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

Monocles & Moustaches

Hey everybody,
I am working on this illustration in pen turned into digital for coloring style, and it is very comics-looking. I could be perfectionistic, but that seems to be incompatible with fun, so I am opting for fun and flaws. Here is a big dude in a suit. Sorry to not be blogging so much, things are accelerating to get up to speed for school, and that I think means there won't be a whole lot of blog going down for a while. Thanks for reading!
Keep living.


love, megacat.

One of those reasons I can't sleep at night

I have made a poster this week, found below. It is a day late, but it was pretty involved, so be chill. Last week was as involved as this week, but in the end, the comic strip I had done posted looking like trash, so I took it down. Ultimate frustration, but I think this week's looks pretty good. I wanted to try one with black instead of all the jarring blue linework , but attempting this crashed illustrator twice and I took the computer's word that that it would look bad. I am working on a new style portraying people as all uniform, with really restricted and forced positions. They are more iconic stand-ins than actual people, that's the point. It's an odd and different poster/style.

About the poster:
COINTELPRO stands for "counter intelligence program" and was initiated by J. Edgar Hoover when he was director of the FBI (a position he held from May 1924 until May 1972). I have been reading a book by Jack Olsen called Last Man Standing, which is essentially a biography of (former?) black panther Geronimo Pratt. The book documents some of the actions the FBI took against the targets of the program; anyone Hoover deemed "subversive." Techniques were underhanded and deceitful, unconstitutional and unethical. Their goals included breaking up marriages, encouraging gang warfare, disintegrating social organizations, falsely labelling activists as police informers and driving leaders (namely Martin Luther King Jr) to suicide. Needless to say, all of the specific objectives were not met, but the scale of these actions was enormous and the people that were unjustly targeted suffered a lot because of what happened. I blame COINTELPRO for a lot of the trouble the United States has with race, though I understand race is a difficult issue for many societies everywhere to negotiate. COINTELPRO is one of those examples of what humans are capable of doing to each other that leaves me dumbfounded and depressed. That being said, learning about these things humanity does to itself is essential in dispelling our naivete and insuring that we are not caught off guard by its capacity for those things we'd rather not think about. It makes us better citizens.

Do you frequent your local public library? When I studied abroad, I got a real appreciation for them, because all of Oman has only one public library, which is in the state-run mosque in the capitol. Use it or lose it, you know? Anyway, I hope that you are all well.

I just want to say I am thankful for the police sometimes, but that guns just scare me generally, so cops do, too, and the FBI and CIA have a pretty frightening history. But thank you to the police that are well directed in their application of force!

Megacat


I wish I knew how to indent paragraphs in these posts. That would be awesome.

Lac

In 1958 my grandparents were spending their summer with their children in rural Idaho. The cabin they built on Lake Coeur d'Alene still stands today, and the families of their three children continue to use the cabin to this day! Early in July, 2008, I decided to try my hand at woodblock printing. I drew a contour image of the view from a front window at the cabin, divided the shapes into three colors, and then transferred the color-coded shapes onto three pieces of wood.

I didn't have the appropriate tools to be carving wood... instead I used a flat-head screwdriver and some kitchen tools. It was a struggle, but considering this is my first wood block carving, and my first multicolor print, I'm fairly proud of the result.

Party Time!

Hello readers,
I was writing some rhymes with my friend Joey today, and we discovered that we both have blogs that we actually update regularly. He is doubtlessly a better and more focused writer, but I know that's not what you're coming here for anyway, so I am not exactly worried about the competition. Here's Joey's blog. He's a smart guy who writes about Twin Cities politics, and he's who I'm reading.

The new image is one that I hoped would be accompanied by some well thought-out political commentary, but the deadline is upon me, and I guess I hope that you will be held over with some links about campaign finance and an understanding of my frustration with both presidential candidates' plans if they are elected. I think I'm partial to some sort of IRV alternative to our current situation. Here's a goofy poster.



Good luck to everybody representing down at Tacoma's port, regardless of intimidation tactics and abuse from the police, I hope you all do alright and that nobody is injured.
Charlie