Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

All good things must come to an end, as they say, and I believe a blog is no different. It is the natural cycle of things to be born, grow to maturity, wilt and die. For the last few posts, I have felt that the purpose of this blog has been declining and nearing the end of its shelf life. That is not to say that there will never be another post from your dear Lucky here again, but I feel that this period has run its course and it is time to move on to bigger and better things.

In the last year, I have made tremendous strides to reintegrate art back into my life. So much so that I have changed my major and redefined what the future of my education and life holds. It has been a wonderful journey of self exploration and I have enjoyed the time I have had posting here. It has given me experience in expressing myself via art and words and I believe the tools I have gained will serve me well in my future endeavors.

Ah yes, the future. Given the rantiness of a few of my more recent posts, it has become apparent that the tone of my narrative has changed from a fun loving art student to a young woman wishing to impart some wisdom and perspective on social and political issues. This does not feel like the correct venue for such thoughts and thus I have begun a new blog which can be viewed here. There will still be art, but more political satire and comic strips poking at social issues.

For this last, regular post, I’ll leave you with my most recent portrait piece and the time lapse video of its creation. This is Ada, whom I have not yet had the chance to meet in person but is extremely adorable and, from what I hear, wicked smart.

It has been a great journey here in the Right Brain Retrain and I hope the few of you that read regularly will follow me on to my new endeavors. Thank you all for your continued support!

Until we meet again, this is Lucky signing out.

Where the @%*# are your Parents?!

Spring Break has FINALLY arrived! Remarkably enough, I evaded pulling any all-nighters this last week. This was shocking since I somehow managed to put myself in the position to pull three during the month of February, but I digress...

The dear boyfriend and I have been watching a bunch of "Dose of Buckley" videos on YouTube lately and, as such, have been having some philosophical conversations about life, young people and the evolution of 'fame'. I feel like I must be getting old because my tolerance for the idiotic youth of America seems to lessen more and more with each passing year. It's not really their fault, what with being raised by a generation that uses TV and techno gadgets as a replacement for babysitters and parenting in general. However, I can't take a tour of the country to slap every slacker parent in the mouth. I'd never have time for anything else and probably wouldn't reach even a fraction of the offenders.

So, what's my beef with young people, you might ask? Self entitlement, mainly. I don't think it's a new concept, but getting on in years has gained me some perspective on the human condition. The problem that arises in this ever advancing technological age is the over saturation of the Internet and media with content from these unintelligent, ego-inflated, selfish little bastards.

Everyone wants attention, but few really deserve it. Okay, not everyone wants attention, but there seems to be an ongoing fixation with the concept of 'fame' in our society. Uncreative American welps want to be the next Brad Pitt, or Charleze Theron, or (insert some current icon that I don't care enough about to remember their name here). Memes are a perfect example. One idiot makes a video, five other idiots see it and say "Hey, that's popular. I can do that, too!" Then those idiots each make a similar video and the cycle continues as stupidity replicates at an exponential rate (to the fifth power in this specific example). Instead of developing talents and creating their own content, young people jump on the meme band wagon and replicate viral media in the hopes of getting views or likes.

No one lives forever and it's part of the human drive to want to leave an impression that will last passed our own existence (some people have kids, some people start a charity and some people just give every guy they meet a blow job). However, popularity does NOT equal immortality. Do you know how many popular kids from high school whose names I can actually remember? Maybe three, at best. The rest are mostly filed away as "rich douchebag".

Well, that was a fun little rant, but some of you may be thinking "Hey Lucky, you have a DeviantArt account, post your work on social media and you blog. Aren't you just trying to get attention like these idiotic kids you're talking about?" (and if you weren't thinking that, you should be). The answer is "yes".

I don't want to be famous in the sense that people would recognize me on the street. I do, however, hope to gain recognition for my artwork (and perhaps get a job). A great deal of my life has been spent honing my talents and, while I do it for the simple joy of creating art, I do hope that one day my work will be known (again, at least enough to get me a job). There is a big difference in perfecting your own skill set and gaining notoriety by creating original content than to simple get a few thousand subscribers or views because you filmed your own rendition of the Harlem Shake. Lets face it, do those subscribers really know who you are or give a shit if you croak next week? No, they don't. They won't even notice or care that you're gone because they didn't give a fuck about you in the first place.

Being known and securing a legacy that will live on after you have died are two different things. I have reached neither, so, given my lack of empirical knowledge, I suppose I should go ahead and wrap this up. Today's picture is a charcoal portrait of a gentleman named Steve. He's retired and going to school for art because, well, he loves it. Steve has made more of an impact on the world by creating a positive effect in ONE person's life than some 14 year old  with 150k views could ever hope to.

So, without further a due, here it is:

Until next time!

And then she found an amazing book...

I've been long overdue for a new blog post, so I guess I’ll go ahead and get on it now. Quite a few things have happened in the last… Wow, has it really been 3 weeks? Jeez, I’m horrible about keeping a schedule, huh? Anyway…

One of the coolest things that happened was that I got to mean a guest speaker named Rafal Olbinski when he visited MSU earlier this month. He’s a painter/illustrator from Warsaw Poland and he’s pretty much awesome. Part of why I was so excited to visit his lecture was because he himself actually started off doing engineering architecture but switched to painting at a later date. Beyond that, he gave me hope that as an artist getting a late start on my education, nothing is lost. Olbinski didn’t actual come to America, where he gained notoriety, until he was 37. And here I am freaking out about being just barely over 30 when I plan to graduate.

I actually got to meet him and gushed a bit to him about how he is my inspiration. How does he react? With graciousness and humility, that’s how he reacts. I want to be all these things when I’m older!! Basically what I’m trying to say is that if you have some time, you should really go check out his work which you can view here!

What else happened in the last three weeks? Well, I had a dog for about 72 hours, and then sent him back. He didn’t misbehave or anything, I just didn’t have the time or dedication to train an adult dog. Uuuum, I finished my second project for Metalworking. I started looking for a part time job (because I have WAAAAY too much time on my hands). Oh! And I offered to do a collaborative work with another user on deviant art!

I always find myself trying to give my own creative input when working with others. This can be good, but I also wanted to have a stab at not creative input (at least story wise) and strictly creating a visual experience of another person’s tale. She’s written a clever little short story and seems to be incredibly honored that I would like to do a black and white manga of it. I’m nervous, but it will be a great learning experience and hopefully prepare me for potential commissions in the future.

So, on to the art… I bought an AMAZING book last weekend. After a brief failed attempt to find tasteful nude photos to use as drawing reference, and by the way, where they hell are all these children on Deviantart parents at?! Anyway, I gave up rather quickly on Deviantart, ran to Barnes and Noble and found “Anatomy for the Artist” by Sarah Simblet.

The problem I have always had with anatomy books is that there are too many words! Even the artistic anatomy books have so much jabbering. This book, while still filled with good information and diagrams of the inner anatomy, is filled to the brim with human figure photos in color and black and white. So, I chose my favorite photo as my first self-study practice session tonight:

Actually, I’ve been drawing a lot of male head figures lately. It’s not entirely intentional, I don’t get to choose the subject our Drawing instructor puts in front of us. This image just jumped out at me when I was flipping through the pages. It’s a great lighting choice and one I was excited to work on. I didn’t really finish the finer detail because I was working with charcoal on a smaller surface than I’m used to. Regardless, I’m pretty happy about the outcome. I’m really looking forward to doing more drawings from this book.

Until next time!

Nobody is perfect...

Today’s blog is to demonstrate that while we may all have talents of our own, or excel in certain fields, no matter how good you think you are, there is always room for improvement. I was left with this thought after a particularly trying day in Drawing I class. We still have yet to begin shading, but I have been doing it anyway out of boredom. No to toot my own horn, but I am at the head of the class (toot toot). If I did not use shading to slow myself down I would run laps around my classmates as far as quantity of drawings.

This week we began drawing plaster casts of faces. As some of you may have read in the last post, we aren’t supposed to actually think of them as faces, but simple ‘draw what we see.’ Last week’s post showed what I think is one of my best drawing pieces. Aside from being very naturalistic, I also managed to frame it perfectly on the page. However, I will admit, it was not an exact replica of how the plaster head looked in class. Sometimes I will ‘fib’ in my drawings to make them appear more idealistic.

However, my ability to do this was utterly shattered today. We were still drawing the same batch of plaster heads, but today, many of them were turned upside down, or on their sides, or laid at angles to where foreshortening ruled the image. I got agitated with the first set up which actually had me drawing the same exact head from last time, but upside down. I gave it three shots and got extremely frustrated with the results.

After a quick break, we came back and had the set up rearranged. This time, I was looking at a head turned to three quarters view and tilted back drastically. I spent a good 30 to 45 minutes attempting to capture the cast’s likeness, but upon my third attempt, I gave up on making it look like the head in front of my and just drew the shadows but on a more ideal face.

The end result of my efforts was this:

 Now, I hear objections from others whenever I say this, but there are a multitude of things wrong with this picture. That is not to say that I hate it, in fact, I quite like it. For only spending about 30 minutes on it, it didn’t turn out too bad. Regardless, that is not what the plaster head looked like (apart from the shadows), and even so, the eye is off, the nose was haphazardly done and the lights were turned on and class dismissed before I had a chance to really rework all the issues I’m seeing with it now.

I’m still posting it, though. Not because I have nothing else to post. I mean, I still have a few days to find something better anyway. I’m posting it because it shows my own imperfections. Pride goeth before the fall and to hide your weaknesses is to deny yourself a chance to overcome them.

So, that’s it for now. I’ll be busy for a while catching up on projects, organizing the new apartment and, beginning sometime next week, training a new dog. Which reminds me, any suggestions on names for a Maltese/Shih Tzu mix with an under bite that makes him look a bit like an Ewok? His name’s currently ‘Duke,’ but that doesn’t fit. Oh, and before you flood in with a bunch of actual Ewok names, we decided Wicket is too abrasive and no other Ewok names really stood out.

Until next time!