You can find more information here if you really want, but all it really means is I have a big head.  

Two for one!  I'm still behind because I forgot about it yesterday.  I decided I needed to change my style in order to trick myself out of cartoonizing my portraits, so in the first one I only used the broad side of the pencil, and I took my glasses off and squinted so I wouldn't get distracted by details.  I'm pretty happy with the result.



In the next one I picked one feature and drew it in as much detail as I could.



Man I'm tired.  That's all for now...

ejl

So.  Today's self-portrait has been bumped for a rather more important project.  



This is a fanciful reproduction of a beautiful christmas ornament sent to me by someone very close to my heart.  Colossal love and hug-tackles to that one.  <3 <3 <3

This weekend is Dancing Fool!  I am dancing my butt off for hours at a time with an enormous hall packed to the gills with fabulous dancers and filled to the roof with amazing music.  Life is awesome.

ejl

Here's yesterday's.  I have to admit I am not a fan, but that's sort of what this whole project was for--making something to have a product, even if I don't like it.



ejl

I know I missed one yesterday.  Here's one for the 4th, and I hope to do today's portrait later tonight at Dancing Fool (!!), though I don't expect to be home in any mood to scan it and upload it, so I'll aim for two of them tomorrow.



I have a really hard time drawing myself "honestly"--i.e., portraying and including the qualities I consider unattractive.  I think it comes from drawing myself in cartoon form for so long.  I became stylized and simplified, skinnier and more put-together; or really, more attractively disheveled.  (Can one be simply sheveled? or gruntled? or whelmed?)  What a complicated thing, my perception of myself.  I am aware that the little things that seems important to me, the ones I try to conceal or minimize, are invisible, insignificant to others, but my neurosis goes on obsessing, unfazed.  

ejl

 BET YOU THOUGHT I WUSSED OUT.

Not so!  Day two:

I have a new project!

I have spent too long telling myself I should me making more things.  For this month, February 2010, I will make one self-portrait every day.  

Does anybody want to join me in this project?

Day one:

More totally sweet animation, this time with post-its!

SUCCEED Blog: A collection of the world's most epic, awesome, mind blowing Succeeds.

Posted using ShareThis

is the description on the photos I took on Sunday, which was Cake Day. E's birthday is the 24th--tell her happy birthday!--on which she will be traveling, so Sunday was the day we made cake and had presents. And I made my ( first ever cake! )


I'm flying to my parents' house tomorrow, and getting up at the ass crack of dawn to do so.  I have mixed feelings about going home.  Life back on the ranch has been rocky lately, but the holidays with my family tend to be really nice; there is lots of cooking and eating delicious things, lots of reading, lots of long walks.  And now apparently there's two feet of snow to do it in!  EXCITED.  Snow does not really happen where I live now.  I'm very mildly sick with the same basic cold (sore throat, stuffy nose), which I am nursing with a huge mug of tea.  I just don't feel like expending the energy I usually do on bitching and moaning about being sick.  It's just not that big a deal.  

Happy holidays, everybody.  

I don't know why I can't embed it, but here is an amazing animated music video using dice as pixels. Really neat technique.

PS: In case you weren't aware, octopi are freaking amazing:

(a time-lapse video)

This time in papercraft, from the New Zealand Book Council.

 Some new comics up on Flickr.   ( Lady Longboarder )

I've been thinking about my mental health history lately.  I made a comic about it, like I do about most things I think about.  I really like how it turned out.  Tell me what you think.  ( OCD )

Ta for now.

<3,
ejl

Dear Friends,

I have a quandary.

Life is fabulously good.  This is true.  I work part-time teaching young children circus arts and helping them gain coordination and confidence in their bodies and abilities.  It is a great job.  I make things (new comics are up at my Flickr site, come and see!) almost every day, or anyway I try to.  But I need something more to do with my time.  The circus gig is extremely part-time, and there are just too many hours in the day for me to stay sane.  

Options I have considered and/or pursued:
- getting a second job (also for income reasons)
- starting a shop on Etsy (selling handmade journals and original art, possibly also comics)
- illustration and graphic design work (I am doing this on the side, but the work is far from regular)

Things I want to do, but don't really know how to go about it:
- be an artist

I'm not kidding on this one.  Making stuff isn't enough.  I want to sell it, or show it to someone, or I don't know, advertise my existence as a person who makes things.  I want to meet people, particularly other artists.  I'm thinking of turning this journal and my Flickr site into a more professional artist's blog and collection of my work (respectively).  I made a blog, but it seems silly to switch to a different journal-like site when I already have this one, and when I know people on this one.  When I finish Olo, which I swear on a stack of bibles I will do, I want to know how to get it published. 

So, friends, what shall I do?  Those of you who make things, and the lucky few of you who make things for a living--how do you pull it off?  More importantly, what did you do before you were able to do it?  

 Super late, but here are (some of) my feelings on Seattle's Seafair and the Blue Angels, who shook our building to its roots for two weeks when they were practicing: 

 

I don't know if I agree 100%, but the sentiment resonates with me.  

I ran across this quote on my way through New Mexico and Arizona.  I meant to post it then; here it is now.  

"Well - I made you take the time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

Then when I paint a red hill, because a red hill has no particular association for you like the flower has, you say it is too bad that I don't always paint flowers. A flower touches almost everyone's heart. A red hill doesn't touch everyone's heart as it touches mine and I supposed there is no reason why it should. The red hill is a piece of the badlands where even the grass is gone. Badlands roll away outside my door - hill after hill - red hills of apparently the same sort of earth that you mix with oil to make paint. All the earth colors of the painter's palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through the ochres - orange and red and purple earth - even the soft earth greens.

You have no associations with those hills - our waste land - I think our most beautiful country. You must not have seen it, so you want me to always to paint flowers...."

-- Georgia O'Keeffe in Exhibition Catalogue, An American Place, 1939


Seattle is very beautiful.  There are fruit trees on every block, and rosemary grows like a tree rather than a bush.  I clipped some new growth from the plant at Erica's house and put it in water--four days later it is already sending out little white fingers into the water.  When it gets bigger we'll be able to plant it in a pot.  I miss the red dirt, though.  I'll go back someday.  

Life is pretty okay.  The apartment is really great, more than big enough for the two of us.  We cook and bake and read.  Money is very, very tight and I am looking for a second job (or third, if you count extremely sporadic graphic design 'gigs').  

That's all for now, I guess.