Trungle of the Jungle

Prints for sale!

2011-12-23T16:39:00.003-06:00

I'm putting up some prints for sale at my website!

New pages up soon!

2011-12-15T11:18:00.003-06:00

Preview images from the webcomic. I've posted up to page three, and page four will be up soon, too!

I've made a conscious choice to include a minimal bit of color into it. I'm pretty adamant about keeping it mostly in black and white, but a few accents give it just the right touch.

New Webcomic!

2011-12-13T00:32:00.000-06:00

Hey everybody!

I've just started a webcomic!
If you liked my art so far, I hope you come take a gander at the few pages I've started so far.

Trungles

Dying Star Series

2011-12-03T13:43:00.001-06:00

I'm an Illustrator!

2011-12-02T01:31:00.001-06:00

I’ve been looking atimages by Harry Clarke and Winsor McCay recently. I always have, but since I’vebeen looking more intensely at Western illustration at the turn of the century,it suddenly occurred to me that I’ve been working differently - it’s informedthe way I lay down a picture. I work traditionally, starting with a gesture,working from observation whenever I can, and finding the way a space existsnext to a space or between and around contours.

Because I am anunapologetically adamant illustrator studying in a Studio Art environment, Iget a lot of flack for being illustrative or missing the point. I’ve had towork very hard in the studio to prove to my professors that, yes, I can DRAW. Ican find a form and describe how it exists in space. I can find planes on asurface and describe it with a stick of graphite. I understand the importanceof figure and ground. I can sight-size a figure better than most of thepainters in my class, and I can do it without trying to editorialize the figurein front of me with unimportant details.

But the second I stepout of the studio and back into my personal work, I am going to lasso thenuances of plane, figure, and ground with a solid, hair-thin ink line becausethat’s the sort of work I want to make. My love of contour has nothing to dowith an inability to communicate visual planes and special relationships - I amabsolutely able.

The former head of thedepartment told me I was producing “bad art” and essentially dissuaded me fromworking this way for almost four years. After some research and reflectivethinking, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not interested in making art;I’m interested in making images. I don’t want to engage the ephemeralideological space between the misogynistic sausage fest of Modernists and thepost-object Art World of the Postmodernists.

I just want to makepictures. I want to make figurative, accessible images. I don’t want to confusethe purportedly unenlightened masses with layers of lofty philosophicalabstraction, nor do I want to speak in quasi-European art lingo to confuseanyone who might not be some sort of pretentious connoisseur.

I am anillustrator, damn it.

Fairy Tales in Dual/Triple Tones

2011-11-14T14:13:00.001-06:00

Later this month, I'll be giving a presentation on sexuality in fairy tales. I'm incredibly stoked, so I went back and did a whole ton of pen and ink illustrations. I'd been looking at a lot of images of sweeping organic forms and line-laden art-nouveau works by Harry Clarke.

When racial and sexual identities team up to kick your butt

2011-11-02T04:36:00.003-05:00

Sometimes, my race and my sexual orientation get together tosmack me across the face in a beat-down I can’t even begin to describe. Godknows I tried, though, but when I couldn’t figure out how to adequately explainwhat happened to me tonight, I figured you just had to see it.

So here’s some background: I’m a first-and-a-half-generationimmigrant Vietnamese Asian American who also happens to be cisgender, male,and, to the most concise generalization of my position on the Kinsey Scale, gayas a maypole. So apparently, that makes any non-Asian guy who wants to date mea “rice queen.”

Let me pare down some of the problems with that. This couldtake a while.

The gay male community is interesting because it carries alot of baggage that few, if any, gay men ever really like to talk about. Alittle contributing factor is the pervasive influence of porn.

So let me clear: porn is fun. I happen to like it, myself –But that won’t stop me from thinking about it outside of the influence of aboner. The odd thing about pornography is that it’s already considered to bethe underbelly of our puritanically-rooted society – so why would anybody stopto reflect and think deeply about… pornography? The truth of the matter is that pornography, as much as it completelyisn’t fun to think about, is where we (as a culture) air our dirty laundry andindulge in them as sexual fantasies. In other words, we can probably name awhole ton of problems in our society if we paid closer attention to porn. At first glance, we might note that all thisporn is being produced for a massive male audience. Men are the ones who tendto fund it, direct it, and consume it. Porn aimed at your average heterosexualmale indulges in inherently sexist themes of power and submission. Already,we’re running into all kinds of male-centricity that tends to exclude a sincereeffort to cater to the needs of women and women’s pleasure. So we’ve got thisbig issue of gender (albeit a cis one). From here on out, I’m going to speakwithin the realms of gay male sexuality, so bear with me.

But we also run into this sort of issue in terms of race asit relates to our sexual fantasies. (Bear in mind that, so far, these are justobservations, so they speak to my own experiences and nobody else’s.)

Where else is it explicitlyacceptable to categorize people in terms of attraction according to their race? It’s pretty much standard to do soin porn! Godforbid a person of color get up on your screen and kill your boner.The default sexual fantasy is a white one. Where will it explicitly state “Thissexual fantasy is for folks who only like white guys?” With little exception,the men in gay porn will be white… unless you cater to a particular niche. Aperson of color who does porn will, more often than not, be serving aparticular sexual fantasy centered around their race. Because of our rathercomplex histories in relation to our discourse on the physical differentiationof people (I’m talking about race, just so I don’t lose you) and the historiesthat followed, we have come to sexualize race. In gay porn, black and latinomen are cast as hypermasculine and aggressive, often pandering to a “thug”fantasy, and Asian men are, by and large, feminized and typically conflatedwith the “twink” body type.

This means that, whether I like it or not, my cisgender maleAsian body, my slight and slender frame and the slant of my eyes, exists in aniche market. To the gay male community at large, I tend not to be deemedworthy of any acknowledgement as a sexual being unless someone has a specialinterest in my type. Unless I fulfill somebody’s sexual fantasy, unless thereis a demand in someone’s mind for my sexual niche, I apparently bear no sexualattraction. And yet, when my race piques someone’s sexual interest in particular,it’s also kind of a problem because it indicates that someone has internalized,romanticized, and sincerely embraced a sexual fantasy conflated with centuriesof Western colonialism and imperialism. This sort of person is derogativelyreferred to as the “rice queen.”

I just can’t win. What is it about the queer community and communities of color that demands that we "reconcile" our identities as though we are not permitted to be our whole selves by default?

And so I’m having just the most difficult time figuring outhow to deal with all this internal racial hurt, and I’m trying to explain topeople what happened and how I felt without going through the last 700 or sowords you might have just read and/or skimmed past to get to this stupidsentence. IT’S REALLY HARD.

And that's the trouble with existing between the lines. I definitely deal with heterosexism and homophobia from a conservative immigrant community of color, sure! We're Catholic, to boot! But, seriously? Who's going to deny that there's just not a whole lot of people of color represented in the gay community.

The fall lineup for 2011 on GLAAD's website might speak to that.

There are 8 LGBT characters who are also black. They're all on Cable. None are on Broadcast TV.

There are 6 LGBT characters who are also Asian/Pacific American. They're all on Cable. None are on Broadcast TV.

There are 5 LGBT characters who are also Latina/o. There are 2 on Broadcast Television.

This means that, on Broadcast TV, there are a couple (like, literally about two) gay characters of color on Broadcast TV out of 23.

So getting back to that image I posted with this little essay: Loren is right. It's really not funny. In making light of that, they'd essentially made light of every instance wherein:

A - Masculinity is preferred as dominant to femininity in a great feat of centuries-old misogyny.
B - Femininity is attributed to a group of people based on their appearance and stature.
C - A group of people is derisively considered feminine and therefore submissive to the group of people conflated with conquest and masculinity.
D - The submission becomes a part of a sexual fantasy with a veneer of a yellow face.
E - The sexual fantasy is legitimized, supported, and perpetuated by a society wherein the people who are conflated with masculinity are the hegemony.

Way to go, you tremendous dickwads. Somehow, you are so ignorant and so flippantly culturally inattentive that you've gone and managed to make light of an incredibly complex cocktail of heterosexism, misogyny, colonialism, and racism.

Coming Out! An audio essay from 2008

2011-10-26T12:29:00.000-05:00

Coming Out!

My senior year of high school, I come out to my parents because I wrote an essay for a class...

And they found it.

And read it.

News! News! News!

2011-10-26T12:12:00.002-05:00

Dear Blog,

I'm sorry I have neglected you for so long. I've been having an affair with Tumblr. For that, I will not apologize.

I have recently rediscovered a passion for pen and ink.

There will be more images posted.

There will be more commentary.

I will rant about all those topics that end up on the cutting room floor of most polite dinner conversations.

In the meantime, I miss you. And you need a makeover. It will happen soon.

Love,

Trungles

National Identity?

2011-07-24T15:01:00.002-05:00

Europe has recently become engaged in matters of national identity. It got to be more than a little tragic.

The conversation regarding the origins of national identity is approached in such a way that narrowly limits an acceptable history of a person in relation to a people. Plenty of people, myself included, were born without a country.

We'll spend our whole lives fighting to prove our allegiance to wherever we have chosen to live our lives and raise our families, and still we struggle to maintain that our citizenship is sincere and hard-earned. It's disheartening to know that acceptance is not the strongest marker of belonging; rather, it is the rejection of others that people seem to believe makes them who they are.

And it's really stupid.

"What is the Proper Role of Art?"

2011-07-21T22:22:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine just asked me this question out of curiosity, and I decided to think about it and see what happens.

I’mnot sure that there is a categorical “proper role” of art because art servesmany functions depending on one’s relationship to the art. I’m going to goahead and talk about it in the realm of visual arts because that’s what I knowbest. Art, in its most broad and general term is, at least to art historians, a“persisting moment in time.” It’s almost as though it lives and breathesbecause art exists in relationship to many things. Its purpose depends on itsmany relationships, and it seeks to be understood.

Thefirst “function” of art, from what I understand, lies in the purpose of itscreation and its relationship to the patron. For the consumer or the patron,art serves certain purposes, and more often than not, it serves to commemorateor prove wealth or influence. In the interest of incorporating human vanity andpride, “commemorate” includes, but is not limited to, memory of the living, thenewly dead, or the long deceased.

Tocommemorate the living, art takes on a role of personal vanity. It isoftentimes created to immortalize one’s beauty, one’s assets, or one’s personalqualities, but the act of using art to commemorate implies that one deservessome small measure of immortality or at least longevity by means less temporalthan the flesh. By the nature of its media and the nature of the patronage, artcan serve to glorify. To commemorate the newly deceased, art might take onsentiment. It is done in such away to honor and to, again, immortalize a personand his or her qualities and personal affectations. To commemorate the longdead typically involves an element of overt historical glorification, in whichcase art can arguably be created to perpetuate and glorify an idea by using animage, in most cases a person, as allegory.

Anotherthing about patronage is that it also implies some measure of wealth. Sometimesart is commissioned as proof of the patron’s wealth, to put it bluntly. It’s areminder of economic status, culture, and taste. In such a way, art is a toolto perpetuate social divisions. There is a particular message or idea that isespoused by the patron that is generally inaccessible, in a deliberate way, tomost others.

Therelationship of the art to the artist is a different story. In the process ofcreating the art, the artist fosters a relationship with the material and theprocess. Artists have to call upon their entire repertoire of skills,painstakingly fostered and earned over a lifetime, to complete a piece of work.That in and of itself implies a history and a previously establishedrelationship between the artist and the art, and it is evident in its creation.Its purpose can be used as a means of personal expression, and it is so alwaysin relationship to the artist and his or her environment, be it literal,figurative, political, psychological, religious, spiritual, inspirational, oreven technical. It conveys one perspective and it will, upon its creation, spurthe existence of many other perspectives with every pair of gazing eyes thatfind it. At the same time, its purpose could be to simply put food on thetable. Sometimes the artist may be using it as a means to criticize thosewealthy enough to commission his or her art. Every now and then, artists createindependently of patronage, and it can really be a testament to the artist’sdisconnect to the world of the patrons.

Wecurrently exist in a world that has amassed a huge collection of art from longbefore our time, and our relationship as viewers to these relics of a differenttime is greatly informed by the fact that they are evidence of what existedlong before us and will, presumably, long outlive us. Even the discourse aroundtemporal arts, such as visual pieces of performance or pieces that decay andfade away, will be recorded and consulted. For just about anyone, to see themis to understand that illusion can be accomplished, and perception can beconveyed so cleverly and elegantly. To an art historian, to see them is to dustoff a sooted window peeking into a time, a place, and a culture we did notwitness.

Artcoyly hints at the artist’s relationship to his or her world and time. What wasthe popular movement of art at the time? Who was the patron? What values did itespouse? What stories does it tell? Is the art meant to support a text or does itexist independently of written sources? Who or what is depicted? What is thematerial of the piece? What is the manner in which the media is applied? Why isthis media or these materials chosen? What sort of prerequisite skills did theartist need to attain before he or she could create such a piece? How did thoseprerequisite skills come to be required or expected? Did people like the piece?Who was meant to see the piece? With what parts of the social strata did theartist identify? Uncovering some of the possible answers to these questionsprovides valuable insight to the nature of both our predecessors and ourcontemporary neighbors.

Sothat was a very long and involved response to a simple question, so here’s myshort answer. I believe that art exists in context, always and absolutely. Itfacilitates one’s relationship to one’s place and one’s time in relation to aplace and a time that may or may not be one’s own. By doing so, art becomes themedium through which we learn to relate to each other, our pasts, andourselves. Art is a means of expressing, but on the other hand –and this is thepart people forget about- art, in a way yearns to be understood. In its ownbizarre and arguably passive way, it encourages us to understand each other.

Aslong as we seek to understand, we will continue to create and interpret art.

Love,

Trungles

Gay Marriage can wait, actually.

2011-04-07T16:29:00.004-05:00

Hey, wow, the title is incendiary!

For those of you who don't know me or know this blog, the title might lead you to believe that I am so kind of anti-HRC homophobe with an agenda that revolves around Palin's incoherently convoluted and non-sequitur rants about the private sector. For those of you who know what's up (i.e., I'm not some gun-toting Tea Party-boy), please try to understand.

There's a little red teddy bear sitting on my bookshelf from the HRC store in San Francisco, where Harvey Milk's old camera shop used to be. I remember picking it up and thinking, "Someday, I want to marry the person I love."

I came home and had a chance to examine my priorities and my life, and then a series of terrible and unforeseen events rocked my whole world (see previous post for one small portion of it). From the dust of the rubble and in the shadows of the ruins of my once monumental hopes and dreams, I could examine the foundations upon which I had built my life and say to myself, "Wow, dude. You're seriously fucked." SERIOUSLY! Gay marriage? Gay marriage is at the forefront of my political activism?

Don't get me wrong, gay marriage is awesome; I still hope for and dream about it. There are just a few more things I want to see happen before I can exchange a couple finger bands and some bad poetry in front of a judge.

Just a little while ago, an incident at my local Perkins resulted in a protest that I couldn't attend, but I heard about it from a lot of my friends. It amazes me that a piece of cloth around one's waist could determine the validity of one's gender so strongly that it could hinder an attempt to find a restroom, but here it was. And this sort of pressure to conform to the gendered expectations of an ill-prepared and unwelcoming society extends to so many places beyond the restroom. In January, Krissy Bates, a trans woman living in Minneapolis, was stabbed to death. As of 1998, Minnesota became the first state to recognize and provide legislation against transphobia in the workplace.

But what about the rest of the country? Being a cisgender male individual, I don't have to worry about those pervasively binding social constraints, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't care.

Recently, a shit ton of social programs, including Planned Parenthood, came under fire in our red political climate. Healthcare legislation continues to be fought over and amended, and people are dying of otherwise livable diseases in the meantime. ADAP could be coming under fire in a second, and that could mean life or death to thousands of individuals in the United States living with HIV or AIDS.

And what about that sudden media attention drawn to the gay suicides over the past year? It's not like this hasn't happened before; gay suicides haven't really been on the news since, well, Matthew Shepard. And we're all sitting around in our liberal complacency and the comfort of our "Minnesota Nice" thinking that could never happen here... but it did. Anoka and Hennepin County school districts saw their own teen suicides, and people are still arguing over whether or not it's okay to protect our children?

And of course, we often forget to hold our own communities accountable for their -isms. The queer community is still, in many cases, transphobic, classist, biphobic, sexist, misogynistic, ageist, and racist. That is my community, and if I care enough to want for it to grow and prosper I know I need to see it in all its failures and shortcomings along with its beauty.

So let's recap.

My trans friends can't find bathrooms, understanding health practitioners, and jobs.

My HIV+ peers and fellow community members need healthcare.

Our queer kids and teens are ending their own lives because nobody can be bothered to tell them that they're worthy of giving themselves a shot at their own futures.

... And my priority is that I just want to get married?

There are more important things to me now. I understand that marriage, being this politically and ideologically-loaded social staple carrying with it centuries of heterosexist cultural baggage, would be a monumental indicator of queer liberation if it would finally be welcome to us. But, frankly, fighting for it now is, in my humble opinion, putting the cart before the horse. I think gay marriage can and will happen here, but I also think that the queer community should be given the space to sustain itself and its community members long enough to afford the luxury of even considering marriage.

Marriage is something I can get to when I'm stable, when I have a job, when I have healthcare and can take care of myself. If that's at the very forefront of the mind of a queer person, then presumably their lives have become more or less stable. And that's a privilege known to so few of us.

Hope.

2011-03-18T00:34:00.001-05:00

I did this piece in pen and ink while sitting at the coffee shop just off my campus. I was doing a little thinking.

My life's been all kinds of weird, lately.

Over the winter, my parents flew my Aunt Yuki over here to the States to get her away from her husband. She'd suffered from an incredible amount of domestic violence for about three decades before she finally decided to leave him this year. She spent Christmas and New Year with us, and before she returned to Japan, I got to spend a lot of time getting to know the brave woman who snuck money out of her personal finances against the will of a fearfully violent husband to keep me, her infant nephew, fed while her little sister and brother-in-law tried, year after year, to get away from the refugee camp to which they'd been displaced in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

That was two decades ago.

With the money she sent back, my parents could buy me formula and soft fruits, and I was a relatively healthy baby, thanks in great part to her sacrifices. She met me for the first time when I was about two, and I still have the little white teddy bear she brought for me. While she staid with us this winter, she was always apologizing for taking up my space. I'm not sure she even expected that I was well aware that I owed her everything. I've never met anybody so oblivious to her own heroism.

Aunt Yuki's visa expired in February, and she moved back to Japan a couple months ago. She's now away from her husband, and in the care of some kind friends.

And then the earthquakes happened.

As soon as I saw the news, I phoned my mom, who told me she and Aunt Yuki had been corresponding regularly. Aunt Yuki was sure to be clutching something solid and stable every time she called over because, as my mom explained, the quakes were still happening. Auntie would apologize in advance just in case she needed to evacuate the building. She says she and my cousins are all safe, but something they're very aware that they'll likely be affected by the nuclear explosions caused by the earthquakes.

She and her friends expressed a desire to send my cousins over here to avoid developing chronic diseases from the nuclear fallout. Aunt Yuki believes, though, that she's too old to really be worth fussing over. Her friends have resigned themselves to dying of disease.

I couldn't stop inking the folds of the fabric around the angel in this image. They kept going and going and going. It felt as though I was drawing every furrow in my brow and every wrinkle to etch itself into my face until the day I died. I'm still worried about everything.

In the coming years, my little cousins will come to live here and become U.S. citizens the way my parents and I did before them. I'll have to coach their English and develop their study habits so they can catch up and keep up with their future American peers. Among their peers may be the Alexandra Wallaces of the world, making them feel unwelcome and misunderstood every step of the way.

In the meantime, I may be taking on far too much in school by way of extracurricular activities. I'll be heading out to San Francisco all throughout my spring break on a service learning trip, exposing myself to LGBT history and volunteering at various establishments. My emotional stability has recently become a little questionable, and I'll be heading into to counseling because I may very well have clinical depression. Oops. Before that, I've got an internship to line up, a few little tasks to complete at my job, an apartment to find, and a semester to finish up.

So I suddenly find myself with a lot weighing on my mind an unexpectedly heavy heart, to boot. I just feel heavy. All the time.

And what I really need is a little bit of hope. Something to lift me up a little higher, make me feel a little lighter in spirit.

And so I draw.

OH YEAH traditional art.

2011-03-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

I'm an idiot and finally figured out how to combine digital and traditional art. Voila.

Things are starting to look more... spiffy!

2011-03-03T16:37:00.001-06:00

Hey folks!

I know it's been ages and ages, but I've been up to some festive work. I just finished this here wallpaper for my website. Go check it out! It's everything I'm on in a nice, consolidated package. One-stop Trungles!

Otherwise, I just got back from ECAASU, so I have plenty of stuff to talk about. More on that soon!

I'm all up on the internet, yo

2011-02-11T11:35:00.002-06:00

Hey everyone! I just got a website through this spiffy little application.

I love getting everything to be as compact as possible, so I neurotically added everything I do onto this little website. I'm sort of nerding out about it a little bit. This is still obviously the spot where everything shows up first, but it's nice to have a nice little area where everything can be viewed at once... we can only have so many tabs, after all.

Everything but homework

2011-01-27T13:45:00.001-06:00

Leather Curtain by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

I've been doing everything I can to avoid my homework, it seems. Sometimes, good things come out of it. This time, I was just ridiculously excited for MvC3 to come out... FINALLY!

I could hardly contain myself. So I got on the fanart wagon.

Doodling again

2011-01-15T13:52:00.000-06:00

Agatha Blooming by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

Euphemisms

2011-01-15T02:39:00.001-06:00

I promise you won't know by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

I use them a lot.

New Year, NEW MISSION, YO!

2010-12-28T22:20:00.001-06:00

First of all, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to everyone!

A new year has begun, so I've decided to spruce up the blog once again. I'm devoting this one to a slightly different mission, and you'll see what it's all about soon enough!

Love,

Trungles

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2010-12-25T10:27:00.000-06:00

I guest-blogged over at KJ's G. O. H. blog!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a wonderful New Year to all of you!

OH.

And here's a new drawing.

energy - lyric by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

Doodle Journal: Weird Shit Happens

2010-12-25T01:53:00.002-06:00

Webcomical

2010-09-06T20:57:00.000-05:00

BFF Sophie and I are working on what we hope to be a regular webcomic. Of course, we still need to work out a load of kinks, but everything should come together as surely as we keep on trucking away.

It's already undergone many visual changes, but hopefully the comic will get itself off the ground this year.

School is starting up soon, but it shouldn't deter us from our process... too much.

Project Awesome conceptual by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

A new look at digital works...

2010-06-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

It's been forever since I really tried anything new in Photoshop, and my only reservation about it is the incredible patience it takes to try something new... at least for me.

Agatha uniform by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

I think it turned out very well! I'm excited to pull some more things together.

This summer, I'll be working on two-and-a-half projects. Two of them are collaborative projects with wonderful friends of mine, which can be found here and here.

Dear Chihiro Iwasaki

2010-05-24T03:14:00.001-05:00

As usual, I've been unearthing as many happy memories of my childhood as I could, and I happened to feel the urge to find a book I once read as a child.

It's called The Crane Maiden, and it's a Japanese folk tale about an old couple who takes in a lovely young girl who turns out to be the spirit of a great crane the old man had once rescued.

I always loved the story because it relates in some way the miraculous nature of parenthood, and it conveys a sense of otherworldly value in the worth of children. The maiden sits at her loom, shedding her feathers and weaving it into beautiful sheets of cloth to provide for her parents: a very eastern notion of "family values," quite unlike the western insistence on the mythical nuclear family as the ultimate example of family values.

Of course, what struck me totally dumb with awe and fascination were the delicately beautiful illustrations!

The illustrator was a world-renowned children's book illustrator in her time, but it seems that few remember her works. Her pieces often depict children, and her playful approach to watercolor seems to say as much as the content of the images she created.

She died of cancer in 1974.

If you want to learn more about this amazing illustrator, much of her biographical details can be found at the Chihiro Iwasaki Museam, along with a nice little sampling of her work, though the images are not terribly big.

It was the unique and spirited watercolors of Chihiro Iwasaki that made me really want to explore more wet media!

Twilit Garden and a Girl by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

Which reminds me, Trina Schart Hyman, another fantastic illustrator I loved as a child and continue to love as a big kid, died only a couple of years ago.

I'll miss her work.

What the hell, Arizona?!

2010-05-05T22:03:00.005-05:00

Hey Arizona by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

In the 1990s, Arizona recognized that its population had a substantial Spanish-speaking demographic for which English was a second language, and the state actively recruited native Spanish-speaking educators to suit the needs of its people.

Today, Arizona has decided to redefine what counts as "its people," and they went about this on every possible level.

At the elementary level, it has decided that teachers with heavy accents are no longer suitable to teach our children.

At the university level, the state has banned ethnic studies

And on top this rump-backwards dip into a culturally underdeveloped age of privileged ignorance that we would like to think of as an archaic past, AZ's governor, Jan Brewer, has decided to spit in the face of every "ethnic-looking" American citizen in Arizona by essentially legalizing racial profiling in Arizona.

We're working under the assumption that progressive-minded individuals are already in a heated frenzy over the racist, ethnocentric, and xenophobic overtones of all this new legislation, but even Jeb Bush knows this stupid piece of legislation is unconstitutional!

And all of this from a state that was actually once a part of Mexico.

The irony is just depressing.

Speaking of irony, Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Heart in Mouth

2010-04-29T11:15:00.002-05:00

I'm going to post this tentatively for the sake of conversation, but isn't it interesting how often we won't say what we mean, but we know exactly what we want? We're weird.

End of the school year

2010-04-21T18:10:00.003-05:00

cliche magic image by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

The school year is finally winding down, and it's been a heck of a busy year.

This summer's projects include some life drawing, getting a camera to take in my larger pieces, and getting started with a little more art historical literature.

In the meantime, I just thought this piece here needed a spot to be published... there's a tragic story of publishing woes behind this one.

Happy springtime! Summer vacation... only four weeks away now...

Sexism in video games FOLLOWUP!

2010-03-17T15:31:00.003-05:00

To those of you still following this (very sparsely and sporadically updated) blog of mine, I've been doing some more thought on the prevalence of gender and sexist visual themes in video games.

Who remembers the first lady of fighting games?

baby chun-li by ~fuzzycotton on deviant ART

Awww, yes!!!

Well, the photo is adorable, but Chun-Li is considered by most fighting game enthusiasts as the first real female protagonist in a video game. She made her debut in Street Fighter II back in the 80s and has been through some pretty clear visual changes. There's some debate as to whether or not she has been deliberately sexualized or not over the years. As far as her sprites go in the original games, the sexual aspects of her appearance seem to be pretty "happenstantial." I only say this because Capcom does indeed play up many of its female characters' sexuality, but in contrast to characters like Cammy or Morrigan, Capcom does a pretty consistent job of keeping Chun-Li in a fairly interesting position.

Ordinarily, female protagonists in video games are created with sexuality at the forefront of their character design, and it is their allure that makes them dangerous. Capcom's "other leading lady," Morrigan Aensland, is a succubus. The sexual implications there are clear. The message that she sends across is "sexualize at your own risk, but don't hesitate to do so," whereas Chun-Li's design seems to exude a presumed objection to objectification.

Whatever the case, I've just gotten a copy of Bayonetta from someone special, and that should give me a whole slew of things to think about.

The Sky is Falling

2010-02-03T00:17:00.003-06:00

Journalism Project opinion piece... SEXISM IN VIDEO GAMES

2009-12-19T23:43:00.009-06:00

The plastic covers on disc containers are annoying. My friends and I had just purchased a brand-new video game called Soul Calibur IV. It had been hyped for ages, and now the only thing between us and the game was this stubborn, unfortunately common clear plastic sleeve that simply would not come off. At length, we stripped the plastic sleeve off the container, popped the disc into the system and skipped through to the start screen. We were terribly anxious to start playing what was hailed by critics as one of the best games of its genre, and when we finally clicked through the character selection into the gameplay, we found ourselves unceremoniously greeted by some of the most gratuitously large sets of breasts we had ever seen.

Last year, Namco, the internationally-renowned video game publisher and developer historically known for the creation of Pac-Man, released the sixth installment of its best-selling Soul series, Soul Calibur IV. It is a three dimensional fighting game praised for its innovative gameplay, groundbreaking graphical advancements, and its inventive cast of characters. Yet even as technically and graphically advanced as the game might be, it is guilty of indulging in some of the most blatant hyper-sexualization of women known to contemporary video games.
In recent years, video games have become a much more substantive form of entertainment among the general American population, and by its thirty-year mark, video games have become more and more universally appealing; women represent 48 percent of video game consumers as of 2009. Why, then, are so many video games saturated with overtly sexist imagery?

Soul Calibur IV, which has been approved by the ESRB for a teen audience, is only one among many popular video games that feature female characters depicted as digital sexual commodities for the consumption of the traditional “target audience,” which had once been males between the ages of 18 and 49. In fact, it features the option of creating an original character based on various preset templates. The creation of an original female character includes a customizable bust. It is extremely common in the conventionally male-centric genre of fighting games, but almost every genre of video game has been guilty of being “curvaceously generous” with their female characters’ proportions.

Because the early generations of gamers are now raising families, video games have been openly integrated into families, and parents have taken issue over violence in video games. But when there is an outcry against the content of games like Grand Theft Auto, everyone seems to have a problem with the shooting, the reckless use of vehicles, the drugs, and the language, which are all fairly common in M-rated (Mature) games of the action genre. Nobody ever seems to notice the element of raping prostitutes. Though the game might not always be visually explicit in this respect, the protagonist does interact with prostitutes. Yes, he pays them; yes, he sleeps with them; and yes, he can kill the prostitute afterward and take back his money. It is only one example of many grievous ethical concessions for the purposes of edgy entertainment, but how much does it really matter? After all, they are only video games.

According to data from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) there is a video game console in 42 percent of American households. With the U.S. Census Bureau counting over 100 million households in the country in 2008, there would be approximately 42 million households with video games. It represents an 11 billion dollar industry and is supported by almost half of the entire population of the United States.

Although sexism in video games can only be dealt with as far as the gender disparities within its home culture, it couldn’t hurt for developers to wrap up their female characters’ bodies as insistently as they plastic-wrap their disc containers. There is no question as to the impact of video games on today’s youth culture. Being that they have become widely available and accepted as a norm in most homes, it is inexcusable to ignore sexism in video games, especially if it can range from male chauvinism to rape.

Dear Corporate America

2009-11-24T17:38:00.002-06:00

Christmas before Thanksgiving by *soulchaserzero on deviant ART

Dear Corporate America,

I am a huge fan of Christmas.

I LOVE Christmas. If Christmas were a comely maiden of unparalleled purity, I would drop on my knees and... tell her I'd totally propose if I were straight.

And I know, dear corporations, that we're all doing the best we can to pull ourselves out of this economic slump, and I am aware that Christmas is the time to get people spending their dough, ya dig?

But please, please, PLEASE, I implore you, save Christmas for December! At least wait until the turkey population takes a seasonal nosedive... at the very least! I stand in protest to every Christmas decoration hung up before the back-to-school specials hit the stores!

I feel as though there's a miniature anachronism in making Christmas come too soon... It dilutes the special Christmasy feelings if you spread Christmas too thin... over three to four months! Christmas should be enjoyed at full potency, packed into a single month when the line between goodwill and consumerism is joyfully blurred, whether one's egg nog has been spiked or not. This might be why we're losing our childhoods sooner and sooner... because Christmas ain't so special when it's four months long!

At any rate, I do so love Christmas, and I urge you lovely dears to keep it potent, keep it packed, and keep it in December.

Yours with love, devotion, and a Bing Crosby song dedicated to you on Kool 108,

Trungles

SPECTRUM: Coming Out Week 2009

2009-10-11T03:04:00.005-05:00

I Wish I Were an Artist

2009-08-22T11:29:00.001-05:00

My school's art department has a very strict attendance policy.

The reason for the strict attendance policy is because the university, as a college in an urban area rife with an incalculable amount of hipsters, acknowledges 2 things: A) Everybody wants to be an artist, and B) Everybody thinks art classes are gonna be cake.

Thing B is the more obvious of the two, and so the department is just trying to weed out the slackers. Thing A seems like a regional... thing. The Midway area is pretty urban, and a city-bound college attracts quite a lot of hipster-types who tend to feel that their purpose in life is to express themselves. That's awesome, as far as I can tell, but what about this romantic notion of being an artist? Why does everybody seem to want to be an artist?

It actually sounds like we can't stand the idea of lacking a voice. We all seem to have something to say, and our generation is always looking for the most interesting way of saying what we have to say. As a result, art has gone through so many interesting transitions throughout history. There was the rigidness of the masters of the High Renaissance, the shallowness of the painterly artists catering to the upper class of the Rococo, and the deconstructionist view of art from the Dada movement... And where are we now?

We're now all so overexposed to art from all different areas of the world. Most of us are now greatly influenced by the art of Japanese cartoon shows, and there are few who can say that they have not tried to render a Disney character or two in their youth. Disney is great, though, because they employ many very inspiring artists, but what about all that anime?

There are how-to-draw books of all sorts catering to all sorts of people who all very different ideas of what art is. Is is appropriate for a book concerning the anatomical detail of the masters to be on the same shelf as an entire series of How To Draw Manga instructional books (ranging from one about chibis to one focusing solely on the lewd hentai genre). Now, every preteen weeaboo can call him or herself an artist because they picked up a book that tells them how to draw popular TV characters. What happens to the kids who call themselves artists because they've studied composition, shape, and taken a more traditional approach to art education?

Everybody says they're an artist. Am I really an artist anymore?

Odosketch!!!

2009-07-19T23:50:00.001-05:00

I just found a website that kept me highly amused for a very long time the other night...

http://sketch.odopod.com/users/1726

Best Friends

2009-06-30T23:29:00.002-05:00

More to come on the subject at a decent hour...

A letter to a dear friend...

2009-06-17T05:21:00.003-05:00

A letter to a very dear friend on the subject of love, life, and adventure.

^_^

Why I do not <3 anime X-core

2009-05-04T01:51:00.002-05:00

I have been cartooning for the paper since the beginning of this year, and it has been extremely helpful to see how I have progressed as a cartoonist. My pieces were highly simplistic and, for some odd reason, featured squirrels all too often. The last issue featuring a squirrel comic snapped me into a realization; I was in a rut, and I needed to get out. One of my favorite means of escaping the rut is to look at what others have been doing. I wanted to get a feel of what people with more experience and technical mastery were doing. Thus, I went and raided the art section at Barnes and Noble.

A couple weeks or so ago, while I was sitting in one of Professor Aida Audeh’s art history classes, the second leg of Western Traditions, she mentioned that the different artistic movements in the final chapters were going to be extremely diverse. I would take a wild guess and consider that one of the reasons for that sudden conception of such a wide range of different approaches to art could be the fact that art was no longer necessarily contained within its own culture. What a wonderful idea! One would think that because so many different traditions could be exposed to so many different people across cultures, the variations of artistic movements would make us even more creative and innovative.

Not necessarily so.

While I was browsing through the art section of Barnes and Noble, I stopped in front of the “how-to” books and heaved a nostalgic sigh. I even found a couple I owned from way back when I was probably eight or nine, and I couldn’t help but chuckle at how silly the art was. Right next to the cute little how-to books of my childhood, though, there was a huge chunk of shelf-space dedicated to how-to-draw-anime books. They were all authored by men and women who had names like Katy and Christopher. Worst of all, their approaches to drawing these deliberately inaccurate and uninspired figures were all identical! I died a little on the inside.

For those still unfamiliar with the concept, anime is a highly formulaic, unapologetically commercial, and notably artistically stagnant form of animated films. Typically, anime is considered to be an eastern creation, specifically from Japan. It actually has its own rich and fascinating history, and the different genres and products of the medium are definitely powerful reflections of the values of its culture and time. Unfortunately, nowadays, the streamlined images and formulaic characters, settings, and storylines are further doomed to become meaningless franchises designed for western consumption.

Now, there on that shelf, was the proof that the globalization of art was rendering the young artists of today creatively stagnant. Remember the aftermath of the iconoclasm prefacing the Byzantine period where every artist’s apprentice did nothing more than rigidly copy the works of artists before him? The images were flat and rather unnatural, and I would have thought that could never happen in this day and age. We have come so far after all, haven’t we? But wait! How many more huge-eyed, hyper sexualized, and impossibly stock characters do we really need? This was not western culture dipping its hands into the creative wealth of another culture. This is us copying the approaches of artists an ocean away from us who were only looking to develop franchises to make a buck. To me, it signaled an international artistic-rut epidemic, and I couldn’t even imagine the sort of immense proverbial raft that could remedy the situation.

I came back to campus more disappointed and rutted than before. As luck would have it, I also had to complete a couple art projects under the strain of the stupid rut. Fantastic. Before coming back into the studio, though, I had to stop by and observe the pieces on display for the Senior Show in the Drew Fine Arts building. I was taken aback at first because, after an unproductive and disappointing trip to the bookstore, I saw pieces with influences that were either entirely personal or unclear to me. Gone were the bug-eyed, flatly depicted characters of anime the middle school kids heralded as art.

Here were works of authentically American art born from within its own culture from relatively young artists who were unfazed by the commercially prevalent franchises of eastern animation. And I appreciated it as such.

Feminism through the ages

2009-04-22T23:44:00.004-05:00

I'm in a Women's Studies class, and there are some kind of amusing things about the feminist movements... especially now that some of the major aspects of them are becoming generational.

What's a generation Y feminist to do?

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT

2009-04-06T05:51:00.000-05:00

www.takebackthenight.org

End Sexual Violence.

Extracurriculars...

2009-04-02T00:44:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, I wish I could be involved in squirrel-hunting.

Due to various goings-ons in the Hamline community, this blog as been somewhat neglected. I swear it's not on purpose!

Hamline's Mascot.

2009-03-12T00:07:00.003-05:00

'Nuff said.

V-day

2009-02-15T14:23:00.000-06:00

God, I hate Valentine's Day.

Looking Back on J-Term...

2009-02-15T13:59:00.004-06:00

Holy moly, J-term is over... and my one qualm about it? The C-Store!

Roomie Love

2009-02-03T23:53:00.002-06:00

This is me and my roomie, David.

Once upon a sweet month of J-term, we both took the same class, so he got to witness my sleep-deprived antics first-hand.

Blah.

Things to Come

2009-01-24T08:21:00.003-06:00

So last night, as odd and as rough as it was in a couple ways, I was undeniably brained in the back of the noggin by the ruthless muse of random thoughts. I felt like I really really needed to write down all the events and everything I felt and all that fun stuff... but then my dad brought me home, puffy right eye and all, stuffed me with chicken, and dropped me into bed, wherein I slept soundly for a whole five hours before I woke up and decided to respond to text messages, like any delirious idiot at three in the morning.

I was kinda groggy and cranky, so I sounded like a major douche in one of them. O.o Whoopsies. I later sent an apology for it, but all that thinking and emoting made it rather difficult to get back to sleep. After unsuccessfully trying to sleep, lying awake for 2 hours, I decided to go make some ramen. At five in the morning.

My version of ramen, however, required eggs because I happen to like egg yolk with my ramen, so I cracked some eegs and removed the whites, dropping them into a small bowl, while I let the watter boil some.

After adding the boiling water to the dry ramen noodle bowl-tray-thingy (for that was what it was), I looked at my little bowl of egg whites, and decided I felt sorry for neglecting it. I order to rememdy the situation, I felt that I should somehow cook the egg whites, so I broke up a couple more eggs and made myself a mostly-egg-white omelette.

So I ate ramen and an omelette. Then I felt all weird again, and I wasn't really into the feeling, so I decided that it needed to go away. I suddenly remembered the cool chocolates my parents bought me this past Christmas, so I checked for them in the pantry and, lo and behold, the chocolates of amazing depression-melting wonders was sitting right there! YES.

So I had some chocolates. But I decided that a nice drink would have to follow up the chocolate. But what kind of awesome drink is tasty enough to chase down those awesome chocolates???

So I made the pomegranate tea my kid brother got for us last time I was home for break.

While sipping the tea was when that damned muse cae up and brained me with the big stick of inspiration! Unfortunately, I totally couldn't do anything because I left all my supplies at school because dad took me and my (no longer) puffy right eye back home right away! DAMMIT.

But then I remembered the tiny little sketchbook I bought from Sophie's Borders bookstore, and everything was better.

Thus, I proceeded to sit down and draw.

I will translate those tiny pages into something scanner-friendly sometime in the future and post them.

So yeah.

I suppose you could call this a lengthy excuse for a long absence of real work.

Sorry, peeps.

Expression

2009-01-12T04:44:00.002-06:00

HAHA

I accidentally deleted the picture from a previous post, so I decided to repost it.

The funny thing about art is that, despite its concrete image, it can mean different things at different times to different people (or the same people, if you're me).

Months before, my intention with the Andersen stories was to convey the persistent frustration of those suffering in silence, unable to cry out for help and helpless to escape the trapped nature of domestic violence. It still reminds me of that particular issue, but now it represents something wholly different.

What are the appropriate ways for us to express our feelings? Are we, like Andersen's Little Mermaid, often muted, our tongues cut out, when it comes to telling the object of our affections, whatever nature that affection may be, how we feel?

College is a lovely place

2008-12-08T07:25:00.002-06:00

Oh dear God, I haven't had decent, consistent sleep in ages.

This blog has been somewhat vacant as of late, so I'm filling in the empty space with a little bit of text right now. At the moment, I should be finishing up the last bits of an English paper that has taken me far too long to write. I tried this thing where I turn off the iTunes to see if I can regain my focus and make myself concentrate, and, lo and behold, it seems to work.

Now, instead of suing such a situation to my advantage and writing up my paper, I am, in no way, making any headway with the remaining page of the paper. Sure, I could get it done right now, but why bother? It's not like anything depends on it...

Actually, yes, yes, my grade depends on it. I sort of really need to do well on this paper.

Okay... off to work again. Tonight, I shall sleep. Tomorrow, I will wake up renewed and refreshed.

Hopefully.

Squirrelz!

2008-11-19T21:51:00.002-06:00

SQUIRRELZ

2008-11-15T14:25:00.002-06:00

This is a little doodle I did for the Oracle this week. I suppose it's just one of those things that can't be helped... but I happen to find these little critters adorable!

Whoohoo!!! Happy Halloween!

2008-10-29T07:14:00.002-05:00

This is a little doodly I doodled for my college newspaper for Halloween...

but they didn't run it.

So I get to post it here! Yay! Perhaps it is the last installment of the anti-emo series...

LOOK OUT!!!

Now I get to work on Amelia and Kayla's continuing storyline comic strips!

The World of Comics...

2008-10-22T02:00:00.001-05:00

Gosh... you gotta remember that comics are among the innovative literary and artistic formats of the modern world. If anybody says otherwise, it's just artistic elitism speaking. Stupid artistic elitists.

Happy Birthday To Molly

2008-10-07T18:54:00.000-05:00

The second installment of Maddie's cultural explorations!

^_^

In the Business!

2008-10-02T22:07:00.003-05:00

So, I've noticed that my last post has caused even more angst than I'd anticipated. Maybe if some would stop being such creepers and following their friends' blog links everywhere, some may be shielded from such personal discrepancies. Ah, well.

Also, a dear old friend of mine had written to me, in a very concerned manner, that it would be unwise to continue stirring the potentially torrential ocean of youthful angst in the way that I have. This fellow is a person to whose counsel I would do well to adhere since his judgment is typically reasonably and respectable by all means.

However, in the wake of some pretty heinously hell-hath-frozen-over expressions of childishness, I may reconsider.

For the amusement of so many Pipers, I've decided to possibly follow through with a recurring character!

Also, to those Pipers who enjoyed it, thank you for the fan-texts, encouragement, and what-have-you. Much appreciated. ^_^

THE VERONICAS

2008-09-27T16:31:00.004-05:00

Last night, I had the opportunity to go see my favorite band ever perform live at First Avenue!

They were touring with Hanson, and I was like, "I better go see them while I have the chance!"

So they're pretty much the most amazing couple of girls ever. They were really nice, very approachable, shook hands with me, and they signed my CD jacket. I totally nerded out beyond all reason. Ah, well. It was cool.

So this one's for Molly... who totally should have been there!

Mermaids

2008-09-18T15:46:00.005-05:00

Of course, being indecisive and horrible at decision-making, I decided to color the mermaids three different ways. I think I'll actually end up doing something of a series based around using single colors in different shades. There's something compelling about the simplicity of a sense of uniformity, but an added element of dimension through the shades.

ARROWWWW SLINGAAAAS!!!

2008-09-17T23:32:00.000-05:00

Love you, too, Molly. ^_^

Happy Birthday to Our Fearless FYSEM Leader

2008-09-15T21:05:00.004-05:00

I feel like such a putz, but it wasn't until I was about halfway done pencilling this drawing that it occurred to me that, no, he did not lose a bet.

I now understand the look.

I totally get the beard.

Storybook

2008-09-11T00:49:00.002-05:00

This one is gonna go into a comic-ish series I'm gonna do, but I like the idea way too much, so...

I'm not gonna submit it to my school newspaper. They're gonna give me ten bucks a piece.

I think this is a little too special.

Fysem Moment

2008-09-11T00:45:00.003-05:00

So, for the matriculation ceremony, we all got these festive little pins, and the university president gave us a speech about squirrels. She actually compared us to squirrels. I thought it was cute until my friend Sydney and I were walking home from the bus stop one day when we saw two squirrels.

At first, Sydney thought they were fighting.

Then, we saw mounting.

Then, we saw very rapid thrusting movements.

We saw squirrel-sex.

Actually, I'm pretty sure we saw a squirrel-quickie.

It was super fast.

And super disturbing.

The first panel is pretty much our entire conversation, like, to the breath.

My First Commissioned Work!!!

2008-09-08T22:10:00.003-05:00

This was a piece that was commissioned to me by someone awesome. I totally sold my first piece.

SCORE!!!

SPECTRUM

2008-09-04T14:34:00.001-05:00

Here is a shout-out to Hamline's LGBT organization...

Spectrum!

Princess Odette..? ODILE!!!

2008-09-03T23:45:00.002-05:00

Anyone remember the Swan Princess? Odile's black dress was pretty kickass.

Loved it.

So, my amazing friend, Sydney, gave me an old Photoshop application... and I love it. I like simple, solid colors... and this is my first digitally colored piece EVER!!!

I'm so happy about that.

Le Petit Prince (again)

2008-08-25T18:56:00.002-05:00

This is the final piece for the "Petit Prince" series. The watercolor didn't show up as well as I'd hoped, but it turned out alright. This is one that is largely based on Bouguereau's depictions of Cupidon, and the Cherubic feel to the picture is added with the scarves.

I'm not sure why I decided to do the whole Cherubic thing, but it turned out alright.

Charlie!

2008-08-23T16:56:00.004-05:00

With the presidential elections coming up this November (for which I still must register to VOTE...), I decided to fall into the hype super-early by posting this here presidential-looking picture. Doesn't he look official? This dude's gonna be a high school junior, and he's his class president. Congrats, Chuck!

Layout!!!

2008-08-23T16:51:00.000-05:00

As long as I've started fresh, I decide to overhaul the look of the blog. YAY, paint job!

It's amazing, I know...

(kidding, but it's nice, right?)

Rapunzel

2008-08-08T02:37:00.002-05:00

So I've been reading my Georgette Heyer novels, originally as a means to escape from my romantic pessimism, but her writing really grew on me. There's this whole idea of patience surrounding the more classical ideas of love.

Two lovers may be torn apart by wars or family altercations or by socioeconomic differences, but there's a willingness in these wonderful characters to wait patiently for the one they want most to come back. Whatever happened to that sort of fidelity?

True monogamy doesn't really happen anymore... but it can hardly be helped. It's most practical, after all, to keep one's options open. We're so used to having options to explore, and decisions to make. Constantly, we make decisions out of a plethora of plausible options without a second thought. Options become a sort of second-nature idea to us, but were we ever meant to be able to experience so many options?

I only wonder because it seems as though, no matter how easily we can pick from our options, it always hurts us to be considered a debatable option by someone else. In turn, we learn, through bittersweet experiences, to make others into our options so that we could do without them if we have to.

I always thought love was worth the risk of getting hurt. Isn't it love when one feels as though one won't mind getting one's heart mangled? I'll get hurt over and over until I find it, I suppose... so long as I maintain that mindset.

Here is a Rapunzel, waiting for her prince to come back. She'll keep waiting and hoping until the day he finally calls down her hair and climbs up her golden-yellow locks to greet her with a kiss and a hope for liberation. Are we willing to choose one special person and wait only for him? Would Rapunzel have waited if she was completely void of options?

I wonder if Georgette would have anything to say about it...

Damaged and Suffering in Silence

2008-07-31T23:59:00.003-05:00

As some of you may have noticed, my dear friend Molly and I both share a common passion for addressing issues of domestic violence. I've chose a visual medium and called it the "Suffering in Silence" series, while Molly has chosen poetic literary approach.

I've noticed, though, that we tend to address the physical abuse more readily than the emotional abuse. Couples often come together so closely that they'd have confided in each other weaknesses that, when exploited, renders each other utterly vulnerable.

One of my favorite R&B artists of all time is a big advocate for the awareness and prevention of domestic violence.

"Rain on Me" by Ashanti

The bottom video is her live performance... much shorter... and comes after an odd interview?

Fresh Start

2008-07-29T11:50:00.002-05:00

It feels like it's been forever since I last posted a real, substantial post, doesn't? For the past four months, I'd been wrapped up in a load of personal projects that would never be revealed to the vast majority of viewers. Since the private, intimate nature of those projects are no longer applicable, they may eventually trickle their way onto this blog. In fact, there are quite a lot of them, too.

Also, to mark the return of myself as an artist, a whole person, and a naïve individual who will continue to learn and grow (heck, maybe I'll even flourish!), I'll be doing some different things with my work. No drastic changes so far, but look forward to some new stuff in the near future.

All will be well.

New inspiration!

2008-07-23T07:47:00.006-05:00

The end of a cycle

2008-07-19T18:37:00.002-05:00

These past few days have been marked with being a little more temperamental and prone to emotional outbursts than usual. Typically, I can squeeze some great pieces of art out of that, but, recently... no such luck. I wonder if anybody's got any creative-block-busting advice to share out there. the general sense of lethargy that accompanies the summer months is absolutely gripping, and people tend to grate on one's nerves, as well.

Forgive the lack of new art for the time being. In the meantime, Molly's got some wonderful new work posted.

Check it, yo!

Romantic Moon

2008-07-03T12:45:00.002-05:00

This is the illustration that was done loosely inspired by Molly's poem, "Connections."

It's long overdue, really... but I drew it, scanned it, and saved it quite awhile ago. ^_^

It's nice that it's finally up, though.

Vasilisa the Beautiful

2008-03-23T22:03:00.004-05:00

My favorite Russian fairy tale! Vasilisa the Beautiful... Any fairy tale that prominently features Baba Yaga is a cool story, in my eyes. The little doll is the gift of Vasilisa's mother which delivers Vasilisa from the clutches of the Witch. The glowing skull fence-post is the gift of the Witch, which delivers Vasilisa from a life of domestic abuse. In the story, the skull incinerates Vasilisa's stepmother and stepsisters by glaring at them. The sash is Vasilisa'a gift (a knack for needlework), which, in turn, is used to make a gift for the Czar, who, in turn, makes Vasilisa his Czarina.

It's really a beautiful story, and one of the best illustrators of all time, Ivan Bilibin, did the most well-known illustrations for the story.

Enjoy!

Forgiveness

2008-03-23T16:51:00.003-05:00

Happy Easter!

Since today is Easter for Christians everywhere, I thought it appropriate to appeal to those more devout in this particular Abrahamic tradition. Of the three Abrahamic traditions, Christianity is the one to really advocate sacrifice for moral retribution in the death of the founder of its faith.

Yay for the historical and religious aspects of images and icons!

Now, in other news, I don't want to really call this, or the ones to come, paintings. They're actually drawings that have been colored in, to an extent, with watercolors (courtesy of my high school art department... thanks Ms. G!). Even so, I got to experiment with shade and color-mixing within a medium with which I was already comfortable.

It turned out rather pretty, though. This is one of three pieces done for a band concert this past month. I really gotta start charging people to use my work... Ah, well. We'll do that later!

A Portrait of the Mermaid

2008-03-12T21:47:00.004-05:00

This is the final piece to The Little Mermaid.

Her portrait seems a little sad, doesn't it?

Man, that was a depressing story to illustrate! But I learned a lot from Hans Christian Andersen. He incorporates so much into a little children's story! I never would have thought that such a classic fairy tale could include themes of unrequited love, sacrifice, personal suffering, selflessness, sexuality, and determination.

It's just a suggestion, but I think everyone should go back and rediscover their fairy tales. There are lessons to be learned and themes ripe for the grasping, if and when one is old enough to understand.

The End of the Ocean, Into the Sky

2008-03-12T19:05:00.003-05:00

The tragic love story of the Little Mermaid comes full circle!

The prince is eventually engaged to a princess from a foreign land. He thinks of the Mermaid as nothing more than his pet, a welcome companion of sorts. Heartbroken, she weeps into the sea.

On the night of the wedding, her sisters come to the surface of the ship. They present their sister with a knife forged by the Sea Witch in exchange for their hair. The Mermaid must stab her love through the heart with this knife, and let the blood trickle over her legs, transforming her back into a creature of the sea. She may then rejoin her sisters in the ocean. She could go home.

She silently enters the bedchamber of the newlywed couple, and she takes one last look at her beloved prince. She lowers her eyes, letting them fall upon the knife in her hands. She sighs.

She cannot kill him.

Instead, she flings her human body over the side of the ship, knowing full well that she will drown, and knowing, with even more painful clarity, that her body will become one with the sea. She would cease to exist, fading into the sea foam, for mermaids have no souls.

A suicide.

Her sacrifice, however, earns her the chance work toward attaining an immortal human soul. She becomes a Daughter of Air, and she flies throughout the world, doing good deeds to gain her soul.

The next Mermaid installment.

2008-03-02T21:28:00.005-06:00

After her tongue is cut off, she gains her legs. When her tail splits into two legs, it feels like a sharp sword is cleaving her delicate fish-tail in two. Every step she takes upon the land will feel like a thousand knives jabbing into the flesh of her feet, but would she walk out of love for her prince?

Walk? What a joke!

She'll dance for him.

She'll dance until her feet bleed, but she'll keep dancing. She'll do anything to see him smile, and she'll endure a thousand times the death of Snow White's stepmother. She'll dance in those red-hot iron shoes until she dies. She'll do it for him.

But every smile that possesses his lips is not of the right love for her. She wants that love. But she'll never take it for herself. She wants him to love her back. She wants for him to offer his heart to her.

She has sacrificed her homeland, her pride, her voice... all for him. And she'd willingly do so without letting him know what she has done. Will he ever know? She has no choice.

She must keep dancing.

Gosh, I love that story.

Sacrifice

2008-02-17T00:12:00.002-06:00

The Little Mermaid sacrifices her greatest gift, her tongue, only to be able to gain the chance to be with the prince in her dreams.

Don't we all?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO CORINNE!!!

2008-02-13T16:33:00.003-06:00

This is the second doodle from my children's story.

Dedicated to a certain Corinne on her birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Tongue loss

2008-02-07T14:55:00.001-06:00

This was the drawing that started my love affair with pen and ink. My teacher tells me that my technique is very unorthodox. I'm not quite hatching, and I'm not quite stippling, either. I did stipple in some places, but only for shade. Ah, well. The rest of this series is coming...

The Little Mermaid!

An evil prettiness...

2008-02-06T18:37:00.001-06:00

Also modeled after the same sort of fair-skinned, dark-haired lady... this one's sort of an arch-typical villain of fairy tales. This one seems particularly young. She also turned out a lot friendlier than I'd hoped. Oh, well. It's leaning more along repetition of design rather than straightforward rendition, anyway. Perhaps Snow White started heading down the wrong road. Maybe she hung out with the wrong crowds or something...

Who knows?

Children's Story?

2008-02-05T16:25:00.001-06:00

This little doodle eventually turned into the inspiration for a children's story for my Creative Writing class. It was about this little angel who helps a bear find true love. Aww...

I dunno if you want to sigh and giggle or just keel over and blow chunks, but it's cute, right? It came out of my head, anyway.

APPRECIATE IT!!!

heehee...

Coffeehouse 2008

2008-02-04T23:17:00.001-06:00

This is for a few props from the school's coffeehouse production. It's the program of the Bearded Countess!

Coffeehouse is "The Good Doctor."

KNOWLEDGE BOWL

2008-02-04T22:38:00.002-06:00

Mr. Rehfuss will be pleased. I promised him this thing for the team about two weeks ago!!!

It's finished, now... FINALLY!!!

Valentine's Day Fun.

2008-02-03T12:36:00.001-06:00

This is me being bitter.

Valentine's Day fast approaches...

2008-01-31T19:50:00.002-06:00

This little piccy-pic-picture is the one I completed for the school newspaper's Valentine's Day Issue advertisement. It was for "Letters to Cupid," an idea from the newspaper to collect and publish small love-notes from people to their loved ones.

It was a sweet idea.

In fact, it was so sweet that I had to personally sift through a bunch of mushy letters to see what people wrote! Heeheehee...

Hey! I'm an editor! I have the privilege of being nosy.

^_^

The Very Beginning

2008-01-31T19:48:00.000-06:00

This is my first post ever!!!

Goodness, I'm excited. I'd always wondered how I'd go about doing this, but It was a lot simpler than I'd realized. I suppose this is where I'd spend my spare time... when I procrastinate on homework and such. With the Senior Slide starting for me, I might as well keep a blog of my developments!