More Dolls

In-progress: Moon doll body re-sculpt. (The first, very sadly, broke.... but it wasn't very sturdy to begin with) Also, Owl doll, made from wood.

Squid Balloon - Color Comps

For the National Portfolio Day poster... without text for now.

New Dolls

This is Moon. She's from a play by Lorca, called Blood Wedding. She's eventually going into a diorama of the woods, with two lovers hiding in the underbrush, and probably some branches and blood. Also, she'll have fancy black lace, like a spanish dancer.



New torso - sculpted the original in stoneware, made a silicon mold, pulled this cast in sculpey, baked.


This tiny thing is Sydney. Too small for wigs/sewing, I think, so I'm going to sculpt the hair and clothes on, eventually.

Cristoff's Bookshelves

More for comics class. We're developing 5 characters, and a story. This is Cristoff, first of the five. I'll put the character backgrounds and stories up later.

The Exterminating Angel

A screenprint inspired by a surrealist film about bourgeoisie cultural entrapment, by Luis Bunuel, that I viewed in my Surrealism and Film class. I wrote a rallying essay on the subject, too.


Some essay highlights:

...Bunuel takes the theme of possession from the sexual to a class reading of such, the bourgeoisie possessed by their possessions, trapped in trappings.

Through the majority of the film, the guests are trapped in the music room, unable to leave despite pressing appointments and plans for secret trysts. The first evening there are dozens of good reasons to leave, and even if they stay, there are guest rooms more comfortable than the floor, but no one seems to muster the will to budge an inch out of the door.

The enclosed space becomes a metaphor for an inescapable belief system. Nothing physical holds any of the characters in place, and yet they are still unable to escape, they starve and suffer and see their ideals and pretensions collapse around them like so much hot air, and yet they cannot simply step outside, remove themselves from the situation.

Visibility is the most important signifier for the bourgeoisie, and it is what gives validity to their privilege. It is, in a way of speaking, their ticket into the exclusive club. Having vast wealth is a secondary consideration to showing that wealth, in ostentatious display. The reality of bourgeois spaces is that only certain things happen in an open, visible space. For the system of respectability to hold up, some things must be kept out of sight. Certain actions are regulated to private spaces, not to be shown or discussed. ...

A few dolls--

Just initial ones. Tescatlipoca, in the feathers, there, a somewhat new character of mine. The other is Flower, still in progress. The third is experiments into woodcarving... getting there slowly.

Capital Punishment

Here's a little morbid piece about the death penalty, for Illustration 4.

If killing is wrong, it should be always wrong, ever, for anyone, with the inclusion of execution and war, too. Does a difference in motive, in procedure, make someone's systematic death acceptable? The pro-capital-punishment websites have a strong focus on descriptions of the killer, and the crime, meant to work the viewer into a sympathetic frenzy with the victim, ready to demand retribution. At the point and time when you demand someone die for what they've done, and vote for it, pass the sentence, turn away, you yourself are complicit in a murder of some kind. Motives of revenge and desire put you mentally on a criminal level. If compassion and fair treatment of one human being to another is the goal, then it should start with people of some privilege. It affords us nothing to let people live. Contrary to common belief, it actually costs more, in the end, to execute a prisoner, than to feed and upkeep them for a full life sentence. And what is the cost of an execution, not in monetary loss, but for the psyches of the people involved? What about the murder victim's family? If the death appeases them, if a problem of anguish is solved by killing for revenge, then it has simply come full circle. Certainly some murderers deserve to die, but who can really make that call? Opposition of the death penalty supports the moral stance that people should be treated better than they deserve, by one another, and by society. As a statistically Christian nation, capitol punishment does not hold up to moral scrutiny, the way I see it.


"As one reads history...one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."
~Oscar Wilde

Only 14 democracies in the world still have the death penalty, and only 3 of them have carried out executions in 2005: the United States, Taiwan and Japan. 44 dictatorships also practice it regularly.

88 per cent of all known executions in 2007 took place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA.

New!

Returning from long absence, I bring you: an update!

This blog was previously used as part of the criteria for my Illustration 3 class, to post up Illustration-related assignments. I am now taking illustration 4, comics, an independent study in dollmaking, creative writing and poetry. I will try to the best of my ability to document the goings-on of my schoolwork on these various fronts.

edit: broken picture link now fixed.

To start it off: A little one-page comic. The assignment was to follow people and record real-time dialogue, and write a comic with a natural conversational feel. I looked a little like a creepy stalker, hiding hunched behind a bookshelf scribbling away notes as these kids went at it, but I think it was overall successful.