Balloon Planets

Sophie (who is 11 and will show up sporadically at the studio with her dad demanding crafts) and I made planets on Friday. Usually Sophie just wants to make different kinds of birds, but this week I was able to convince her that it would be way more awesome to build an entire world!*
Sophie's Planet was colorful and decorated with tiny flocked bunnies and frogs, we made a small boat with a feather mast to sail the ocean and a weird nurse goddess to watch over the planet.
My planet is brown and made from inside out cereal boxes and used packing paper.
Incidentally, cereal boxes are my most favorite of craft supplies, they can become almost anything and are basically free!
Sophie named our creations Balloon Planets, although no balloons were used in the making of our tiny worlds.


*something I've wanted to do since boyfriend bought me Little Big Planet last year...next I will turn my work area into a life size "pod"and decorate it with googly eyes on stalks and stickers! I can never seem to find good stickers though, the only ones I have that I like at all are my friend Jennifer's business stickers...maybe I shall start making my own. 

Daisy, Cheesecake and Dennis

This morning I went to the pet store and instead of buying a rabbit, which would have been adorable and fluffy and left poop in all my shoes I bought more fish! it's possible that I have a problem, I started with one little tank and a couple of little stripy jobbies and now I have the little tank, (which is mostly just breeding snails at this point) and a 15 gallon tank with 7 neon tetras (all named Jeff), 4 zebra danios (the little stripy jobbies), two big fat ones, Cheesecake and Dennis, Ted the poopfish (I can't remember what he is exactly but he seems to enjoy eating poop) and a hatchet something or other I named Daisy.
I'm thinking that I will start emailing pictures of my fish to my friends who like to send me pictures of their kids/puppies...

WALL!!!!!

The wall is almost finished! we have the Alum show coming up next weekend and, due to the number of submissions, we actually needed more wall space so we built a new wall... technically its more of a mobile room than a wall, and really Robert mostly built it, I just held things, did a lot of measuring and drilled holes where I was told. Today I filled all the seams, screw holes and molded a corner from wood filler and then sanded it, now I am waiting for my second coat of primer to dry so that I can start on the top coat, then we can attach the trim, move it into place, load up the shelves cunningly hidden in the back portion of the wall, rearrange some of the track lighting to properly illuminate our glorious new studio addition, and hang art on it!

....on an unrelated note, and I feel very strongly about this: art is hung, people are hanged! 

Dammit!

Dandelion & Burdock

Dandelion&Burdock

This is the birthday present I made for my sister.

I started it a while ago and for some reason I couldn't seem to get it right. I am mostly happy with it now, so it probably wont change at all. I did steal the house for IF's "cultivate" and a small section of the background for "duet" but I might change the background of that one because I was feeling lazy and it doesn't really fit the image. 

Dandelion and Burdock was this weird fizzy drink my gran used to buy when I was a kid, it sort of tastes a little like dr. pepper, I haven't seen it since I moved to the states. 

let the randomness begin....

Ok, this is just  string of random comments and thoughts, its mostly pointless, but its a blog, what do you expect?
My boyfriend pointed out to me that I can be somewhat judgmental (a word, I feel, that deserves to have an "e" in the middle of it) and perhaps, overly critical? but whatevs, I have 6 weeks left of my twenties, I'm not really going to change any time soon (although this is probably to my detriment)

This week I have been wondering these things:
1. how can a person eat a tub of icecream and a packet of milkduds a night and yet never gain a single pound. I wonder this not because I am jealous, I think that much candy would just put me off, but mostly I just don't understand it. where does it go? do the calories evaporate? how do you not have diabetes? (also someone should probably explain to me how you develop diabetes)
2. how can a person practice something for years and call it their trade and yet not get any better at it? I have things I am bad at, lots of them actually, but I think that if I were to pick one thing and practice it everyday, I might just get a little better at it.

 crap, I just got my first mosquito bite of the year!

3. why did Firefly get cancelled?
4. what the hell am I going to submit to the alum show? I managed to annoy/bully many others into participating, now I have two weeks to submit something myself.
5. do people get shallower as they get older? it seems that way, I doubt that ten years ago I would have been blogging about ice-cream consumption and cancelled tv shows... nor would I have had a blog.
...but one day, will I stop caring about things altogether and start painting pictures of my pets? or my plants assuming I am unable to keep a pet alive long enough to actually render it's portrait.

Borders is going out of business. I got a pile of books for the studio,  one that is just various artists interpretations of disney princesses. I will probably keep that one for myself. and I might start drawing disney princesses.

Started reading a blog belonging to a woman who drew a picture of a giraffe everyday for 300 days and then posted them to that blog. I can't quite decide how I feel about that. I probably don't.

my baby sister turned 24 today. Happy Birthday Dan!

IF-duet

It feels like it's been a very long week.

Allergies

Its Wednesday which means my friends get back from their honeymoon tonight and I can go home!  house sitting is weird. Other peoples houses, regardless of how clean or welcoming they might be, just seem strange, everything's in the wrong place and I can never find the light switch. The last two weeks I've felt a little bit like I'm wearing someone elses socks. Also I can now add my friends pets to the long list of things I am allergic to. So far the list goes like this: cats, cherries, raw almonds, tree spooge and the entire city of Atlanta from mid February thru late May.

IF-Cultivate

Illustration Friday-cultivate.

Ah College!

I stumbled upon this photograph on a well hidden blog, from the Agnes Scott publication Aurora, this was our college arts magazine. Why on earth someone saw fit to stick my suitcase full of boobs on page 36, I have to admit to being a little confused by. But it made me smile. the whole thing was made from green floral foam and paint, except for the suitcase, which was cunningly fashioned from an old suitcase. I think it was supposed be some sort of commentary on the male gaze...ah, to be young and idealistic.

Going to a liberal arts, women's college was awesome! I cared so much about everything, and got pissed off at make-up commercials (despite my sizable eyeshadow collection) and yelled at strange men in bars, accusing them of misogyny (while not being able to spell it) and frequently declared myself smarter than everyone else in the room (which of course I wasn't, but thats why college is great). 

Anyway...suitcase full of boobs.

Zombies weeeeeeeeee!

While feeding my roommate's goldfish while he's out of town I found the birthday present I made him a couple of years ago on his desk next to the fish tank...


Probably due to the large amount of super cheesy zombie movies I watch I tend to have fairly frequent zombie based dreams. They usually take place in Atlanta and revolve around me and my roommate escaping the city while fighting off hoards of the undead, sometimes with friends who most often get bitten or left behind or kept as zombie pets. But I found this and it made me smile...so there it is.

IF-warning

It's been a minute since I participated in Illustration Friday's weekly thingys and after realizing how thoroughly unproductive I had been this week, I thought, why break the trend?... so instead of working, I did this:

I was thinking about those signs I saw at the beach as a kid that read "SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK"
obviously these signs were there to warn me about sharks or sea monsters, rather than the lack of adult supervision.

...shelf

I have very little to write, I feel as though I have been busy, but it seems that all I have to show for this week is a slightly rearranged shelf. 

oh yeah, I went to clay class and made stuff. that was pretty fun. I will take pictures when my creations are released from the kiln... until then... heres a picture of my shelf. yay shelf!

Finished Mural

Jennifer finished the mural today and it looks brilliant! Finally we have some fish in the studio that Jeremy the Crab Asshole can't eat. We put a hermit crab in the tank last week thinking that his size and shell would protect him and for a few days they seemed to be getting along well, until Saturday morning when there was nothing left but a shell, a couple of legs and the claw that Jeremy spent the rest of the day delightedly sucking the meaty goodness out of.
Jeremy doesn't get any more friends but the mural looks good.

The Brand New Kid

Giant lunch lady head prop for "The Brand New Kid" opening tonight at the Alliance Theatre. So large and frightening, I wish there was more to say about it...
It reminds me of the Face of Bo, I'm glad it is not at the studio anymore.

some stuff about some things:

Thing one: got a little carried away with the sandwich idea, and finished all my sandwich drawings, see above page titled "Sandwiches"
Thing two: the mural will be finished on Tuesday, Jennifer, Robert and I painted the wall this week and next week Jennifer will return to cover it in murally goodness. I am excited!

RAD

The RAD art walk was yesterday. After 3 days of building boxes, painting signs, finding homes for all the random crap Robert and I had accumulated and what seemed like endless sweeping, we actually looked like a proper studio and real live work space. well worth the splinters and bloodied fingers.
A few of our artists sold work, me included, and today it still looks awesome and we have the garage door open because its 62 degrees outside. Yay for February in Georgia!

Why is it impossible to starve in the desert?

Today is Friday, which means figure drawing in the studio. Given the opportunity to draw from a live model, most artists would drop whatever they were doing and jump at the chance...I, however, will never be a true or developed artist because while everyone else was drawing the model, I sat in the corner working on a series of drawings based on a text conversation I had the other day with a friend of mine about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Here is one in a series of 4 which will be hanging up at RAD tomorrow.

New year, new website...ish.

It was pointed out to me, by someone who apparently had been trying to track me down that all the information on my website was out of date and that among other things the email address listed had been deleted long ago. So yesterday I fixed it...more or less.
One day I will bully Robert into "helping" me redo my website for realz, but for now iweb does a fair job. you can go look at it at www.nicmorgan.net

New year, new stuff!

So the raptor and the falcon made it to the top of the cake and my friends got married. 

heard something funny on parks and recreation the other day that made me laugh, "everytime a couple gets married, two single people die" at this rate I'll have no friends left by the time I'm thirty.

Anyway, I ordered business cards from moo.com, they came in the mail today and are awesome!

I love minimoo cards!

More Things On Your Cake!

Hampton and Erin get married on the 29th, I'm curious to see if this actually makes it to the top of the cake.