Tag: art

Fiber Fridays #6 : Sentro Knitting Machine

rissaw Leave a comment

Hey everyone!

In order to complete my Christmas gifts for family members this year, I invested in a Sentro knitting machine. This is going to be my honest review of the machine and what it can and can’t do.

I purchased the 48 needle machine knowing that the majority of the crafts I would be making for Christmas would be using the tube setting. This ended up being a really easy and intuitive setting on the machine. The machine has little suction cup feet that will keep it planted to the floor or a counter top while you crank the handle. I was able to hang out with my partner and watch television while I worked.

I used a thicker acrylic yarn which the machine seemed able to turn into a really pretty knit fabric. When i had attempted to use a finer self-striping yarn (which the machine advertises that it can handle) the stitches were much too far apart for the fabric to be usable. When one uses yarn that is too thick for the machine, the hooks will get caught on the yarn, causing the user to be unable to turn the handle. When this happens, there is damage occurring to the handle. It is important to pick a weight of yarn that will work well with both your project and the machine.

I was able to create many hats that my family members seemed to love which this machine. When I had ordered the machine from amazon, it came with four different sized puff makers, a few skeins of yarn, a crochet hook and a few darning needles.

This machine sells for around $50 and is a good investment if you see it as something that you might use often. Keep in mind the yarn weight restrictions and make sure to pick a a machine that has the right amount of needles for the types of crafts that you would like to create.

I personally really enjoy it and think it makes crafting really efficient and more relaxed.

I hope this review helped anyone in their decision!

See you next week,

Marissa

Industrious Illustrating #52 – Experimentation

Robin Leave a comment

Hello, and welcome back to another week of Industrious Illustrating! It’s now 2024, which opens up a lot of new possibilities and directions for the rest of the year. That means I want to highlight a few drawings I’ve made recently that are more experimental or different from what I usually draw.

This was more of a graphic design-esque drawing I made for some zippered coin purses that I ordered from a supplier during a sale depicting a plastic file, two different types of plastic nippers, and two hobby markers that would all be common tools for building model kits. I wanted to go for something simple yet bold, as my usual style focuses a lot on details and elaborate painting.

This, meanwhile, is a quick digital doodle of the cell towers disguised as palm trees that I saw all around the Los Angeles and Orange County areas when I was visiting family there over winter break. I wanted to convey the feeling of driving home after a long day and realizing something is slightly off with one of the freakishly tall palm trees lining the freeway. I also wanted to free myself from needing every drawing to be highly polished, so I set myself a time limit on this one and stopped drawing once the 20 minutes was up.

That’s all for this week, but I want to wrap things up with a quick question. What ways have you personally experimented with your artwork recently — and if not, how will you experiment with it in the future? I’d love to hear about it!

Industrious Illustrating #51 – 2023 in Review

Robin Leave a comment

Happy holidays! I’ve been alternating between seeing my family, vacationing, and making art during break. Something I wanted to share with you guys before the end of the year is my 2023 art summary:

Template made by @Taxkha on Twitter/X

I tried to pick from a variety of art styles/subjects I drew this year to represent how I’ve progressed as an artist, as well as how my thoughts have continued over the course of the year across each month. It’s pretty obvious that I’ve been drawing a lot of mecha lately, so I’ll likely set aside some time to draw humans and furries next year more often.

Some notes: I had the hardest time picking out a single piece in July, August, October, and December to represent my art progress, as I had so many good pieces to pick from for those months. Meanwhile, February, March, September, and November were relatively easy to pick from as I hadn’t finished as many pieces. Not coincidentally, those were also mostly the months where I was starting new semesters of college and therefore had less spare time/energy to spend on my artwork. And in November’s case, I had two cons back to back that month and also had to deal with semester project deadlines creeping closer ahead of the end of the semester.

In terms of what I want to do next year art-wise, I do want to keep giving my follower/customer/client base what they want — which is largely fanart and acrylic charms — and make great sales online and at conventions, but I also want to do more original art and make my portfolio more solid to apply for well-paying art or design gigs. There’s only so much time I have in the day and year to make both of these aims happen, of course, but I am enrolled in a scientific illustration class next semester to make the second aim more achievable. I’ll likely be posting assignments from that class next semester as I try to strike a balance in this column between art business topics and talking about my art practice itself.

That’s all for this week, and I wish all of you a happy and restful holiday season!

Industrious Illustrating #50 – Autumn of Artwork

Robin Leave a comment

Hello! It’s been a while since my last post — I ended up more busy with finals than I expected, and then I threw myself into making more artwork right after I finished my last final project. This entire semester I’ve been writing how-to guides and overviews of art business-related topics, but I think it’s about time I went back to talking about my own artwork for column #50!

Since I didn’t take any art classes this semester (unless you count Intro to UX), all my artwork from this semester is personal work or commissions rather than academic work. Most of this artwork was specifically for prints and small merchandise that I could sell at conventions, sometimes of original ideas (e.g. a fat squirrel wood pin) but mostly fanart of existing media properties. Because of how much of my time was taken up by programming/website design classes, I didn’t make as many fully rendered paintings as I would’ve liked and focused more on simplified artwork that I could finish in one or two sittings. I think it says a lot that my artwork output from November to today (mid-December) looks something like this:

Even then, I’m still overall proud of how much progress I made this semester both in terms of developing my art abilities and my business. I think my rendering has made significant and visible leaps above my artwork from last year, for one thing, and I’m getting better at making my artwork look more appealing from a design standpoint.

I’d like to highlight that the one original character piece I drew this semester (besides artwork for Flamechaser that I’m not posting publicly yet) was this piece I drew for Digipaint’s Fall 2023 zine “Dreams and Nightmares”, which will be printed next semester:

It features Wenet Tozawa (purple-haired girl) and Rashida Kuromiya (pink-haired girl) intertwining their fingers through a plane of water. This piece is supposed to represent the feeling of seeing a familiar face in a dream and reaching out toward them.

I personally really enjoy drawing my OCs and would like to make more artwork of them, but I also want to make a lot of new merchandise designs before the convention season hits again next year, and my energy and time are both very limited… I applied to a bunch of major conventions happening next spring/summer, so I’ll probably be discussing anime convention application results next semester!

I may or may not be making more posts over winter break — it really depends on whether or not I have anything to talk about. If I don’t, I’ll still be posting next semester anyway, so see you guys soon!

When my legs become the white noise crinkling from the tv in a storm

Mattie Grace Levy Leave a comment

This is where my voice is 

Socotra coffee house is a sea of color

And when I order my small adeni chai I feel at home in a language I don’t understand

My heels hanging on to a metal seat frame 

Typing busy bees, the meaning of indeterminancy, and complaints of capitalism

“And when you cross this divide, you’ll get what we’ve all been denied” 

I call my mother because I’ve finally found the right line

Note from the poet:

This is the first poem in the new Written in red series, which are poems focusing on the personal, creative, and political

Mixed on Campus #16 – Alice Conner

Alice Conner Leave a comment

Name: Alice Conner
Mix: Japanese & White-American
Major & Year: Industrial Engineering; Junior

Q: How has being mixed affected your campus experience?

A: My racial identity and the racial/ethnic identities of other mixed people are often scrutinized by others. People choose to accept or not accept my racial identity based on when it is convenient for them. Constant scrutiny on my appearance and the validity of my experiences is alienating, exhausting, and psychologically distressing. How you look is not a choice. Before joining the student organization Mixed@Michigan, I did not have the vocabulary to defend myself and other mixed people. People did not listen to me until I educated myself, even if all I learned were the “proper” words to explain what I already knew was true. Mixed people should be heard even without statistics and well-spoken words.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about the mixed experience?

A: I believe a lot of the prejudice towards mixed people is a result of ignorance, which is why it’s so important for mixed people to be able to speak about their own struggles and experiences. I want people to understand that the mixed experience is a real lived experience and not just an interesting debate topic. I’m tired of hearing arguments on whether or not a mixed person is allowed to identify with or represent a specific racial identity based on the percentages of their racial makeup and opinions on what the person looks like. How a mixed person is perceived by others will depend on the mixed person, the person perceiving them, AND on the context of the situation. In the end, monoracial people do not have authority on how a mixed person chooses to identify.

+1: Mixed people are not buffers between different racial categories. People should not be measured and judged based on their perceived proximity to whiteness. Oppression is often discussed in binary terms (a person either experiences it or they don’t), but reality is not so easily categorized. Mixed people are used to this idea– they are good at tolerating contradiction and ambiguity.

Q: What is your proudest moment?

A: I’m very proud of this project. What I wanted to do with Mixed on Campus was provide other mixed people with the opportunity to speak up about things they might not have been able to before. I’m very grateful for all the responses I’ve received and the opportunity to use my platform to provide a voice to the mixed community at this university. Mixed@Michigan is a club in which we are bonded not through a specific racial or ethnic identity but because we have all experienced what it means to not fit into the monoracial paradigm of racial purity that society expects. We are able to support each other and provide a safe space free of judgement and questioning. There is so much diversity in experiences within the mixed identity and I wanted to be able to show that by providing other mixed people with the chance to tell their story.

Mixed on Campus was inspired by the Humans of New York project. The purpose of Mixed on Campus is to give a voice to this university’s mixed community and shed light on its members. Being mixed means to be multiracial, multiethnic, and/or a transnational adoptee. Through Mixed on Campus, mixed students have the opportunity to have their portrait drawn and share their experiences!