Fatalistic Plant Types

I messed around with these for a while and I am thinking maybe I should have watercolored them. I guess I have grown attached to the infinite malleability of digital things. I can try things, making aesthetic decisions all I want, and not feel like I lose anything from it. Of course there are the countless hours that I've spent digitally manipulating things that could have been spent doing maybe more legitimate artistic endeavors, but what's done is done.
Most of these plants came from a sort of feeling like maybe I have been committing myself to pursuing all the wrong goals, like maybe I am a tomato plant aspiring to be an onion. Talking about myself as a plant is not meant literally, it is this college thing called metaphor. Really wild stuff. Sorry, I forget that keyboards can't express subtlety like sarcastic overtones can. But anyway, that is where "give up," and "I will never be an onion," and "no you aint awesome" came from. I think these type of shapes might make for good woodcuts later. The last one on the bottom is an attempt to counteract all the negativity in the others. Looking at them, I am actually pretty furious about how the colors turned out. It will be all gorgeous and saturated, and then saving it in a profile that is fit for the web mutes everything, so now the purple looks all whack and pastel, but it's not my fault completely, I swear.

Keep living,
megacat

Faster Pussycat! Pedal! Pedal!

I loved Megacat's letters, so I got to work applying them in a context that made them make more sense to me. "Ride" is obviously referring to a bicycle, right? Or since I love my motorcycle, it must have been meant for motorcyclists. Or is Tupac just a serious roller coaster 'ridah', in addition to being a self-admitted rapist? In the end I decided it would make the most sense to use a bicycle, plus bicycles have the least to do with Tupac. And because bicycles are awesome.

The idea of being "hardcore" about some activity or another—so serious that you would die doing it—is hilarious to me. It implies the sort of extreme attitude that tends to produce outrageous absolutist statements. If we take a different approach to interpretation, however, and rather than "I will ride my bicycle and I will stop for nothing until I expire, panting down the road", we assume the meaning is "I will always be a bicyclist because it is wonderful. When I die, I hope that I will be able to look back at a life filled with bicycling", everything sounds much more rational. The people who, in my mind, most closely embody the (latter) implied relationship with their bicycle, however, are those in the radical community, anarchists and radical leftists in general love their bikes. They see it as a symbol of independence from consumerist commodities like gasoline, as well as a symbol of self-reliance. After all, in the absence of an engine, it is the rider that provides the locomotion.

Incidentally, I couldn't get this movie title out of my head today. It looks totally bizarre. And sorry if this post seemed mildly schizophrenic.

Ride til you Die

This one might require some explanation. "Riding" is a pretty general verb, one that has a history in hip-hop music, going back in my memory to Tupac, with the track "Ambitionz az a Ridah." If he didn't start it, he popularized it.
Anyway, in Tacoma, in the UPS crowd I hang out with, I really got into the self-coined saying "no sleep til you die, work til you die" a couple semesters ago when SDS had seemingly endless projects constantly happening. It has a flow to it that really can't be communicated through this medium, so I understand if you don't get it. Regardless of why I thought that statement was good, "ride til you die" has better phonetics and can kind of apply to everything.
Obviously the top one is my favorite. I was doing some hand-lettering for this stuff, but it didn't quite work out as planned, and the font looks okay. As usual, they could use some more work, but getting them to this point has been pretty fun, and I just have more ideas than perfectionism.
Okay. Here are two goals.
1) start updating stuff that is almost entirely pen & ink based, plus maybe colors done digitally.
2) figure out how to give you my music in blog form. (This one is probably very feasible, but I'm working on feeling more comfortable with letting anyone hear it; that's probably what the blog would be best for).
The thesis and my other classes will be very demanding this semester, so I'm not making any promises, but I'll do my best.
megacat