Happy August!

Holy canoli, the weeks just fly by. Summer term is almost gone, and Fall semester is just an Education Week behind. Things are going really well - I'm still learning a lot in my drawing class; but I'm learning much much more by viewing the work of so many talented artists (check the sidebar and browse their work! You may never come back to my blog again!). All in all, this translates into a couple of things for me: a) I'm drawing more, and b) those drawings are less and less resembling the section of the Friend magazine where the readers send in their own art.

Anyway, just to attach a visual to this post, here is something I made for an assignment in my Masterpieces of British Literature class. We got to kind of "translate" (in this case illustrate) the main theme of a poem. I chose Coleridge's "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison". Basically I used a tag cloud to find the most common words and transposed them over a portrait of the poet (that I did not draw), to give the sense that the work of any artist serves to shape who they really are (at least to the reader). It was hastily done (then done even more hastily after the original was lost), but I kinda like it. Enjoy.

Grandpa and Wall·E

I was asked to throw together a design for a t-shirt for our family reunion coming up... and I thought of all the cheesy (and poorly designed) reunion t-shirts I've seen in the past. Does anybody wear those in public after the reunion? I wanted to make something that would be a little goofy but still funny enough to wear in public. Mission accomplished? We'll see how the family reacts...

(That fine looking gentleman is my grandpa circa 1970. The quote is an old Coca-Cola slogan from the early 1900's.)

On a completely unrelated note, my wife and I saw Pixar's "Wall·E" yesterday (and are going again today). I went in with high hopes...and left kind of discouraged. Pixar did an absolutely masterful job with the main character--who knew that a robot could be so expressive? The visuals were amazing as well. I just have a few beefs:

1. I found myself getting extremely bored whenever Wall·E wasn't on screen-- I didn't think the other characters were quite as engaging.
2. The mixture of real humans with CG just didn't work for me. To me, the goal of film (and especially animation) is to transport the viewer from their theater seat into a totally different world. But the illusion of life just wasn't there -- the CG humans and the real humans didn't look like they belonged in the same world (I guess 700 years will not only lower your bone mass but also make you look more like a cartoon).
3. I read that the premise of the film wasn't too preachy, but I kinda thought otherwise...

Again, Pixar does absolutely incredible work (Ratatouille changed the direction of my life) and who am I to question them? This film is getting rave reviews, so what do I know? I think I just went in with too high hopes...I'm seeing the film again today, so maybe I'll have a totally different experience.