babel. oh babel.

Jorge Louis Borges; for three weeks our entire class hated you just a little bit. Sure, you had some nice prose, but, really, nobody wanted to do it.

Our first project of 2nd year was to create a piece for the wall of the Illustration Dept's seminar room, based on 'The Library of Babel' text by Jorge Louis Borges, and a particular wall-art period in time. We went up against the 3rd and 4th years to produce something for this, which sort of added to the misery.

My final piece was based around 'contemporary graffiti' and focussed mainly on the quotes, 'obviously no-one expects to find anything' (in regards to the librarians constantly searching for knowledge), 'young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter' and 'MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another (very much consulted in this area) is a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says Oh time thy pyramids.'

I also quite liked, 'for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences'.

In the end, I wanted to poke fun at celebrity and how some people mindlessly worship these people even though they haven't done anything particularly great, but I didn't want to take it too seriously, because, well, I was poking fun at it, so I threw in some bits of literal babel here and there.

I could have probably picked other celebrities, or spent more time getting a proper likeness, but basically, it's supposed to be Britney Spears, Jerry Springer and Bono.

I like birds?

I've done a lot of bird-related shit recently too.
First off, was my first proper silkscreen print:

Then there was my etching, where I was the victim of quite horrendous foul bite. Still, not too bad for a first timer, I thought?




I've also been using a lot of quotes from films in these works, my summer project sketchbook had snippets from No Country for Old Men and these quotes are from Say Anything and Brick. I started with the text and wanted to illustrate something that I thought looked cool, basically.

who said summer ended months ago?

This was my summer project, give or take some sketchbook pages of inane rambles. Our brief was to have a look at past projects and the work of some selected artists and then produce a final that 'highlighted our interest in drawing'. I chose to look at the work of Charles Avery, Vija Celmins and Juan Casas, because I like stuff that looks real, stuff that's done in line and stuff that's fun. Basically.

So that was my summer project sketchbook, and all of that became this:

a procrastination post.

Well, I finally found the energy to actually make a proper start to my project, so I thought I'd stop and take a break as of course I was working way too hard so I thought I'd show anyone who's interested what I did for a friend's book they're writing. It's a children's book that he wrote for his nephew, but I'm not sure if his nephew's actually received it yet. :D Basically, the background to the story was a small boy breaks his head, but his parents can't afford a newer head, and his old head is obsolete and so they have to buy him a little girl's head instead. The whole story is (probably) copyright of Chris Campbell.

it's always good to know shit.

So, I finally figured out what I'm going to do for my uni summer project, with a little less than two months to go. Good times! Going out tomorrow to gather sources and take photos and sketch and be a general creep, as that is what my project (sort of) involves.

I also have to go and ACTUALLY BUY THE DAILY MAIL so that I can get vouchers for Toy Story Lego so that I can buy some so that my uncle can give my nephew them. I might find a way of taking the vouchers without buying the paper though, because, hell, nobody wants to be seen buying the mail.

So, figuring out what I'm doing for this project was only one of the things I did on my incredibly productive day in Dundee. Others include; getting the keys to the flat, giving the council one of the 4 out of 5 forms about council tax that I need to fill out, being locked out of the flat because my front door key didn't seem to work, and then waiting half an hour to be told my bus back home had broken down, and then having to wait an hour in total for the next bus up from Glasgow. Nice one, Stagecoach.

So, anyway, all the rage aside, here are some pictures of my flatmates' and myself's lovely new flat:

Living room/Kitchen:




Bathroom:




Shower room:




Bedroom (not mine, but they're all pretty much the same):



September should be good like. :D

past posters.

Because I still can't think of what to do for my summer project, here are some older projects.

serious lack of any inspiration whatsoever.

Just what it says on the tin.

Literally can't think of anything at all for summer project.

Need to think of it a bit more, or maybe a bit less? I don't know what to do.

I've taken up to listening to inane amounts of The Shins and reading Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith in order to distract myself from the fact that I have no idea why I like art.