the work of a man named Kandinksy. He was a german expressionist. Yes, a German Expressionist opened my eyes to art and--this is the weird part--made me really want to be an...illustrator. I'm still figuring that out. Hypothetically I should be angsting to throw paint all over my body and do interpretive dance on a box spring.

He made this painting which has been on my desktop for almost four straight years for a few reasons



1.) Its guash (or maybe even tempora. I forget. Both are about the same.) Huh? The colors are amazing becuase of how they're placed next to eachother--guash/tempora generally makes really awful color but in this you can't tell. The play with gray and lavender and that shocking fuschia is...shocking.
2.) Considerable tangents all over the place that don't bother me at all because the composition is so solid
3.) Amazing texture. Just amazing! I love every single part of this painting.

I also have another artist named Paul Klee, who I discovered when I went to the art section of the library and pulled his book off of the shelf about a year ago. I remembered him for his gradation studies, and I realized quickly that the man had style ADD and made a lot of things I am not fond of and a few that I really, really do love. There were some clever things with a burlap sack that I admire, but for what I'm thinking of doing I want to look at "Twittering machine" and "tightrope walker." I mean, check it out.





Yousee, this oil-transfer line stuff is amazing. Amazing and Hilarious. Kandinsky's guash stuff is creepy and magnificent and so subtle. So I've been wondering how to combine the two, as well as this realism that I still like but secretly am really sick of, to make something that I can be proud of--as opposed to most of my work where I work it and work it and work it and decide, ultimately, that I am a failed artist and I would throw my paint brushes and pallate knifes through the canvas and hand it in anyways, if only modern art hadn't come along and cliched all of my angst. Maybe 30 years ago I would have been a modernist.

I've experimented a bit and I will show you, once the daylight comes out and I no longer fear the halogen light bulbs that sit among us, yellowing all of my night-time pictures. Its not really where I want yet, but I think its something that I...can play around with this summer. This summer I want to come back to school as an artist with more of an identity. Because right now I look like everyone else, and I think that is what upsets me so much when I finish a painting.

The first of the first

I had an epiphany. A sort of horrible epiphany that starts out with love and joy and kittens and ends up as a nightmare when you realize the epiphany is going to take too much time in huddled in the F-wing of the HFAC. Alas, not a cool F-Wing. A Cool F-Wing being the type that you fly around in Star Wars. But instead, an F-Wing of the smelly hallway variety with the Graphic Designers and Photographers discussing the newest and best in Mac technology. I've already spent way too much of my life down there, but I'm going to have to go back, I guess, because of this horrible and awful epiphany that keeps materializing every time I think I'm comfortable.

Yousee, I need a website, or at least a blog. I already do have a blog. I won't tell you about it, because its all of my ramblings from Senior Year of High School until about five months ago. Horrible stuff. Sort of funny. Entirely privatized so you won't know about my premie crushes and my 30 year old crushes that never were. Oh. I actually have two blogs. There's livejournal/rachels_nsomnia.com ? I forget what the site was, but it involves rachels_nsomnia as the title and its also rediculous musings of me and my relationship with love and insomnia. Also stupid. Oh, and really bad art. I felt like I needed to post some bad art so I could stop being so scared people will think I'm bad. It made sense at the time.

Anyways, I need an art blog for good art...sort of as a portfolio boost, so I got one. I got one right now at this very moment although my computer BSOD's all over my lap like a bad child whenever I photoshop and my graphire Waccom is leaking some type of acidic virus onto my pirated Corel Painter. I got one even though its going to involve scanning crap in the F-Wing and its going to involve the second half of my epiphane--the layout and design of my own personal portfolio website and buisness card.

So here's some old stuff. Lets see if I can figure out posting. (it would be also nice to figure out cuts. In Livejournal ((oh lj)) it was called an ljcut and thats basically what the HTML was. I like cuts because otherwise freinds pages are sort of crazy.



Here's something I have around. My better work was in Tiff format, and Blogger took way too long to tell me it couldn't possibly do it. Ignore the gesso lines running through this. Ah I am a failed artist.
I have to say that at least four times a day. Its like vitamins.

Anyways, about a week ago I decided I was done with illustration. I was done. I was going back to California with my silly fiction and when it didn't sell I'd go to Santa Cruz and proceed to pull out some bongos and some weed and have a good time. And protest something.

About the same time I was planning my protest (should it be anti-fur, anti-cigarretts, or anti-war? Whats the vogue thing to protest nowadays? Nudity?) I had to do this treehouse project for a visiting artist to critique. It was the worst thing I have ever painted.

PS my name is Rachel Jones and I am an illustration Junior at BYU. I can't believe I forgot to say that. Probably because its dull and its boring and I can't post anything without four pages of description. I don't care if its an art blog. I'll figure out how to cut and no one will ever have to read it.

Back to the treehouse. The house was lame, the tree was green, the grass was green, the sky was blue, and the bark was sienna. Yes. Sienna. I sat in that critique admiring my butchered composition and cliche color pallate and I thought sweet thoughts of syncapated poetry and a future without lingerie. I felt the salt in my hair and the Pizza My Heart on my fingertips until...

...well until about two days later. Yousee, I have this horrible epiphany. I can't get rid of it. Like that boy you're in love with who has the footsmell and the pot habit and you know you can't ever date him but at the same time you accept things as they are and the footsmell and the pot habit is a vissisitude (vississisissisisistudesisisisis sp!?) of life. Truth is, it starts out as a pot habit, and then you find a new boy with a porn problem. You move on and the next loves you so little he wants you to pickle in your own tears until you're green and bumpy as the one after that can't stop wearing that awful shirt that you swore your Physics teacher wore once as a joke.

Love and Art are basically the same thing. Art starts off as a bad habit that you ignore, until you accept and then rejoice in Art and all that it will never give me. But I just can't stop art and I just can't stop falling in love with addicts and loosers with bad shoes and bad attitudes. Because, yousee, I've had a horrible epiphany. Its a lot like Marriage. Some day, one day, There'll be some guy in my life who actually likes me and is a big deal. Some day, one day, when I'm good enough to paint and not miserable about my horrible luck I can buy my own place and have my own studio. Some day, one day, someone will let me intern with them (How can you be denied by 15 people? how! I swear its impossible!) and/or Some day, One day, I will be good. Which is a big deal. Considering where I am now.

Anyways, this is officially an art blog, but because I don't use LJ anymore, this will be a justaboutanythingblog, but I promise I will not blog without posting art. I have a lot of hobbies.


By the way, what am I supposed to do with all my lj-icons. Are there no icon's here? I mean...I miss having this

describing my mood and complex personality. I have more examples here...


WOAH WOAH WOAH. Blogger can't do animations!? Are you serious? I can't post my dancing spiderman usericon!? Ah! Are you telling me I can't post that crap anymore? I mean...I spent four years collecting this crap! Now what do I do with it? Crap!

On the plus side of Blogger, because its so public, It'll help me break my random swearing habit.

ah I'm mad! animated jpgs just sit there like they were never meant to move. My poor Stagnant Spidey. I'm going to bed.

Well OK I'm not. But I'm going to be in bed and I'm going to be thinking really hard about falling asleep. it should happen.