haven’t posted in forever

May 10th, 2010

This is a picture dump…
Prepare yourself…
Are you prepared?
Promise?
Okay.

A drawing a made for a friend’s kid. It’s amazing. It’s a dragon eating a snake.

This is a butterfly I drew for the same friend, different child.

This is my new favorite picture of myself. It’s nice that my hair has grown in a bit and I don’t look like I recently had brain surgery (I didn’t recently have brain surgery, I just had a bad run in with some clippers).

My compositional skills are amazing. Also, Portland is really beautiful.
Great picture of Evan.

Wigging out with a Red Bull.
Wigging out.

Many attempts were made at getting a normal picture.
Really?

A horse is a horse, of course of course.
A horse is a horse.

You wouldn’t know magic like this unless I accidentally hit you in the face with my magic/jazz hands.
MAGIC!

An almost normal picture.
Swizeet.

Posted in Hotness, photoshop, tablet art | 1 Comment »

OH YEAH! Racial and Cultural Stereotyping is the new black. (Wait…)

February 27th, 2010

This is BumpasaurusX, a close acquaintance of Nichole’s. She has allowed me to hijack her blog in order to spread the good word that our beloved Kool-Aid has engaged in some hilariously, tragically, uber-ly stereotyping style advertising. Behold, their home page: http://brands.kraftfoods.com/koolaid/Home.aspx

Here’s a pic of it if you don’t want to head over there:

Since their marketing team seems hell bent on racial/cultural profiling, I thought I would help them out and create some of my own art for ads on their home page:

Hipster Kool Aid

Hobo Kool Aid

I submitted it to the Something Awful crowd and you can see what they’re coming up with here:

Kool Aid Thread

Justice has been served.

That is all.

Posted in comedy, photoshop | No Comments »

Apparently blogs don’t write themselves….

February 23rd, 2010

Nichole McMillan is back again
Doing a little west coast fling
Nichole McMillan is going off
Not too hard and not too soft

Can you dig it?

Now I present to you: a series of pictures from my latest (and first) oil painting. 16″ by 20″.

This is the fish I painted for Leeann, my flute friend. I started out with a sketch, and then painted it all white. Once the wash was in place, I went over it and painted the detail in brown. I quickly learned that my touch had to be really light, otherwise I would just pull paint up rather than laying it down.

The fish begins.

Here you can see I added some blue details and began the wash for the water. I’m not sure if the correct term for the background is called a wash since it was done with oils. With watercolors when you paint a large space with one color, or a gradient, it is called a wash. I was surprised at how quickly the thin layers of paint dried.

This stage was just finishing up the water, and adding more details. I decided to make the fish more three dimensional so I started adding darker colors to its underside. However, I kept taking step backs to figure out what the painting was missing. I knew it was missing something. And even though I kept adding shadows, it still didn’t feel right.

More details.

So apparently when you have added a bunch of shadows to something, it is important to make sure there is a light source as well. I added some light strokes to the water, and voila! The painting felt more finished to me. Now all I need to do is touch up the frame and then I will be ready to hand it over to my flutey-lady-friend.

Light and shadows.

Here is a close up of the scales. I’m still really fascinated with the texture that oil paints can provide.

Scales.

Tags: fish, leeann, oils, painting
Posted in painting | 1 Comment »

Relaxing.

February 11th, 2010

As I am an artist, I have artistic friends. One of my friends plays the flute for a living and she is very gifted and talented. Her music spans many genres, from funk to classical. Her latest endeavor, is relaxation music with the help of her showering boyfriend.

Leeann in the jungle with her flute.

Listen:

relaxing rain forest

It’s pretty amazing. If only we could all add a little “echo effect” to our lives. Everyone would be so much more relaxed.

Posted in comedy, music, photoshop | 1 Comment »

If you welcome addiction, this is your kingdom…

February 11th, 2010

This is Chris Corner, also known as IAMX, and the lead singer of the Sneaker Pimps:

IAMX a.k.a. Chris Corner

He’s a musician. And he is indeed emotional, but don’t mistake him as emo. He’s not emo. He’s just too beautiful and fragile for this world. (At least that is the feeling I get from listening to his music.) This might sound like I don’t like his music and that isn’t true. I really love his music. If I had found this guy when I was 14 I would have plastered my walls with posters of him. I would have listened to his music endlessly, and would have considered myself to be too beautiful and fragile for this world just like him.

He claims that his music shouldn’t just be an aural experience. A big part of IAMX’s persona are the visuals he puts on, a lot like Fischerspooner’s act. This intrigues me. Someday I will have to go to one of his concerts, but for now I will settle for listening to his music in my car and on my computer.

There is a story behind this entry. On Monday I was driving home to Portland from Spokane which is a 6 hour drive (if you do it right). Evan was my copilot and we were about 2 hours away from Portland, getting antsy and stir crazy. Evan put one of my mix CDs in the CD player and one of the songs that came on was called Kingdom of Welcome Addiction by IAMX. Immediately we got into it. We listened to it a couple of times, belting out the lyrics. There was passion. There was chest pounding. We were even singing in harmony. It was quite the show. I decided that I needed to write an entry about the song, so here I am.

That night I searched the internets for some sort of video link with the song. I hoped for finding a video of the song with a Chris Corner slide show, but alas, this was all I found:

So now I associate Kingdom of Welcome Addiction with Twilight. And what scares me is that with my fledgling knowledge of Twilight, this song is perfect for the series.

Now I’m not just going to write about Kingdom of Welcome Addiction. I’m going to write to it as it pertains to rainshadow2′s compilation of Twilight footage paired with the song.

I still don’t have a lot to say about it though, except that it is AMAZING. And I’m only being halfway sarcastic. I have yet to read the Twilight series or see the movies, but what I do know is that it’s a very perfect romance story. I grew up reading 19th century romance novels. They moved me so much. I would yearn so strongly for the characters to get together that I would be incredibly happy and relieved when they finally did. So happy, in fact, that I didn’t really care when one of them died from consumption (as was the typical way to go in those books). I mean, at least they got to kiss.

Do Edward and Bella get to kiss eventually? What is this I hear about teams? Will Chris Corner be invited to do a cameo in one of the movies because Kingdom of Welcome Addiction seems to fit the story so perfectly (in my eyes)? You can be on team Edward or team Jacob all you want. I’m in Chris Corner’s corner. I’m on team IAMX.

Chris Corner, I hope you read this:
I have taunted charm and a broken smile.
And I choose life with you… and your music.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

65_RedRoses

February 9th, 2010

My friend, Eva.

Me.

Eva and I have a few things in common: we both love having fire-engine red hair, we both get tons of enjoyment from getting our pictures taken, and we were both born with a genetic illness called Cystic Fibrosis.

We met through an online journal community called LiveJournal. I had already had my journal for a few years when this beautiful, red-haired siren requested to be my friend. From perusing her profile I found that Eva, or 65redroses as I first knew her, was my age and also had CF and lived in Vancouver, BC. We were similar in the ways I’ve mentioned, but different in that her CF was much worse than mine. She needed a lung transplant. A few months after I started getting to know her she updated her journal, very excited, telling all of her livejournal buddies about a documentary a couple of her film-maker friends were thinking about making about her, and her transplant process.

To my surprise (a surprise because it was such a huge undertaking) it actually came to fruition.

Here is the trailer:

I finally saw the documentary this weekend in Spokane. It was weird because I saw my friends on film. Because of CF and the chance of cross-infection meeting my friends in person is looked down upon, so I connect with them over the internet. I must say, however, that I’ve cheated and I’ve actually hung out with Meg before and I even *gasp* gave her a hug yesterday. But as I mentioned, it was weird seeing them on film. These are my girls. These are people that I share a crazy kinship with but have never (besides Meg) actually met.

However, I’m moving away from the subject matter of this blog, which is art. I will openly admit that I don’t have a strong film background, but I do know a good movie or documentary when I see one, and this was definitely good.

It’s hard to distance myself from it and give it a serious critique because the subject matter is so close to my heart. And this documentary is so moving, I feel like it’s close to everyone’s hearts who is able to see it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

I would definitely recommend this film to everyone I meet, and I would follow the movie recommendation with a recommendation to become an organ donor.

So….

Watch 65_Redroses.

Become a registered organ donor if you aren’t already.

(But not necessarily in that order.)

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day

February 4th, 2010

2/3/10

I’m 26. I had a great birthday which involved hearing from lots of friends and family, and reveling in the number 26 for a day.

I went to a nearby bar in the evening to live it up with some of the Portland crew and before I left a friend of mine who works in an art supply distribution warehouse came by with a couple of boxes. And in the boxes was everything I could possibly need to start painting with oils. So… oil paints, 6 canvases, a table easel, disposable palettes, mediums for thinning the paint and cleaning brushes, and set of brushes.

About 8 years ago I thought I would give oil painting a try and I did one painting, and after I cleaned the art space and all of the brushes I ended up sitting on my bed for an hour staring at the wall, completely content. I realized later that I had become high as all get out, because I used odorless paint thinner. This frightened me from oils for a while. Also, it took over a week for the painting to dry which made me itch with impatience.

I have since used water-based oils, and they are pretty sweet and becoming more mainstream and accessible, but I still want to paint with real oils. There is so much history with the medium. It’s a shame that I don’t know how to use oils. But now I’m 26. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day. A new life for me. A new life involving painting with oils, and I’m feeling good.

2/4/10

I wrote the above, yesterday. However, due to using a wireless router that’s not so good at the wireless, my connection kept dropping and I gave up actually posting but I had hopes of finishing later. So, I bought a 25′ ethernet cord and voila! Internets.

So, I will start out by posting my newest cartoon drawing. It’s of Evan and his old roommate Duncan. It turned out better than I thought it would, and that’s always nice. It isn’t the first cartoon I’ve made, but it was the first of this style using the pressure sensitivity on the tablet.

Dunc-Ev-an

This is something Evan made this morning. It’s his contribution to the Pimp My Ride meme.
“Yo dawg! I heard you like Ulysses so I put some Ulysses in your Ulysses!”

You've been pimped.

This piece was done by David Barton of limpfish.com. I think it’s pretty sweet. And it looks like fine art, and I’m sure it can be considered fine art by some. However, it was done with a tablet. Pretty sweet stuff.

Monet's Vader With a Parasol

And so ends this epic post. I plan on updating this from here on out every monday, wednesday, and friday.

Posted in tablet art, Uncategorized | No Comments »

don’t you dare make fun of me

January 1st, 2010

This is my “art” blog. It’s important that you don’t confuse this with my other blog, which tends to be about my emotions and what I perceive to be “unique” observations of the world. It may take some practice but my hope is to center this blog around what I perceive to be “unique” observations of art in general.

So really, I was projecting. I don’t need to worry about you confusing this blog with my other. I need to worry about confusing them.

That being said….

I never forgot that I was an artist. I just took a break from the “making art” aspect of it. I still had the stereotypical “flakey artist” personality down. (I swear I don’t normally use this many quotation marks. I’m not sure what’s going on).

Anyway, I’ve been experiencing a resurgence in the “making art” realm over the last six months or so. Thanks in large part to:

…this guy…

WHOA

With his help I moved to Portland which has a very strong art community. And something about the change in scenery motivated me and inspired me to start making art again…. for fun, even. And I’m very fortunate to have a lot of time on my hands due to some unfortunate health problems, which I could complain about and I sometimes do, but right now am simply appreciating.

Tags: Hotness, Really Really Hot People
Posted in Hotness | No Comments »

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