oh photoshop. i love you and you're totally awesome and everything, but i need to stop thinking i can count on you to swoop in at the 11th hour to make sense of vague and nebulous half baked notions of lay outs *cough* horrendous top spread */endcough*. it's not you, it's me. no, really.

oh, also, you need to redraw that bottom one- you do a much better job of aping observational drawing when you do it with a graphite stick. ssssssllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyy.


on another note, instead of doing some much needed reading up on the much neglected dissertation this morning, i opted instead to finally getting around to watching this:



mary & max had been on my radar since before it even came out three years ago, but that's just how crap i am at ingesting media. man. this thing was good. its sense of humour's possibly one shade darker than emperor palpatine's allegiance of the force and oh my gosh is it sad.

huh. that doesn't exactly sound like a stella review, does it? but you might want to check it out. it's also go this stuck in my head till forever, but that's okay because this ditty be aces:



PEACE AND LOVE AND ALL THAT JAZZ.

life drawings. that top one's the result of drawing a repeated sequence over and over and over and over again, not from dropping too much acid before going to class.

wow, alex. just... wow. way to totally shit the bed at the final hurdle. we've got the macmillan crit today. as well as a complete dummy book and four pages of finalised art work, we needed to design end papers and a title page. through this together for the latter at the 11th hour and now i'm just feeling shame. so much shame.

a silly little drawing. on the plus side, i now know how to spin photoshop files like this shit's a turn table.
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WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN!?!?

so for this project, we had a day (aaaaaaacctually, make that more like 6 & 3/4 hours) to come up with a series of ten images to illustrate a scale using Italian words that are normally reserved for marvelling at sun rises in the alps. yeeeaaahhh. i wasn't feeling too imaginative because the best i could come up with was italians getting super enthused about food. way to stereotype.

anyhoo, here are the first four. god damn. i need to work out a way of drawing quickly that doesn't look like total ass.

some people managed to do some truly amazing things in that brief window of time....

OH ALEX. YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE SUBTLE ART OF DESIGN.

in my defence, that gnarly, grey square's there because i don't think i should be telegraphing information about a PRIVATE event. huh. go figure. and that doesn't excuse the rest of it.

invite for The Show. we've been batting round the idea of getting everyone to wear masks. somehow that worked its way into my totally ass proposal for the invite design.

OH GOD. THIS THING IS A CRIME AGAINST ART. I WILL TRY AGAIN. OUT OF TOTAL SHAME.

but before that train-wreck-waiting-to-happen happens, here's some more random crap from the last bit of the summer project!






(wow. awesome job of scanning that. idiot.)

going to stick all this shit together a la that... uh... 'book' about our hike across scotland because i totally don't have it in me to make a cohesive final piece.

background for something. what intense tea-baggery.

boy howdy, is souless composition souless.

just dicking around in painter. need to work out something a bit more dynamic for this pair.

more silly things from the moleskin.

anthropomorphisising museum displays is fun!

wow. did not hit the ground running on this one. so-so-SO many scrapped attempts.

as fascinating as they are, i think siamese twins are my kryptonite.

first attempt at the second of the 'tickets'. uuuuuuuuuuuugh. nigh on no planning + rush job = MEGA FAIL. didn't rough it out enough so ended up totally flying by the seat of my pants when it came to slapping down the water colours. as a result, many, many things went wrong. for instance, IMMA LOOKING AT YOU, WACK PROPORTIONS!

oh well. lesson learnt; your neurosis will not allow you to phone it in. in the mean time, just wrapped take two and am about to slap it in the scanner. hopefully, it's not quite such a cluster fuck this time round...