Stomach full too soon
The sky has mooned
And you turned into much more than I assumed
There’s an owl under my lamp shade
Above the sticky phone screen I’m desperately trying to rub clean
It flies at about 6 millimeters taller than patience
A chicken uncooped in my mothers house
Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! This week’s post is late because I spent the entire weekend in National Harbor, Maryland (near Washington D.C.) at Katsucon — a large anime convention — in the Artist Alley selling merchandise of my artwork! It broke my previous convention sales records several times over and I ran out of a bunch of merch designs, so I’m very happy with the results! I also got to network with and meet a bunch of other amazing artists!
When I was in the area, I also visited the Steven P. Udzar-Hazy Center, which is an offshoot of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum located nearby in Virginia where the space shuttle Discovery is on display alongside an SR-71 Blackbird, a Concorde supersonic plane, an X-35B STOVL, and many other exciting civilian and military aircraft! I took lots of reference pictures and even did some on-site sketching to the best of my abilities, though I’m not as practiced at drawing aircraft and I was exhausted from driving all the way to D.C. (with an overnight stop at Pittsburgh) last week.
Anyway, I’m elated that I got the opportunity to do a convention outside of the Michigan-Ohio area for the first time and that I gained so many valuable experiences from it, plus I had lots of fun and made enough money to fund my next art business ventures and pay for a bunch of personal expenses! I’m looking forward to my slate of upcoming cons next month (Anime Milwaukee in, well, Milwaukee at the beginning of the month, Sakuracon in Seattle at the end) and I also hope to do more original design work soon with aircraft as inspiration!
Shot in her bed by police
Her heart fizzled out from loving too much
Many times before going to bed I’ve seen her forgetting my name
I see someone else screening my calls
Answering with one-word messages before I finally find out the inevitable
I’m in the shower and she’s drowning
From her own blood, in a lake
My father is screaming, my sister is crying, and I’m making funeral arrangements
Trying to remember what the six primary seasonings were,
where the red beans and rice recipe was whether or not pattern goes with pattern
I want to record our conversations so I have messages to scroll through but I keep thinking about when I get to the end of them
When no one agrees with me
Or sees my side of things
When she finally picks up I remember
I have to stop practicing for my mother’s death
Hello everyone!
Due to technical difficulties, I am posting this a few days late, but nonetheless, I have fibers for you!!
This week I worked on crocheting a opossum. I am working on crocheting things for myself, as I usually make my crafts for someone else. I thought it would be cuter and silly to work on a crochet opossum. I didn’t follow a pattern for this one, I have just been free handing him as I go. I am stuffing him with fluff from an old pillow that I don’t wan to use anymore. I think that when it is finished it will be super cute. I will upload the results next week!
I started off this little guy with ch 4 (starting at the nose) , joining with sl st to make a ring. I then crocheted 6 sc and then kind of just kept increasing whenever I felt like he needed to get larger around. When I got to the spot where his tail will begin, I started to decrease my stitches until I get a decently opossum tail sized hole. I then front loop crocheted once around, and then went back to single crocheting the rest of his tail. I stopped when I felt it was long enough. I stuffed him so much he’s extremely stiff. Stay tuned for the rest of his transformation this upcoming Friday! I have been working on some really cool fibers projects that I am super excited to show everyone when they are finished.
See you next week!!
Marissa
Hey guys! This week I visited the Matthaei Botanical Gardens with my classmates for ARTDES 364 – Visualizing Science and took a lot of notes on the guided tour. We’re working on a project to revamp the Botanical Gardens’s map, so I made sketches of the general layout and where the different plants of interest are located.
I also took note of some botanical facts that made me imagine sci-fi speculative evolution worldbuilding for my own projects, especially the Indian banyan tree’s ever-encroaching roots that try to suffocate any plants in their path. In my own imagining they become the inspiration for giant biomechanical tendrils slowly engulfing ruins and wreckage from a bygone era.
All in all, I’m really glad that I got the opportunity to learn more about the botanical gardens for various creative projects that I’m gradually working on! Next week I’ll be selling in the Artist Alley at Katsucon in National Harbor, Maryland, so my weekly post will likely come later in the weekend than usual! Have a great week!
Hello everyone,
This week I have been working on exploring sewing through by fiber structures course. I have learned so many new techniques and find the course exciting. Our current assignment, we have been tasked to explore muslin as a material with the machine. I am not the greatest at sewing as I have just learned how, but I am excited about the different possibilities it might bring to my practice.
In my explorations, I decided to work with different techniques such as quilting and creating patches. I plan on completing the rest of my explorations this weekend, including techniques I have discussed in my prior blog posts such as fiber slashing. I really enjoy how the fabric can be dyed to whichever colors I want. I found dying the fabric very time consuming. It takes over an hour all together to measure out the dye formula, and soak the fiber in the dye. It then needs to be hung to dry completely before use. I think that I personally enjoy the way just the plain muslin looks when layered on itself, but I do intend to dye more of my fiber work in the future.
Here are some of my explorations below !
See you next week!
-Marissa
