Survival Tip!

#1. If you are an art student in college, then almost none of the normal rules apply to you.
The sooner you accept this, the better off you will be.
You will keep crazy sleep schedules that sometimes mean not sleeping and sometimes mean sleeping for days.
You will eat steak burritos for breakfast or a ginormous muffin for dinner because it was nearby and you are hungry dammit.
The constant overload of coffee will make you very giggly around 10 am.
Your English, Math, Education, any-major-that-is-not-yours friends will never undertand any of this.

Where's Taylor?

Week 3..... five pots of coffee and a large soda are my only sources of fuel..... my vision is blurry and my back is killing me....
They are relentless.

(pictures coming sometime after the impending hibernation)

Persephone

My final piece, project 9. It's Persephone, the Greek maiden who was trapped underground by Pluto (who loved her, thanks to Cupid). Her mother, goddess of the earth and harvest, grieved for her loss and the world began to wither away. Eventually a deal was worked out: Persephone had eaten 6 seeds of a pomegranate in Hades, so each year she would spend 6 months underground with Pluto (winter) and 6 months aboveground with her mother (summer). This is also my first-ever attempt at anything involving digital media or Photoshop, and although it is not perfect I am still very proud. I also intended to do a complimentary  piece starring Pluto, but ran out of time. I'll probably still do it eventually, and wind up posting it here.

Sands of Time II

This is my 3rd independent piece, the 2nd attempt at "making time", building on the first Sands of Time. Is not crooked, this is a perspective distortion from the camera (I did my best). India ink and watercolor, with an art nouveau twist. The border does carry the theme of time using clock hands along with 9 and 3 positioned where they would be on a clock. The colors are a tad more vivid in person.... Overall, I am pleased with the outcome yet willing to hear any suggestions for improvement.

Piece #7. I redid the "making time" prompt and tied it into the mythical sands of time, which Zeus collected from the blood of his slain father, Kronos. The majority of the peice is in soft pastel, which I had never used before. The bottom half or so of the "blood" is actually sand. IT IS NOT CROOKED. It just looks like it because of the way it was cropped. It's not a complete failure, considering I have never used pastels or sand before. Still, I note there is room for a lot of improvement.

Mahamayuri

Art 4 Piece 6. I chose to develop my altered book entry for "Glory". Originally in the altered book I tried to do a gold wire outline of a peacock, with the crown enlarged and stylized. It did not work, and turned out very dissappointing. So, I ix-nayed the wire altogether and did my outline with gold acrylic instead. It worked much better. I also filled in the body with a peacock feather pattern and used black acrylic for the kanji in the back- it just says "peacock" (or at least I hope that's what it says).

Why kanji? My inspiration for this piece (to tie it into my concentration) is the Hindu/Buddhist diety Mahamayuri vidyarajni- the peacock diety of wisdom. You can read about it here: http://fudosama.blogspot.com/2006/04/kujaku-myo-o.html

Fountain

This is for the "woven painting" project. My subject/theme is the mythical fountain of youth. For the first watercolor I used predominately yellow with some green, the second was predominately red with some purple. Weaving the two straightforwardly did not work out well for me, so I cut out unequal strips of various length and wove those. I think the end result is passable but not spectacular (which is fine by me. I did not like this project very much).