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I don’t know why, but this picture makes me think I’m about to take a ride through the tunnel in the first Willy Wonka movie. And does anyone else find it sad that now you have to put the word “first” before the words “Willy Wonka movie?”
Finished artwork! Rock!
My friend Jem and I started on these a few weeks ago. I think we got these done…four weeks? That’s amazing, if I do say so myself. We were both really stoked that we completed them. I just love finishing a project. I’ve said it before, it used to be a hallmark of my creative life that I would start a project and not complete it, but these, THESE ARE DONE! Yet more evidence that I CAN finish something. And Jem can finish something as well, which she has also told me she cannot do. Here is proof that she’s lying. If she tells you otherwise, just pull this up and remind her.
Any rate, these were tons of fun to do, and we immediately started on new ones that night. We got all the line work done for them. She’s going on vacation next week, so no drawing, but we’ll resume in two weeks. Awesome!
...Yeah, just, uh, move that thing! And that other thing!
Monday was the big car scene shoot for “8 Wheels of Death,” the zombie movie I’m in. Before I became one of the cast, however, I volunteered the use of my and my brother’s Chevelle for use in a scene. After having had to reschedule the shoot once due to fears of rain, we finally got it all together on Monday night. My brother was a hero, taking a half day off of work and trucking the car down there while I left work and immediately headed south to meet with him at the shoot.
Here some of the crew decided camera and mic placement for a key scene in which someone gets killed. Good times, right? I know! They even got some fake blood on the dashboard! And, there was a shot where an admission ticket had to be used, and they had left the prop at home. My brother said, “There are tickets on the dashboard,” as that’s where we often “keep” drag tickets after a racing event. They used one of them, and now I have a fake-blood-stained ticket as a souvenir of the whole thing. You gotta love that.
It was fun. It was big fun! I can’t wait until the actual acting shoot that’s coming up in a little over a week!
Put the needle on the record...
Remember these? People used to buy them, rush to the store to get them even! Big, circular discs of music-y goodness. I have a small collection. I’m by no means an audiophile or collector of old vinyl, but I have a few. Mostly I owe my meager collection to friends who see stuff I’d like and pick it up for me. Bruce has red on his head because a friend found “The River” at a thrift store and brought it home just for me. This was only a couple years ago, and until I set aside some money to buy the CD, I actually put the thing on my turntable (I had to buy one at a yard sale just to listen to some vinyl a few years prior), and used them as originally intended.
I haven’t listened to every single one of these all the way through. Some of them came with my house when I bought it (I also have Elvis Live from Hawaii on 8-track!…but it plays badly *frowns*). Still, I think I’ve listened to at least parts of all of them, and this stuff rolls around in my head in various random ways and somehow comes out of me when I’m onstage.
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One of the musicians from the festival I played at in Kentucky this past weekend. He was goofing around bowing it before the show started. Upright bass is just plain cool, no question.
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If you upsize this photo (just click on it), you’ll see that the lowest light, the green one, has some kind of dusty sort of cobwebby-lookin’ thing all over it. That’s what it is – a dusty-looking cobweb. Okay, so it’s weird that there’s a cobweb on a street light, right? What’s weirder is that it’s not dusty. It’s fully of dead little midge-fly things. I don’t know what the hell these things are, but they are friggin’ everywhere around my neighborhood. They don’t bite, but spider webs have started popping up all over the place, like miniature tent cities of fly-trapping death. I’m all for it, really, as it reduces the alarming fly population, but they look pretty janky when they get all full of dead bugs and just sit there after the spider has moved on. The orb weavers are gettin’ fat in the Midwest this summer, folks. I have them all around the security lights near my back door. It’s kind of freaky how prevalent they are. I was beginning to worry that it was just from me not trimming back bushes or something and giving them a place to germinate or whatever, but two blocks away I notice that the freakin’ traffic light has cobwebs on it?!?!?! Yeah, not exactly restricted to me, and even weirder than having webs on my house. I keep waiting for news stories to start popping up on these things. I’d love to know what has caused them to be so overwhelming in number this year. Maybe there will be a swarm of biblical, yet harmless, proportions.
This is just weird. It’s not a great photo. It’s actually kind of crappy, but it’s WEIRD! Had to shoot it.
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I know we’ve covered this subject before, but I like the way this one turned out. It also just happened to be the most interesting thing I shot all day, so it won for pic of the day today. Oddly, this is a friend of mine doing the work. What’s odd is that he’s been doing this for three years, I’ve been hanging out at the art center for three years, and I just randomly ran into him the other night as I was walking by and leaving my photography club meeting. Funny how that works.
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My friend Jem and I finished this one just the other day. I’m stoked! It took us three weeks of one-nighters to get this one done. She took the other one home and is finishing it up this weekend. We’re going to start on some more like this, but maybe change it up a little bit somehow. Not quite sure how, but we’re going to change something about it. These are super fun to do. I love messing with different shapes and colors. She’s really good at blending stuff together, so I’m working on that a little. Anyway, here’s another completed project, and you all know how much I dig completed stuff. It’s a victory over all those things that keep us from achieving what we want with our creativity. It’s way cool.
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These are leftovers from working with all those colored pencils. I actually like the idea of this photo, if not the particular execution on this one. I’m saving up more shavings to try and have another go at it with some stuff that looks…I don’t know, not quite so flattened. These things get all mashed up if you move them around even a little bit. Picky!
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I finally got back to work on some rolling ball sculpture. I think I meant to do this two whole months ago. Progress is slow, but it is progressing. These are some of the parts for the marble lift assembly. I think I screwed something up, but I’ll fix it. You’ll never know!