Beautiful Things

These are some beautiful things I saw a Barnes & Noble today that I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy me judging books by their covers:

I really like this sketchy style that has been big with journals lately. I like more realistic sketchiness more than this, though.

I WISH I could buy this. It’s pretty much awesome.

Also, I absolutely love all of Barnes & Noble’s classics that are designed like this. I was going to buy the Jules Verne compilation today, but they didn’t have it in stock.

Aside from having a horrible title (“Aurorarama”) this book looks awesome. I literally only picked it up because the spine’s awesome design caught my eye.

This is the inner cover of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales compilation from the fancy B&N classics. I want to die.

I love these Shakespeare publications. None of them are actually white, but slightly off-white to match the color of the letters. It’s great.

Another beautifully laid out Shakespeare publication.

I bought this tea today with a giftcard I received for Christmas. I’ve always wanted to get one of these teas because the tins are amazing. Also, it smells SO GOOD.

There Must Be More to This Provincial Life

Everything is converging! This is going to mostly be a post about continuing and unfinished art projects.

Here I am, two weeks left of this quarter. I’ve been in Austin for 3 months, I’ve gotten a job but it hasn’t started yet (gahh!), and it’s finally cold outside. I’ve got lots of projects in the pipeline, but no money (ehh) and Saturday is cookie day! (yess!)

I’m currently working on a painting for Katie, and one for Marissa. Katie’s is going to be a fantasy-themed painting, and I’m really excited about how it’s going. Marissa’s is going to be something fancy saying “Am I lost, or just less found?” I also bought a giant canvas (2′ x 4′) to paint with something. I had an idea, but I’m not sure about it now. I wanted to paint a scene with really tall birch trees with fall leaves on a hilly landscape. And of course, in the tradition of landscapes by me, there would be mountains in the background. But what else is new. And I considered putting a lion in it, but again; what else is new?

Other than those, I just finished an assemblage thing with leaves and sticks and an old textbook I got from Goodwill called “Morphology of Plants,” that I’m going to sell at a show (hopefully) at school. I want to do two more similarly with two other textbooks I got called “Advanced Mathematic Engineering” which I would make look kind of steampunk-y and “The Science of Gemstones.” I also started a painting of one of the photos from the glow face paint shoot Eric and I did a few months ago. I’m not sure if I like it though. It’s on loose canvas and it’s started buckling.

I need to make cookie dough for Saturday! My mom asked me to make all the dough that needs to be chilled the night before so that it will be ready on Saturday. Good gravy do I love Cookie Day.

Some Big Art

Click on the thumbnails to see bigger sizes and some info about each. Let me know what you think!

New Fields to Explore

Hello, all!

I’m enjoying the speech bubbles that appeared on my bulletin board after the crepe party.

Today is day one of no facebook for all of March. It shall be interesting. I’ve never done this before. But I get ahead of myself: I’ve felt convicted lately that I spend entirely too much time wandering around facebook. I seriously have, lately, been just doing nothing for hours on facebook when I have plenty of other things to be doing.

Anyway, I discovered something wonderful today! You can download free brushes to use in Illustrator! ahhh. They are amazing. I got some that look like watercolor streaks and markers. I also found a whole bunch of free stock vector files. Here’s an example of the wonderful brushes:

Needless to say, I am excited to get to use them for projects.

I’m about halfway through a book that Molly lent me, The Church Can Change The World, by Jimmy Siebert. It’s very, very challenging and a great read so far. It’s encouraging also, I’ve realized my neglect and underestimation of prayer. (Mark’s sermon on Sunday helped, too. He talked about how we are not supposed to be afraid to ask God for things, which is also something R. J. Foster talks a lot about in his book Celebration of Discipline. He points out that “Perhaps the most astonishing characteristic of Jesus’ praying is that he never concluded by saying ‘if it be thy will.’ Nor did the apostles or prophets when they were praying for others…there was evidently no room for indecisive, tentative, half-hoping, ‘if it be thy will’ prayers.” Of course Foster says there is a proper place for those prayers, but yeah.) Goodness that was a long aside.

Also, I just listened to She Must and Shall Go Free all the way through and actually enjoyed it. So there we go. haha. Also, what’s the best Sandra McCracken CD?

More on Thinking Styles and Synesthesia

Bear with me! This is me working out how my brain works, ha.

Sometimes I feel the need to belt a song out as loud as I can, and if
I don't my stomach gets all into knots. I think it can be attributed
to me feeling a strong emotion about something.

Today Pastor Mark's sermon was about love. This is a subject I feel
very strongly about. I spent the entire sermon wanting to sing an old
song my mom sang when she was in the choir called 'Only Love.' (I also
really wanted to sing Your Love is Strong, Your Love is a Song, and
Love's Going To Last) But I spent the entire sermon feeling off
because of the response I was having to the subject. I wanted to be
able to express how I felt about the subject be singing any of those
songs at the top of my lungs, then I probably would have felt better.

This leads to a topic I posted about a
long time ago about thinking styles and synesthesia (which is
basically the connection of two unrelated senses in the brain, i.e.
hearing colors). I have come to the conclusion that I think very much
in sights and sounds, never in words (or should I say written words, I
hear the words I'm thinking or I literally see the text of the word in
my head, whereas my brother, AJ, thinks more in terms of information.)
I think that probably the only reason I can write poetry is because of
the rhyming aspect, because I hear the words being spoken in my head.
I've never been very good at writing an eloquent essay unless I have a
sort of writing style in my head to follow. Most of my sentence
structures I use I have stolen from sentence structures I've heard
repeted a lot around that time.

How does this description me myself differ from your thought style?
This subject intrigues me!

Sine Wave

Today when I signed up for my classes, I wasn’t thinking and scheduled one on Thursday evening, which means I’ll have to miss most of Throwdown starting the week after camp, because the Art Institute starts on July 13. But I’m still excited to be starting classes soon!

Tomorrow I have an interview for a job at the Container Store that Taylor’s mom has helped me get. We’ll see how this plays out, because the job is from 5 to 10 am in the morning… and I’m definitely not a morning person. haha.

Random observation: I feel like a sine wave. Up, Down, Up, Down.

What a nerdy way to put things.

oh, and, 3.0! I heart sideways texting. Riley’s right. I’m more excited about being excited than anything else. haha.

Random things I’ve been pondering:

1. I think I focus better when someone is speaking when I have my eyes closed. I’m too much of a visual person to focus on what a person is saying when they are wearing clothing with weird patterns or have a weird body type or something. I’m always trying to figure out how a clothing pattern repeats or where lines on something would meet if they extended farther.

2. I very rarely do things accidentally. Like, I pay attention to how I dress so much (and how other people dress) that it’s more work for me to try to not think about what I’m going to wear than to just think about it.

3. I’m fairly certain I will never be able to play the guitar very well. There are too many places to put your fingers and they aren’t grouped visually or anything like on a piano.

Apparently I’m a visual freak. Well, welcome to my life.

ps – my trial version of Adobe Fireworks CS4 expired.

Something I Found; Something I Should Remember