Homage

I just finished my latest assignment for Illustration class. The prompt was portraits in cut paper, black and white. We were supposed to choose someone iconic, someone people will recognize. If I have done my job well, I won't need to tell you who this is:

Accio Sketchbook

This is my most recent sketch of a friend who was patient enough to hold still for the better part of an hour so that I could draw him. I am quite pleased with how it turned out:

And on a sort-of related note, perhaps you are familiar with the art student owl meme? I came across this one this morning and it just seemed so appropriate. And, as always, I was tickled by the Harry Potter reference:

Sticking it to the Man

I have finally completed a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. It all started when a certain photo studio corporation for which I used to work promised me and the rest of my co-workers commission for our largest sales during the Christmas season on top of our hourly wages. Just an extra incentive to sell more stuff. We worked our butts off off only to be denied our commission thanks to a loophole that corporate conveniently set up for themselves. My co-workers and I were incredibly angry and disappointed.

To make myself feel better about the whole situation and get some risk free, completely legal revenge, I hatched a plan. You see, this photo studio chain offers online coupons all the time. One of these coupons is a free portrait collage (an 8x10 print with multiple photos in it, comes in a variety of formats. $30 value. No purchase necessary. Limit one per day per family). Can you tell I have sold these before?

It is essentially a bait and switch. You get people in the door who think they don't have to spend any money, take awesome photos of their kids, then they say, "Awwwe, well these pictures are so cute I'll just have to get a couple sheets!" Ta DA! We now have your money. BUT you actually can just get the free thing and walk away. In fact, you could theoretically go in every day and get one. Without spending anything. This is really, really annoying for the photographers whose job performance evaluations are based on how much they sell, but for the customers, this is pretty great.

I had calculated that I would have had at least $200 worth of commission coming my way had corporate not gone back on their agreement, so I decided to get about $200 worth of free collages. I would fill the collages with pictures of me doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes. When I talked about this with friends, they generally wanted in on the action, so some collages have other people doing ridiculous things in ridiculous costumes with me.

I have completed my goal. I feel pretty vindicated. Here is the end result:

Please note the bottom middle photo in which Becca is strangling me. Priceless.

The obligatory Harry Potter theme photoshoot. 

Yup I walked to the mall in a cape. I am a true Earlham kid.

Western theme, with a fence obviously.

50s house wives!

Pajama party!

...So I feel like I got my revenge and everything I did was completely legal! ...Except posting pictures of the collages online. Technically I can't reproduce these images because I don't own the copyrights. However, if this company tracks down this blog and calls me out on it, I will be really surprised. I imagine they have better things to do, like finding more ways to suck money out of both their customers and their employees.

Hooray!

Truth

I'm taking a short hiatus from my Ugly Apartments painting to post pictures of my final Harry Potter potion jar. It is Veritaserum, the potion that makes you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This potion makes me wonder how different wizard trials must be from muggle trials. I mean, if there is a surefire way to make people not lie, and not even bend the truth to make themselves look better, then wouldn't that make a lot of trials more clear cut? 

I wonder the same thing about the pensieve (for you non-Harry Potter fans, that is what I imagine to look like sort of a magical fog machine that you can store your memories in. Like an external hard drive for your brain. Combination fog machine and hard drive, hookah and coffee maker!). 

This is a pensieve, according to the Harry Potter movies.

Um, anyway if you can take your memories out of your brain and put them in a magical fog machine, then recall them with a sweep of your wand, and/or allow other people to enter your memories and walk around and relive them sort of, then why not just use a pensieve for every magical trial? The jury could literally weigh one memory against another. However, as we see in book 6, it is possible to tamper with memories, BUT its super obvious when a memory has been magically edited.

But THEN we get into the idea that truth for one person may be different from truth for another person. Is there one universal truth or does each person see the world just differently enough to make truth more of a series of individual observations? And what I don't entirely agree with about the pensieve is that it assumes that memories are static and clear. You can walk into someone else's memory as an invisible third party as it replays like a virtual reality movie. Why would you be a third party in the memory? Why wouldn't you take the place of the person who remembered it? And if you did, wouldn't your experience of the memory be effected by the rememberer's emotions and state of mind at the time? And wouldn't you need to understand their entire life to get the full context of their memory? And don't you find that the way you remember things changes over time? How would that be encompassed in a pensieve?

Oh man, deep stuff, people.................

So here is the Veritaserum jar I made:

I am really quite pleased with the shape, my only complaint is that you can't really read "Veritaserum" on the side because of the way the glaze came out. I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that this potion jar is made of red stoneware whereas the other two were made with white stoneware. I guess I'll never know... because I can't make another one because they closed the Cornell Studio forever. I'm still really bitter about it!

Anywho, here is a closer detail of the lettering:

The "rum" part came out more clear than the "veritase" part. 

Alcohol does tend to make people more honest, I suppose.

The Last of the Cornell Studio Ceramics

Well, it is official: The Cornell Ceramics Studio is being shut down after 54 years of use by the Ithaca and Cornell communities, artists, students, and anyone else who was interested so that they may transform the space into a "multi purpose room." Read: a room that will probably end up with some grungy couches and a broken pool table in about 6 years. There are no other public ceramics studios in Ithaca. I think this will be a huge loss to Ithaca as a whole.

Yes, even after a petition with OVER 1,000 SIGNATURES, many letters on behalf of the studio to the president of Cornell and the Dean of Student Life, and a spirited protest in the rain which featured me on a bullhorn chanting things like, "Make a bowl! Make a pot! Close the studio? I think not!" the higher ups at Cornell still decided to shut the studio down for good.

I am super bummed out.

I went to the studio today to collect what I think (?) is the last of the stuff I made and I am pleased with how everything came out! I have all these new ideas about more things I could make but oh wait... I can't because they're closing the studio to make way for a multi purpose room.

Anyway, here they are!

My mom chose the glazes for this mug with its little bird alighting the handle. I think she has been even more excited than I was for it to get fired! My mom is adorable.

This is the first bowl I have ever made that is is actually big enough to fit a meal's worth of soup.

I added patterns to this little mug using some stampy things I found at Ten Thousand Villages (I threw that picture of me holding them for reference). I am new at stamping wet clay and so I ended up with a very asymmetrical mug but you know what they say; if you want perfect ceramics, go to Walmart.

And below is what I have been referring to as my Wonky Pitcher. It's one of the weirdest things I have ever thrown. It is super lopsided, doesn't pour very easily, and the glaze came out... well, not quite how I expected it would, but the little guy has grown on me. Three cheers for Wonky Pitcher.

The following are my latest MAGICAL CERAMICS!!!

Yes, that is a unicorn mug!

It reads, "Just say NEIGH to people who don't believe in MAGIC."

Look at that glaze! How cool is that?

Ok, and I know you have been on the edge of your seats waiting for these bad boys to come out of the kiln and here they are-- HARRY POTTER POTION BOTTLES!!!!!!

Felix Felicis and Polyjuice Potion!! I also made Veritaserum but it is hard to read and the lid hasn't been fired yet, but when I get it, I'll post it up.

Anyway, to take my mind off of how bummed I am that I will never take another class at the Cornell Ceramics Studio, I started taking a watercolor class at CSMA. Soon to come: a post about watercolors!

And the winner is............

EMILY!!


Emily won my "who can come up with the best reason why Harry and Hermione's faces melted on this bowl" contest with, "Floo Powder Mishap." (For anyone who just tuned in, I am referencing this post) As promised, I am awarding her with a cartoon of herself and the Harry Potter friends!

Congrats, Emily!!!

Side note to all Harry Potter enthusiasts who were considering calling me out: Where Ron says, "Muggle born, you know" I meant to write, "Raised by muggles, you know" because Harry is not muggle born... but I wrote it in pen and by the time I realized, it was toooooo laaaaate!

The Error part of Trial and Error.

Hey friends, I just got two new pieces home from the ceramics studio that didn't go the way I had planned. I had an awesome ceramics professor in college who used to say that clay is a good metaphor for life. I think that's true-- not everything works out the way you want them to all the time. I'm posting photos of these pieces anyway because even if they aren't perfect, they're still kind of cool.

First of all, I made this bird with five smaller birds stacked on its back. Now that I am doing so much throwing, I started missing hand building, so sculpted these little guys and stuck them together.

The glaze did not come out quite like I had hoped, but it started growing on me. I think it sort of looks like the sky, which fits in nicely the bird motif.

Then I took it home, showed my mom, and she promptly dropped it and the tail broke. Oops.

It is a pretty clean break, so maybe there is a way to glue it back together?

I have learned that if you lament about a broken piece of ceramics to an experienced ceramic artist, they will shrug and say, "Make a new one." This is totally different from all the painters I have worked with, who tend to want everything to be just right. I interned with an artist who didn't want me to breathe on her wet paintings. Another artist for whom I interned monitored my every brush stroke on my first day. 

I am not exaggerating. 

I'm sure there are many fussy artists who work with clay out there, and painters who are not so particular, but based on the ones I have met, I think painters could learn a lot from potters. 

....... And speaking of potters, my Harry Potter bowl came out of the kiln as well!

I decorated it based on the test tiles featured in this post.

Ron came out awesome... but unfortunately Harry's and Hermione's faces melted.

It is a sad day in the wizarding world when the boy who lived and the cleverest witch of her age were defeated by a mere kiln and one-layer-of-clear-glaze-too-many (even after Gary warned me not to use too much!). I was thinking that maybe I could just say that it is portraying a moment from their second year, when Ron's wand was broken. Maybe his spell backfired and melted his friends' faces, then Madam Pomfrey would re-solidify them in a jiffy. 

I will draw a little cartoon of whoever can come up with the best story as to why Harry and Hermione's faces melted. Extra points for the cleverest references to the books and uses of additional characters.

HARRY POTTER CERAMICS!

I have recently been re-reading all of the Harry Potter books and it has been one of the best decisions I have made in recent history. I have completely re-kindled my love of Harry Potter and the gang and was very surprised by how many details I had forgotten from many of the books. My middle school and high school self would be APPALLED at how much I had forgotten, but now the whole story is fresh in my mind and the best part is-- IT IS INSPIRING MORE CERAMICS!!! I threw two potion jars on the wheel last week: Felix Felicis and Polyjuice Potion. They aren't out of the kiln yet, but the moment they are, I will post them so fast you won't even believe it! As a side note though, I accidentally dropped the lid to Felix Felicis and it broke. I had to fix it and it is a little wonky. It was ironically unlucky for a Felix Felicis bottle (for anyone who hasn't read Harry Potter, Felix Felicis is the name of a potion that makes you lucky... and Polyjuice Potion makes you look exactly like someone else of your choosing).

I spent Tuesday afternoon at the ceramics studio with Gary Rith, my totally awesome ceramics teacher at Cornell who makes the coolest mugs and teapots and pitchers!! They are frequently beagle or elephant adorned and you can check out his website or blog to see them!! Also his blog currently has pictures of me on it. All the more reason to look at it! Anyway, on Tuesday Gary showed me how to use underglaze to draw on pottery and I practiced on some test tiles which just came out of the kiln and I am SO EXCITED ABOUT THEM!!! I drew Harry, Ron, and Hermione casting spells along with a monster, and Jenny and Aaron from Girrrl!!!

Totally magical!!

A very excited Jenny with a skeptical Aaron.

Also out of the kiln were some more things I threw on the wheel-- They all have kind of a blue/white/green pallet. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

My first lidded vessel! 

Another mini-pot. My dad requested it!

I ate ice cream out of this very bowl just last night! Love it!

Also: I have the email addresses of some important people at Cornell. If you are interested in writing to them and telling them that you don't want the ceramics studio to close, let me know and I will give you the contact info!! Don't let the studio close!!