SWISS STUFF

Painting of the Chapel of the Macchabées in Genève.

So, first of all, I'm in Switzerland. If you follow me on any other social media, you probably know that, and you've probably LONG SINCE given up hope of any updates here.

Here is the rundown:

1. Why am you in Switzerland?

I was asked by my MIT thesis advisor and research supervisor, who now heads a lab at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (in English that's the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne), to do a three-month internship in her lab over the summer. She also asked if I was interested in applying for a Master's of Science program in Energy Management and Sustainability, which would allow me to continue to work with her. I did, and I was accepted in early June.

2. How long will you be in Switzerland?

Probably until May 2014, with occasional trips home.

3. Do you speak French?

No. I am learning. It is awkward. Also at the university a huge percentage of people speak English.

4. But how do you manage in restaurants?

I don't eat out because Switzerland is even MORE expensive that Japan. Otherwise, I point and smile. This is pretty universal.

5. What's Lausanne like?

Very steep. I live near the city center, which is very charmingly medieval and very bad for your ankles. Nothing is open on Sundays except the Coop Pronto. From many places in the city there are gorgeous views out over Lac Leman (or Lake Geneva) to the blue Alps on the other side.

6. Have you done much traveling?

Not so much so far. I went to the Chateau de Chillon, which is on the east end of Lake Geneva, on a boat ride. I went to Fribourg (an attractive Swiss town about 40 minutes north of here) one Sunday, but it was incredibly rainy, so I ended up coming home after about two hours. Last weekend I went to Marseille, which made me remember how exhausting traveling on a tight schedule and a tight budget is. (I also missed every train I planned on catching and usually ended up on a train 3-4 hours later, so that probably contributed to the stress level.) At the end of August I am going to Rome for five days. Before then I plan to go to: Zurich, a castle some of my labmates recommended to me in Switzerland, and probably another weekend in Geneva. (Due to the aforementioned train-missing, I spent the morning in Geneva on Saturday. Sigh.)

7. What do you do in your internship?

I research daylight-interacting technologies (like fiberoptic systems that collect sunlight and use it to light regular fixtures inside a room, for instance) and enter them into a visual database for architects.

8. How are things?

Things are pretty good. I really enjoy having my own space again. I have not yet found a place to live for the fall, but I am actively moving toward that point. I went to an English-language book club. I've read a couple books. I've written a couple stories. My labmates are pretty cool. I went to an English-speaking church. I have my bank account set up. (SWISS BANK ACCOUNT! Except it's with the post office, so that makes it less dramatic.)

In short, I'm starting to craft a life here.

a random post of updates.

Hey, horse eating hay in the Old Market. How's it going. Make any important life choices recently?

Well.

I have not been keeping up here as well as I might have. Forgive, forgive, I beg you to forgive, and so on.

MANY THINGS have happened. SO MANY THINGS, so I shall give you a brief (if scatter-brained) post about as many as I can think of.

First: Many persons who know me are probably aware at this point that I am possibly going to be doing an internship in Lausanne, Switzerland, this summer. If all my visa paperwork goes through correctly, I will be starting June 1 with the same professor I did daylighting research with undergrad for three months. I also applied to a two-year energy management and sustainability program at the school she now teaches at, EPFL, and if accepted I may be staying in Switzerland for a bit.

SO THAT IS VERY EXCITING.

Second: Illustration continues apace. I am back at the Hotshops in Omaha doing life drawing once a week (you can see several weeks worth of work and experimentation here), and I think I've improved noticeably from last year. My illustration production has slowed somewhat (more on the reasons for that later), but I've finished some new paintings, including a still life, a the proscenium at the Rose Theater, and some of the Durham Western Heritage Museum architecture. I'm working on another painting now, and have a lot of ideas for things to try in the next month and a half (though I am making sure all my art supplies are portable so I can trundle about Switzerland sketching and painting if possible.)

I was in my first show this month, at the Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, with the plein air group I painted with 2-4 times a month from October to February. I have twelve pieces in the show, which is up until April 30. Yesterday we held an artists' reception in the afternoon, and I sold two paintings and six prints, so I am quite excited about that.

Third: Writing continues apace. I am still working on my book (bit stuck on it, to be honest, so I've been developing the outline), but I've also written three (and a half) short stories and submitted them to magazines.  The first was an attempt to be literary and local, and the second two were fantasy (and I recalled the reason I write fantasy, which is that it is SO MUCH EASIER.) So far I have no takers, which is rather discouraging, but to be expected, I suppose. (I did burn my first official paper rejection notice in my mom's Christmas Yankee candle, so that made me feel a bit better.)

The Kansas City Design Week experience did yield up three articles for This Big City blog: one about the graphic identity of the city, one on density and transportation, and one on interpreting architectural history.

Fourth: I have had some adventures! I went back to Kansas City for a weekend two weeks ago to spend time with a friend; we went to the Kemper, walked about Westport, and went to the new H&M (I got a sweater! DON'T JUDGE ME.) In two days I will be going to a live performance by Eric Hutchinson and Graffiti6 at the Waiting Room in Omaha, which admittedly I bought a ticket to because a. they were cheap and b. I like Graffiti6 (though after finding some music by Eric Hutchinson on Grooveshark, he's not too bad either.)

I continue to work and hope and plan! Hopefully I will have more and more interesting posts soon.

LINOLEUM PRINTS: the beginning of an epic adventure

Let's talk about linoleum printing.

First, I'll admit: I really had no idea what I was getting into with linoleum printing at all. All I really knew was that I had come across some really cool limited edition art prints (like this one and this one) and thought, "Hey! Those look really cool! I should do that!" One can, of course, reproduce similar effects using Photoshop, but for someone like me who is still more or less a novice in the illustration world, the easiest way to get nice textures is to . . . use real materials.

If you clicked through to the links, you'll note that neither of the two prints I was inspired by were actually linoleum prints -- the first was a letterpress print, and the second was a screenprint. I really like both of those styles and hope later to be able to make prints that way, but a letterpress requires an actual wooden press (thus the name) which would require either a lot of money or time to construct. As far as screenprinting goes . . . essentially you use a light-exposure technique to create a stencil of your design on a cloth screen. For reasons best known to myself (ha), I decided to start with something I had done (sort of) in middle school art class instead (hey, we carved little 2"x2" stamps out of rubber), because the principle was more straightforward and I was more confident in myself not to screw it up. I watched the Dick Blick videos (yeah, I know) here and here and decided that I could handle a process that was more or less making a giant stamp.

There were a few things I did not bargain on; one is that it's much harder to transfer an image exactly with linocut, because you are drawing it twice, more or less -- once with pen on the block, and once with the lino cutter as you chisel out the unwanted pieces. I also found that it's sort of a bad idea to draw the image on a different piece of paper, because the level and type of detail one gets with a pencil are not the same as the equivalent with the cutter. At some point I will probably learn to screenprint as well, in no small part because I also didn't figure on this:

This is a linoleum cutter, sketched very handily with my new tablet (heh, I'm learning new artsy things all over.) What it also represents is a tool that will make you lose feeling in your hands if used excessively, which I most certainly did in the first few days of experimentation. Screenprinting, I think, is less likely to cause muscle strain. The little cheap Blick-brand cutter I bought for $7 came with five blades; so far I've use mainly the deep V cutter (enough that I ordered another box of them rather than risk the one I have getting too dull to use) and the deep U cutter. I also decided to use Blick blockprinting ink, the main attraction of which is its relatively low price. I think at some point I will switch to oil-based rather than water-based ink, because this ink dries extremely quickly (meaning that I waste a lot by the time I get it spread out), and smudges very easily if I try to add other paints or color on top of the print.

Here are some photos from my first print, which was sort of cute but in several ways was moderately disastrous. Note: Do not attempt to make a heavily detailed two-color print on the first go. It's just not a great idea.

One of Mom's old pan lids got commissioned into service as a linoleum shred catcher/inking plate. I bought a bench hook, but have not really used it a lot yet. This was the second color. . .

And here is me trying (somewhat hopelessly) to line up the second color with the first. It was a miracle it worked as well as it did, but it still came out . . . kind of goofy. This print series ended after about three.

merry Christmas from the style factory

The jury is sadly still out on whether I am going to get Christmas cards out before Christmas. Still, at least now I have a card to send.

Ugh sorry for the lack of text but I am not feeling very smart right now.

BEHOLD, I present to you: THE BIBLIOPHILE'S CHRISTMAS.

Mycenaean Holiday inspirations: Fun times were had by all

First things first; I have a design up on Threadless to be scored for the "Dysfunctional Families" design challenge. Rather mysteriously I decided the thing to do would be to make a Greek mythology joke -- not, I would argue, a particularly obscure one, but still, probably less accessible overall than a joke about, say, the Kardashians. Whatever.

Here is my design! And here is a link where you can go give it a nice score on Threadless! (You need a Threadless account to vote.)

Now, let me justify this business.

My roommate took a "Women in the Ancient World" or somesuch class when we were juniors or seniors, and she would come home positively crowing about the murders of Medea or Clytemnestra (not that we have macabre senses of humor or anything.) I always particularly enjoyed seeing Agamemnon get his comeuppance, because he always seemed particularly like an ass (particularly after that television miniseries we watched in high school World Lit with Rufus Sewell as Agamemnon, cough). Not only that, there were enough murders in that story to make a truly ridiculous graphic. (Agamemnon kills his daughter Iphigenia in a ritual sacrifice for favorable winds when he's taking his army to attack Troy; his wife, Clytemnestra, avenges her daughter by strangling/stabbing him in the bath; and finally, their son, Orestes, kills her to pay back his father's death.)

The idea of having all four pagan folk together murdering each other in a chain reaction, decked out in anachronistic holiday swag (though you'll notice that the tree has a lightning bolt on top and dolphins and bulls hung from the branches) struck me as quite humorous.

The nice thing about pulling a story from a culture with a strong tradition of graphic representation is that it makes deciding how to draw it much simpler. I wanted to mimic the sort of figures one sees drawn on large Greek vessels, of which the Boston MFA has a large and admirable (if occasionally risque) collection.

I started poking around in their online archives for ideas. (I used links to their websites for the images, so hopefully they don't break in the near future. :P) (Whoops -- editorial note -- the links on the MFA items lead back to the slideshow these pieces are found in, not the specific piece. It's not a very long slideshow though so you should be able to find them.)

This one is a bowl for mixing wine and water from Athens (called a bell krater, I think?), ca. 470 B.C. The figures represented are Diana and Achteon; the myth goes that he saw her bathing, so she turned him into a stag to be ripped apart by his own dogs. I more or less copied her dress for Iphigenia (minus the skin of a -- cat? -- around her neck.) Click through on this link to look at a bigger picture of Diana's hands -- they're very gracefully shaped, and I tried (and perhaps failed) to do justice to that in my design.

WHOO BEEF

This is the first year my brother and sister-in-law are hosting Thanksgiving. My brother doesn't like turkey, so we're having prime rib.

Happy Thanksgiving, guys.

a fallish outfit

The truth is, I haven't been dressing up too much since I've been home, despite ample opportunity (movies, plays, excursions out to eat, etc.) I fear I have been afflicted by at-home-slackification, as well as overcast sky exhaustion.

Last night I felt silly so I put on heels for my own amusement. Et voilà, my first . . . er. . . fashion illustration!

new Society6 products

Hopefully I have a better blog post coming later today, but first:

I spent some time today resizing some of my Society6 artwork for the other product they sell -- i.e. laptop skins, iPhone skins, t-shirts, and hoodies. I'm hoping that in a couple days I'll have all of them reformatted.

I though two pieces in particular looked really nice -- the "My Dear" laptop skin and the "For the Heart-Hungry" iPhone skin. 

you have noticed: NOTECARDS (also, PEGAPUP!)

You may have noticed the new button at the top of the blog -- Things you can buy. Well, currently, "things" means "notecards." I am now selling notecards with my art on the front, each printed on bright white matte heavy cardstock or Bristol board with a white envelope. They come in packs of five cards for $10 or eleven cards for $20, plus shipping. So far, I have a mixed Iowa watercolor pack, a mixed black-and-white travel sketches pack, a Purple Up Over the Hills pack (the painting I did at the Loess Hills Lavender Farm), a The Only Way Out Is Up pack (the painting I did lying on my back at the Gleason-Hubbell nature area), and a A Few Reflections on an Elegant Curve pack (the print I made with my drawing of one of the roofs at Yoshida shrine in Kyoto.)

I spent today cutting, folding, and assembling cards. (Somewhat relieved that I didn't give away all of my architecture tools.)

There's one more pack that appeared today -- the PEGAPUP pack.

What is Pegapup, you ask?

Pegapup is a little doggie with wings I drew a few nights ago before bed. More or less he came about by way of, "Gee, wouldn't Stubby look cute with wings?"

This gave birth to more Pegapup cartoons depicting the slightly glamorized life and times of Stubby the Frequently Sleepy Dog as his winged alter-ego.

BRILLIANCE!

Abstract City, by Christoph Niemann.

An architecture friend emailed out about the most recent page in this blog, but I really enjoy the leaves.

Actually I really like the whole blog so far. . . it is very very charming.

---

Speaking of things that are charming.

I follow about 20 artists on deviantART, primarily fantasy artists of various sorts, since my account there is kind of a leftover from my somewhat more single-minded high school days. Nowadays I mainly look through the "Daily Deviations," for things that are beautiful, unexpected, fun, or otherwise wonderful.

That being said, I still heartily enjoy most of the artists I watch. A German illustrator I love both for her style and content is cidaq. Her illustrations are charming (there's that word again), whimsical, a touch scary, and altogether rather magical.

my lab notebook is boring.

In character. (Courtesy of Stumble.) This blog entry is quite brilliant -- the work of photographer Howard Schatz (no, I hadn't heard of him before either), giving about 10 different well-known actors a series of three very different prompts and capturing their facial expressions.

This doggy photography was created by Sharon Montrose, via Cup of Jo. GREAT DANE.

Refinery 29 Fashion Blog. It looks smart, brief, and informative. We shall see.

Kate Wilson Little Doodles. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaa soooooo cute. I particularly like the ones this blog chose, but Kate Wilson's actual site is here and it looks rather more interesting.

---

And here is what I called the "FU" section.

just quick. . .

before I transition back into work, i.e. Japanese vocabulary. (偉い/えらい means "great, superior, distinguished." continuing from there. . .)

Things that are awesome: (These were all found by way of the Firefox add-on Stumble. If you want to see your productivity take a nose dive for a week until you've seen so many art-game-history-literature-random-gorgeous-application websites you're satiated and nauseated, add this. I kind of prefer following the links from people's blogs, because there is only a finite number of them.)

30 Fashion Illustrators. Fashion illustration is a whole different way of approaching the design and composition of drawings, one that I would love to learn.

Calligraphic art by Margaret Shepherd. These four pieces are unquestionably, spectacularly BRILLIANT. The rest of this site -- Omniglot -- is pretty awesome too; I found it in high school and spent hours cruising through alphabets from around the world. The Roman alphabet serves its purpose, but it sure hasn't got the market cornered on sheer gracefulness of form.

Textures library. This site has got a lot of the textures I use the most in Photoshop type work -- wood, stone, water, and fabric -- as well as some new (to me) ones that could be fun to play with -- such as doors. Yes, doors.