I drew a cephalopod again

So, one day, I was sitting in my room, thinking "You know, I suffering from a distinct lack of cephalopods in my life." Then this happened:

Sketch

Now, I know what you're asking yourself. It is the obvious question: "How did the artist challenge himself and explore new techniques and experiment with ideas while he was drawing his cephalopod?" I ask myself this question every day. The answer is that by simply making this drawing I was challenging myself. Frankly, I didn't even know my colored pencils could blend into each other before this project. Since this particular cephalopod is displaying a wide range of colors, I had to do that a lot. Also, can we talk about how cephalopods are just such a surreal experience to draw? I mean, if evolution was an abstract artist, cephalopods would be its masterpiece. Why does it have a fancy ornament on its head? Because it's a cephalopod. Why does it have that weird black pattern around its eyes? Because it's a cephalopod. Honey, where are the kids? Oh, the cephalopods took them again, darling. Those rascals.

Work in Progress

The legendary goggle squid

Now the next thing to think would be "After having traveled into such uncharted territory, how did you cope? Most people would have gone insane! How did you create solutions?" The answer to this one is that I was already insane; only insane people draw cephalopods, this should be common knowledge. The insane state of mind I had while drawing the creature was as follows: "You know, I'll just draw this here because that might look good. If it doesn't, then it only looks like that because it's a cephalopod and cephalopods are weird." This idea served me well in the end, because I cannot find a place where my experimentation backfired. In this case, my woes were not solved by planning, but by following my primitive cephalopod-drawing instincts.

And finally, the most prominent thought in your head is probably "Wow, you are really bad at drawing octopi." Well, you are wrong. I am the best octopi-drawer that I know. But that is irrelevant, because this cephalopod is not an octopus. It is an original cephalopod that I made with my mind so I could develop a truly original cephalopod drawing. Naturally, I had to make the idea believable, so I spent a while developing a cephalopod. And right now I'll give it a name, too, because I am really sick of writing the word "cephalopod". So, I imagine that this species would have deviated from other cephalopods in the Cephalopoda subclass of Neocoleoidea, creating the order Polypodiformes, family Humusomoenia, genus Reprobaformus, and species Spectaculums, making its scientific name Reprobaformus spectaculums (in Latin: Shapeshifting goggle monster), which isn't much better than the classic "Cephalopod," so people just call the species "goggle squids" even though they are not actually squids. See? Originality. Anyway, the goggle squid, as most cephalopods do, has superpowers. It can change the scales that cover its body into any color, and it can use its one hundred or so tentacles to mimic other animals and move really fast. It has evolved two false eyes on its four dorsal tentacles, that can wrap around its face and scare predators away. It can use the dimly glowing ornament on the top of its head to attract prey, though often the creatures live in environments not dark enough for it to stand out. Instead, they use pursuit predation to catch most of their prey. The goggle squid's skin secretes a lethal poison that that will kill most of the prey they touch, at which point they will just wait for it to die then mosey over to eat it. The spikes on the end of its arms are only for defense against hard-skinned fish. In the 1970s, a Russian scientist attempted to domesticate this species, but he accidentally poked it and died. The goggle squid then escaped by taking the form of a human and living among society. The particular goggle squid is known to most as Vladimir Putin.

And so ends the tale of the genesis of the Reprobaformus spectaculums, the goggle squid, the cephalapod, the Vladmir Putin. And what a learning experience it was.

In which I draw tools for cavity-constructing

The pictures you see above of sugar in both solid and liquid forms are the result of me using things that aren't non-colored drawing pencils for once. Really, I use them all the time. It's gotten to the point where I've stopped bringing regular pencils to school because I could just whip out my HB or B pencil to achieve the exact same effect.

The first medium I used was a reunion with an old friend: oil pastels. Only when I started using them did I remember that they weren't my friend at all, but just people from my fondly remembered past that I only consider friends upon recollection. They're actually a bunch of little jerks. They get all over my hands (and everything else within a meter radius it seems), they are generally broken in half, and most of all, they are too dull on their ends for me to see where I'm coloring. I just can't maintain a friendship with them; they're too unpredictable. I might think that I'm coloring lightly in one place but end up coloring super intensely in another place. And before this starts sounding too much like a Taylor Swift song, I digress.

The next medium was chalk pastels, which I thought where pretty great. They had all the good qualities of oil pastels without all of the hassle. Unfortunately, they were located in a shelf, in a box and had to be picked out one by one by sifting through trays of one million other colors of chalk pastels. It was simple logistics that kept me from using this medium.

The third (but second in the chronology of my drawings) was colored pencils. They are so simple, but so wonderful. I imagine that one day there was some ancient Greek philosopher who was looking at his boring ordinary drawing pencils and decided that they would be a much better allegory for the universe if they were in color. And thus the genesis of colored pencils occurred. They are so easy to handle, unlike the preceding mediums. They are colorful, as the name implies. And most importantly, they can be sharpened if they get too dull. Ahh, what rapture.

Consider the Following

Well well well. It's been a while. How are you doing, art blog?

YOU... you left me here to die... I waited for a year, but you never returned...

I appreciate you ever-insightful input, art blog. But we shan't dwell on reintroductions for too long. I have a project to explain through comedy of a range of brows.

I'm starving...

Moving rapidly on, my first art project in this class was to draw science. Naturally, such a simple concept wouldn't satiate my endless artistic hunger, so I did not only draw science, but I drew the manifestation of all things science, the science king, but above all of these things, the Science Guy.

Work in progress photo: Workiness is evident by the sheer amount of art supplies lying around

The King in his full glory

Of course, if you know anything about science, Bill Nye should be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think "Scientific". He ranked on the top of my list of scientific things, right up there with "zombie kittens" and "dinosaurs" and "rocks" and "ghost busters". None of these things stood a chance. Let's be honest, I knew from the beginning that Bill Nye the Sometimes Wry Fly Bowtie and Science Guy was what I was going to draw.

In between deeply contemplating how to fit a summation of Bill Nye's ever-glorious character onto a single page, I was vaguely aware of drawing shapes with implements that were pretty much pencils but not quite, like charcoal pencils. Charcoal pencils, instead of using graphite to draw, use burned dinosaurs. We also used pens, which are magical implements that use black magic to stain paper until the end of time (Really, imagine if the declaration of independence was written in pencil. The pencil would have smeared off as soon as Nicholas Cage took it out of it's display case). This is the same black magic that, if used by an inexperienced sorcerer, can the the three pages below it stained with the shadow of it's inscription. Using these implements intimidated me and caused me to retreat back into my comfort zone, which is the pencil equivalent of a ball pit. Though, even my comfort zone hurts me sometimes. Most of the pencils in the pencil pit are sharpened, so I imagine you can see the design flaw. Alas, I stayed there (Not because I had crippling lead poisoning, but just because I prefer pencils).

I showed contrast by suspending Bill Nye between the realm of Light and the realm of Darkness. He exists in the middle of the two. He is everything, but he is also nothing. He can be found in every direction, spatial or temporal. He has always been there, but should you look for him, you will not find him, and believe that he is nowhere. He is the universe. Nay, he is all universes. Also his body is lighter on one side and darker on the other, and all of the wrinkles have a light area and a dark area, etc.

In line with the theme of this project, I used complex science to create this piece. You see, the chemical reaction that occurs between the graphite of a pencil and whatever eternally mysterious element paper is made of creates a product of paper with graphite on it. This works because graphite is made of layers of hexagonally organized carbon atoms called a graphene layer. Paper really loves hexagons made of carbon so it takes the graphene layers and wears them as a fashion statement. I used this relationship to manipulate the paper into making a picture of Bill Nye on itself. Whenever I told the paper about this, to make sure it couldn't discover my real intentions, I used the code name of "Shading" which is kind of a menacing sounding codename and honestly I'm surprised that the paper wasn't suspicious. Shading, as I had explained it, was the technique of rubbing more graphene layers on one area and then gradually rubbing not so much on adjacent areas (Or, more specifically, to "put more graphene on some places for maximum stylishness"). Shading, of course, wouldn't have worked with pens because they don't use graphite and therefore cannot be fabulous (as far as shading goes, that is; no offense to pens).

I took a major risk by making the sleeves and bowtie have wrinkles. I wear wrinkled sleeves all the time, you know, and by virtue of that I often look at wrinkled sleeves, but even with all this experience I couldn't hold in my mind a stable image of what one looked like. So I did what any sane person would do; I traveled to the Tibetan Plateau and sought guidance from the monks that lived there. "How do I remember what wrinkled sleeves look like?" to which Grand Master Choden (We go way back) told me: "To understand the image of the wrinkled sleeve, you must find the wrinkled sleeve within yourself." So, in the monastery's courtyard, I meditated on my inner wrinkled sleeve until I became united with it in my mind, and I came back, and projected it onto my paper. It turned out alright. They were much easier to pull off than I had expected, I just had to plan it out a bit.
*It was also during this time that I got sick with some vicious malady and crawled around on the street trying to make dolphin noises, wondered about the plurals of words, died, etc., etc. In true Art tradition, it seems.

Overall, I think this is probably the best drawing of Bill Nye the Science Guy that I've ever seen. I always appreciate a good, old-fashioned pencil drawing of Bill Nye the Science Guy, but this one is the best. Under the "Good times list" (A list that I have been compiling for several years so I can read it when I'm old and remember that I wasn't always old but, hey, at least I can still read) I will add "Drawing Bill Nye in art class for the first time" because I assume this will happen again, because it was just such a splendid experience.

Ballad of the Mongeese

This unit's assignment was to create an ink print of some sort of wildlife. I pondered on creating a print of the Shoggoth, but decided something in the Lovecraftian realm would have to many complex textures. So instead, I made a small legion of mongeese:

(Reference Photo)

As you can see, I was going for photorealism.

I noticed early on that many people were also doing this creature for their projects - or something almost identical, the 'mongoise' - so I took a risky decision and made it a baby mongoose, to add originality. Don't let its large head and eyes deceive you, however; this here's a battle mongoose. It may not be apparent at first, but on closer inspection you can see that the scar tissue between its plates give the illusion that large sections of its armor is barely connected as if they were splotches of ink, as well as the gash on its chin, no doubt the result of a gruesome battle with some metallic, wedge-headed serpent.

**Fun fact: Another distinctive feature of the battle mongoose is its color patterns - similar to that of a great white shark, it has a darker colors on top of it's body, so it blends in with the dark waters below when seen from above, and lighter colors on the bottom so it can blend in with the lighter water above when viewed from below. However, most battle mongeese will swim upside-down, standing out from all angles. This is an even more effective defense mechanism in the wilderness, as then it is not confused with the puny great white shark, but something several orders of magnitude deadlier. Generally, the passage of a battle mongoose through some of the more populated waters is accompanied by hushed whispers of one fish to another: "Hey, is that a battle mongoose?" to which the other fish would reply, "Yeah, let's not mess with that guy."

This valiant warrior mongoose has has ambitions, visible by the death glare it is giving the creature that inhabits the plastic bottle in front of it. This ocean litter is both a statement about pollution and a metaphor for the ultimate goal of every mongoose: become a moongoose, navigating through vast spans of space with a roughly bottle-shaped vessel. Deeper meanings are left to the viewer to unveil.

I crafted this battle mongoose from linoleum with nothing but the power of my mind, which manipulated devices called 'limbs' into clutching tools and moving them in such a way that they carved away the linoleum, leaving only the image of the mongoose in their wake. It was a grueling task, of course, scratching away the material through sheer will, focusing my mental power on the narrow spaces between the plates. But my concentration was still intact at the week's end, though I had to rest it back to its former glory before I could write this post, and even now, I can hear the sticky sound brought about by rolling ink on a brayer ringing in my ears. From this experience, I can deduce an important life message: some cuts are not deep enough, and can become so over-encumbered that they can no longer be seen.

Sometimes, I lay awake at night, wondering, "Could the battle mongoose's struggle to attain its dream of becoming a moon-goose really just be a symbol for my struggle to create battle mongeese?" and I can't help but think that I have been up far too long pondering these things and should really go to sleep before further psychosis begin to develop.

Lily the Blood-Curdling, Bone-Chilling, Brain-Consuming Pancake

Have you ever thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting if pancakes were vicious terrifying demon-spawn that were baying for your blood?"

Well, if so, meet Lily, which is essentially that. Unfortunately, I am still unable to answer that question because Lily is an illusion. She was fabricated, you see. And not by a chef, but by me, using photoshop, which as you know, is made primarily out of magic.

Following instructions on a video, I was able to make a basic template for Lily, which was only her mouth. This went quite smoothly, but I later decided it wasn't enough. I added some more teeth, in case she needed spares. But then I was hit by a huge problem: she didn't look very happy. For this, I magically warped her mouth so she would be happy forever. And I imagine she is happy on the inside as well, because her mouth is no longer a massive division around her entire face.

However, I believe the mouth not coming from such a division may have detracted from the illusion of realism. Similarly, I believe a mouth existing as an anatomical feature of a pancake detracts from the illusion of realism, so I'm not too saddened by it. And, by the looks of it, neither is Lily.

I've run out of foot puns

In this project, I was supposed to take an 'expressive photo', turn it into a gradient thingy on the the computer, then turn the computer gradient thingy into a spray paint gradient thingy, and it turned out like this:

(Reference picture added to avoid confusing the spray paint picture with a bird)

I chose this picture to recreate as a spray paint gradient thingy because I felt like there was an empty void in my collection of art projects that could only be filled be people getting hit in the face with soccer balls. This was an appropriate oppurtunity, I felt, to address it.

That was the first step in the overall project; but as with all my projects, there was not yet enough internal and external strife to prove it worthy of completion:

Next, I went back to the art room with print-out gradient thingy. I was still working on my last project, drawing a chinchilla. While I was doing this, everybody suddenly crowded around the projectors they used to trace their stencils. Even after I finish drawing my chinchilla, everybody is still occupying the projector. Having nothing to do, I read for several days. Eventually I get a chance on the projector and trace my stencils.

Afterwards, I began cutting out my stencils. About half way through I realize that one stencil I made was completely redundant and sacrificed it to the stencil gods.

After sacrificing and maiming the poster board with an exactoknife, I paint a piece of cardboard burgundy. I procrastinate for a bit, then I spray paint the yellow layer on first.

The next day, though, I am infected with a plague similar to the one detailed in my first blog post. I went through similar stages of philosophical introspection regarding grammar and the making of dolphin noises. In the end, I die briefly, but life's weird like that sometimes. After the gruesome journey, I come back and finish spray painting. The product of the whole shebang is the topmost picture shown (unless you are reading this blog upside down or sideways) above. 

The first thing that I noticed was how unexpectedly dark the blue spray paint dried like. The contrast it adds makes it look a bit odd, but I'm not bothered by it too much. The color, distracted me for a moment of the giant mutant blob in the bottom right corner, just under the soccer ball. It was very out of place, and didn't even really look like an arm. It took me looking at my own reference picture to find out that it was somebody's elbow photobombing the picture. But in my mind, I would justify the existence of the blob by saying that it is the trail of flames left by the ball as it flew so fast toward this poor lad's face that it ignited the air.

Great Things are Afoot

What did the shoe say to the hat?

 

 Foot note: This shoe drawing is a foot long.

"You go on ahead, and I'll follow on foot."

Anyway, about a month ago, my art class was occupying itself with contour drawing. The assignment above was our project for the unit, to make a contour line drawing of a shoe. As you may guess, this was no easy feet.

The drawing is, certainly, recognizable as my own shoe, but it still does not contain all of the characterizing feetures of my actual shoes; the holes near the sides that go straight through the shoe, the scratches, gashes, dirt, etc. Indeed, my real shoe may be on its last leg.

I've got to hand it to myself, though, it's a lot more realistic than the contour hand drawing I was doing earlier. In those, I could hardly handle constructing five fingers; it was a bit out of hand. Hands down, however, all of the practice with contour drawings eventually made me get a grip on the whole concept, I learned it's not that difficult to grasp. I give myself a hand for this one.

There is one thing I want to point out, however: the laces. They're a bit wound up there, but it's for a reason. It's a bit of a tradition for me to tie my shoelaces in ridiculous patterns, and there is a story behind it.

You see, back in 2010, during April fools day, I was watching my step at school, as everybody was. Trying to avoid being tread on by other peoples' tricks. I didn't last very long, though, as I've always been a bit gullible, I was defeeted by somebody telling me my shoes were untied when they weren't.

Next year, April fools day 2011, I was still kicking. But I was still quite laced up from last year, and had created, after some sole-searching, a brilliant plan. I tied my shoes in the most ridiculous way, a way that could not possibly come undone in the next several days; a Gordian knot to boot.

When I went to school that day, I inevitably ran into the person that had so callously waded up to me and told me my shoes were untied last year. This year, again, she could not hold her tongue and told me the same thing: "Hey, your shoes are untied."

I grinned, and without even looking down, replied, "No, they're knot."