Saturday Night's Alright for Blogging

This week was so loaded with extra challenges - I didn't really sit down to read emails until Friday night. And here we are, it's Saturday night... actually, Sunday morning... and this is my blog report for the week.

The big deal this week was the Pecha Kucha on Tuesday. That's an interesting idea of showing twenty slides on a topic, for 20 seconds each. Absolutely crazy and nerve-wracking, but now that I am on the "other side" - it was kind of cool. And I learned a lot from the other students.

My topic was "Zentangle" - of course, it should have been fairly easy. But not crammed into 400 seconds! The real trouble lay in having too many other things all headed on a collision path with Tuesday. It wasn't enough to be panicking about having to give a presentation in front of the class... nope, I was also worried about a phone meeting with the GAL, an overload of homework (100 drawings due Wed., too many pages for the lettering assignment, color trapping assignment (turned out it's due next week), a comic page about an intense emotion, a bunch of emails I couldn't take time to answer, an enormous bill from the IP lawyer, and some rather disturbing things I learned about my books in foreign countries - I discovered this while researching the Pecha Kucha topic. Oh yes, and I met a "guy" last weekend. That last item was a good thing, but added to the stress.

So, by Tuesday... I was in full blown panic attack mode. Which is kind of ironic as I had chosen "Panic attack" as my intense emotion. That comic page was the only part of my homework that was complete by Monday.

Here are the inked sketches - and you can see some of the lettering homework in the background. The lettering was very text heavy and boring to do.

And a few close-ups in progress...

After I'd finished the gray marker work, and scanned the art - I decided to remove the upside down girl in the last row. The critique went pretty well. Everyone got the emotion except the second panel was interpreted as the items flying OUT of my head, rather than IN.

If you want to know how I was feeling on Tuesday? That's it, right up above. I wish I could say that the panic cleared up quickly and disappeared by the time the presentation was over. But it held on through the rest of the week. Kind of a low rumble in my head and body. Between extreme lack of sleep and not being able to eat properly... I actually lost four pounds. I don't recommend this as a diet plan. I feel pretty rotten even now.

The lettering homework was a long scene from the movie "Double Indemnity" - an old black and white thing. I looked it up on YouTube, then did a search for typography from film noir movies. I found some movie credits that looked like how these characters might speak - and made an alphabet from the credits.

The second half of that class was the best. I finally was able to relax a little. We spent the entire afternoon inking. First we did a Pogo strip using a brush...

Then we did some Jack Davis (from Mad Magazine fame) Monster card art, using a dip pen. I was only able to finish one monster (Dracula) since they are so detailed. We work on "blue lines"- the artists' original work is printed in blue. Those lines won't reproduce when scanned or copied but they give us excellent guidelines for practice.
I preferred the dip pen.

Thursday's visiting artist was Glynnis Fawkes.

I found her talk fascinating - she's an archaeological illustrator! She draws the artifacts found on digs and has done a lot in Cyprus, Israel, Syria and Greece. She also cartoons her experiences on the job as well as her family life and stories from mythology. I loved the way she integrated all her "bad boyfriends" into her art - revenge comics. My favorite quote from her talk was concerning her life after having kids, "they prevent you from doing anything!"

Then I stuffed the cat into her carrier and drove home in the dark and the foggy rainstorm to hang out with my kid for a few days.

At home - I'm still trying to clear out the BeeHive studio so I can rent it out. I made some huge signs for the windows, piled up the remaining books, took a look in the office, got discouraged at the piles of stuff still to be dealt with, called it quits and took my mom and Lilah to see the new Peanuts movie.

I figured I could come back in the evening and work some more. But then my friend Debbee agreed to meet up for dinner and chat about boyfriends. Oh, OK, let's do that instead! The piles can wait another day. Or week...

But seriously - If you know of anyone looking for a fabulous store and/or studio space, please tell them to rent mine!! I need to pay my rent at school.
I also uncovered a load of mosaic materials - tiles and cement - and glass frits for hot glass work. Anyone?