New Moon

Yay, I win! I will be the first to post about this twilight related thing! The trailer for New Moon Premiered at the MTV Movie Awards last night. Twilight also won awards for best movie, best female performance, best breakout male performance, and best kiss. Here is the trailer.,

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Looks pretty good, eh?

(FYI: I actually haven't heard the the trailer, only seen it. Our work computers don't have sound, so if there is anything untoward about the sound, I am ignorant.)

Endure

I seem to be pretty despicable because I have one millions things to blog about (my new hamster named Lawrence [the cutest hamster in all the land], my new garden, my new internship) but I haven't. Instead, I'm going to write about T-shirts.

The supervising computer for my work just got the Adobe Suite installed on it, and I have been going crazy with it. I volunteered to design our office t-shirt, and from there I have made two other t-shirts: one for my boss who does a "cousin camp" for her little grandchildren, and the other for our Wilkinson Family Reunion. I had a lot of fun with them, and think I could probably make a cottage business for camp shirts...but don't worry, I won't.




Here is the BYU Info Shirt. It is views of the front and back respectivly.




Here is the one for my boss. She wanted a simple design for a kids camp.




Here is the Wilkinson Family Reunion shirt. It depicts the greatest of all Wilkinson legends: THE VEGA. For those of you who don't know, the Vega was manufactured by Chevrolet 1970-1977. It had an unusual aluminum-block engine, that had some serious problems, most notably, the valve stem cells would split or crack, leaking oil into the combustion chamber. Basically, you could only go about 200 miles on one quart of oil. We had a Vega when I was growing up, and it was a very uncomfortable, and somewhat unreliable car. But it was the best car.

Some of my memories include: going around corners and the passenger door flying open; wanting to go to the park, but unable to because the door wouldn't open at all (even though it was unlocked); five to ten minute wrestles to get the car in reverse; the hump where the middle seat should have been; looking at the ceiling, which was like one of those 3D puzzles that pop out if you cross your eyes; and always leaving puddles of bright green antifreeze where ever we went (when the car was turned off it would promptly dump all of its vital fluids on the ground).

The reason we revere the Vega is because of its drive to go on. It seemed to serve us when we needed it the most, and wouldn't give up on us even when we retired it (at the dump). In the end, my dad called dumps to see what he could get for the car, and one dump even said in a disgusted voice, "We don't take Vegas." When he found someone who would take it, he left it running on their scales (so it wouldn't leak all over the scales), but it also seemed fitting. The car that never died.

As a result, in our family when we say "Be a VEGA" what we really mean is "Endure to the end." I thought it would only be natural to draw an homage to the Vega for our family reunion, to remind us to stick it through the tough times, and to always park so we can pull forward, in case you can't go into reverse later.

Sex, Lies,and Photoshop

I just saw this really cool video article in the opinion section of the New York Times. Once again if you are squeamish of women (and this time men too) clad in bikini's then beware, you have been warned, although, it is kind of the whole point....

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/09/opinion/1194838469575/sex-lies-and-photoshop.html

I entirely agree that the false images portrayed by the media give false notions of beauty to those who look at them, whether it be men, women, young girls, whoever. People should know that the images they see in movies and magazines are not real. They are in fact, impossible to achieve using mortal means. So next time you see a skin care add with skin that appears to glow from within, or a man who muscles seem to too proportional to be true, it probably is. Too perfect to be true I mean. And admit it, you really wanted to know what I wrote when you saw "Sex" in the title....

Artwork from last year

So finally I am posting my artwork from last year, which includes: oil, watercolor, gouache, ink, a few acrylic, and an egg temera. Woo-hoo!

This is the first extended painting from my figure painting class. It is in oil. If you are offended by bikini's, there isn't much I can do for you except say at every other art school models are nude :). This painting, which is mounted on a door cut in half, took probably about 40-50 hours to paint.





These four are the start or my in-class shoe series for Aqueous Media. Aqueous media is any media that uses water as a vehicle (rather than something like oil). The whole semester I painted these shoes in different ways and with different materials. The top three are watercolor, the first one being an arbitrary/abstract.

The last one is an ink transfer and very watery gouache (most inks are also Aqueous Media, the ink used for this was water-based Intaglio ink).




I only did these three painting of my blue wedding shoes, the first one titled "Sacred Blue" was the first painting I did for the class. It is in watercolor. The single shoe is in acrylic, and the last is India Ink. For the ink one I used different hued washes, diluting the ink with water.



This is one of two painting we did on a plein-air(pronounced plane)field trip. The other is so grotesque I couldn't bring myself to put it up. This one is a view of the western mountains and sky seen from Rock Canyon Park in Provo.





These are my favorite painting from my Aqueous Media class and they are Gouache! Huzzah! The first two are from a second Plein-air outing, and I'm not going to lie, they are awesome. Doing the second painting, of the thicket, I began to understand the principles of painting outdoors and my teacher was pretty impressed.

The last two are shoes of course, the last took quite a while, but one in which my teacher was also impressed. All of the shoe painting I did in the 3 hour segments of class-time with the shoes sitting in front of me, and it made painting the Dr. Martins difficult because lighting would be changing day to day, or even hour to hour.






These are kind of misfit paintings, in that i just barely took pictures of them. The shoes are the last shoes I did for Aqueous Media. They are in Egg Tempera, which was a somewhat difficuilt media to work with, hence I only did the one painting. The shoe part is only about 5"x5" and the whole piece is 12"x12". I still like the kitchenesque tiles, mostly because it is super hard to get Egg Tempera to look that flat and consistant. Bragging rights really.

The whistle was for my final project. I painted about 15 items from my typeset tray.

The last painting was my in-class final for Figure Painting (the very last picture is a closeup of the models face which was tiny on my painting, very hard to get right). It is in oil.



Yay for the last painting, that I will show at least... It is of my face. A giant face.

This was my Final project for Figure Painting.It is on the other half of the door from the very first painting. It is of course not a perfect likeness. You also might have noticed the red things coming out of my neck; those are a Maya symbol of sacrifice, with some of my own embellishments. It's in oil. Yah, it's weird, but my teacher really liked it, so that's that.

So, for the two or three of you who really wanted to see my work, hooray! For everyone else...sucka's! :). This is of course not every single piece I did this year, but the ones I liked the best and still have with me, or had already taken pictures of.

P.S. All these works are copyrighted to me, so no stealing please.

2012: The end of the world?

THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MAYA (and Megan):

So I just watched a trailer for the movie 2012 which involves the Maya Long Count calendar ending on December 21st, 2012, and so begins the apocalypse . The Maya calender does indeed end, after 5000 years, on Dec. 21st 2012, but it is the same as our calender ending every year on Dec. 31st, not a prediction of the end of the world.

However, I think the most interesting thing about the trailer was the final shot telling us to "find the truth, Google 2012". I must admit I love Google and Wikipedia almost as much as I love my own self, but anyone who admonishes you to seek the truth through amateur web sites is clearly grasping for straws. It is also very clear to me after reading a few of the Googled web sites, that anyone who believes this theory has not studied the Maya because they call them "Mayans".

I feel it my duty as a student in a Maya art history class to tell everyone out there that only the Maya language is called "Mayan", never the people or anything else having to do with their culture, they are always referred to as Maya (By themselves and by those who study their culture. Yes they are still alive and well in Mexico and Guatemala).

So if you feel compelled to research the Maya, make sure the sources you are using do not use the word Mayan inappropriately. It means they don't have any idea what they are talking about or are just making wild and unresearched accusations without understanding the Maya culture.

Thank you, you may continue with your day.

T'is the season for me to stop slacking

So it is getting to that time of the school year: "the hump". I really despise 'the hump' because it is the time when all the projects a haven't done or assignments haven't read come back and slap me in the face. This year I've been way better than in previous years but it has also been different because this year I am married and have a whole nother person to take care of beside myself. Even as I write this I am putting off writing a short essay on the Iconography and Importance of Blood in Maya Culture. Fascinating, yes. Nauseating, yes. Completed, no.

I'm wondering if "the hump" is something only experienced by slacker college students. Feel free to follow my example and whine and moan on my blog about "the hump". Also, if you want to learn about some nasty Maya self-sacrifice I can e-mail my essay to you. With illustrations!

Very interesting....

I received an E-mail yesterday saying that my blog had been flagged as one potentially being a "spam blog", but since I was an "actual human being reading this" my blog probably wasn't a spam blog. When I read how they flag spam blogs it said those blogs often participate in link spamming and use gibberish and nonsense words....but please believe me, Gouache is in fact a real thing and I'm not making it up.

I also thought I should give a pronunciation guide since for the first year I saw the word Gouache I thought it was pronounced as if it rhymed with grouch. It is really pronounced /goo-w-ah-sh/ but faster and slurring all the sounds together. If you know the IPA then it would be /guwoʃ/.

I bring in the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet, into this because I'm taking an introduction to linguistics class, that I love, and I learn all sorts of interesting and hypocritical things people do with language.

Today I think I will rant about people making fun of Bush for saying "nucular" instead of "nuclear" (which incidentally people don't even say that one right: the clear part is pronounced /klee-are/ not like /ear/). Anyway, apart from Bush having a totally different dialect than western America, he is making a mistake that EVERY SINGLE one of us makes, almost on a daily basis, just not necessarily with nuclear. Take for instance the word WEDNESDAY. Over time the pronunciation has been modified from the original /wed-nes/ to the switching of the consonants /d/ and /n/. This has been done presumably because it is much easier to pronounce.

The same can be said of the Midwestern and southern version of nuclear. The ending /ular/ is much more prevalent in English than the ending /lee-are/ (muscular, popular, tubular, etc. vs. Cochlear). So while the ending is incorrect, it is easier to say and it is more common.

If you are worried over our president's mispronunciations, take a chill pill. You do the same thing, just with different words. (Also look at the words, familiar /fermilar/, asterisk /asteriks/, Samson /Sampson/)

There is my rant. Obviously I have no pictures yet. Maybe sometime in the future...