Free Rats!

I renamed my blog. Welcome to Rats on the Loose. This blog is mostly about what goes on in my room, and there are loose rats in there.

Coming soon: Cats on the Prowl, a blog for the other rooms of my house.

The Imajinary Alphabyt

When I started the Imaginary Alphabet, I gave it a cool-sounding but generic name to fill space. When I started this blog, most of the posts were cool but e/n filler.

Now I've discovered Imaginary Alphabets, which is both a cool project with a fitting name, and this place is becoming more incongruous with it's title.

So I'm going to change the name of the blog.

Diplomacy is the Cornerstone of Love

I have a Magic Murder Bag:

Das ist mien Magic Murder Bag

Inside that Magic Murder Bag, I have a Magic Murder Book:

Ich habe ein Magic Murder Book

Selected quotes from Diplomacy (1994), by Henry Kissinger:

Past Blasters: Dr. Lasers Revenge (1)

Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue One

This is the first in a series of fourish installments on some of my more notable creative accomplishments over the last year and a half. Today in Past Blasters, we'll look at a full-wall mural I painted in the summer of 2009 titled...

Dr. Lasers Revenge.

!!!!

In the June of '09, I had just finished up my junior year at college, and was slated to move into the largest room in my fraternity house that coming fall. I was also getting over a breakup. For a while I had aspired to at some point paint a mural somewhere. A number of factors had combined to make the summer the opportune time to undertake this project.

• I did not want to spend more than, oh say, 1/3 of my summer wallowing in self-pity.
• I had a lot of free time, see above.
• Fraternity room budgets had recently been increased.
• The room, like much of the house at the time, was unpainted. It also had a large blank wall.
• My roommate also agreed to cover a wall in the room with a mural.

Obviously, the timing was fortuitous. At the time I committed to the project, I had no idea what I was going to paint. Actually, I had no idea how to paint because I had not held a brush, artistically, since I was in grade school. At the time I considered myself a pen and paper artist; my conception of the project was transpose a drawing to a wall, and add color.

Things were going to get, well, educational.

The summer started with a lot of doodling. I had a few threads of ideas, but no overall concept. I knew I wanted animals, lots of animals. Probably an octopus, likely an elephant; and dinosaurs (incl. birds). I was also fairly committed to the concept of robots from the outset. As for setting, I was bandying between a prehistoric jungle setting with volcanoes and the like, or outer-space.

I jumped in headfirst and started drawing all of these concepts in turn. As for animals, I quickly gravitated toward octopi, but continued to work on birds and soon found interest in microscopic life. The question of locale was settled on outer-space when I hit upon the idea of a satellite constructed as a bacteriophage. From there, the terraforming of the octopus' head was a natural next step.

Having sufficiently technologized viruses, I turned to robots. Robots proved significantly more difficult to draw. Your common robot is an intricate balance of straight lines and regular geometries; something my more fluid drawing style struggled to conquer. I think, in the end, I managed. All of these sketches were beginning to congeal into something concrete.

(I still have all these sketches and may publish them someday, if I see significant interest.)

I had planned a week long trip to school in early August to put the mural up and tackle other projects. As the first fortnight of July fell away, these congealing ideas were still splattered in a number of different sketchbooks and had yet to be brought together. So I took my largest sketchbook one night, sat down, and came up with this:

My methodology at the time was to progressively enlarge sections of the drawing and draw more detail onto them; draw interorbital objects separately; and somehow project the whole thing up on the wall. Hindsight is what it is, and I realize now the ways this methodology could have been more exact, not to mention much, much simpler. In any case, I proceeded single-mindedly. With a little photoshoppery, I produced a sheaf of grayed-out guidelines onto which I made this set of sketches:

This continent is presented the way I drew it, not the way it was later painted.

 

These drawings formed the basic corpus on which I would build the coming mural. Although some of the more intricate details were eventually jettisoned (in the sun and gaseous planoctopod, particularly), the core ideas in these sketches made it to the final painting. Albeit clumsily.

As I am growing tired of writing right now, and because I want to have a topic readily available next time I feel like blogging, I am going to leave off here. In the next issue, I will discuss the difficulties encountered in time, texture and light projection.

I Fight To The Finish...

Yesterday I ate nothing but ground beef. Nutrition fail. Today I made spanakopita. I've made this pie before, but long time readers named Jose or some anglicized version thereof may remember that I was dissatisfied with the amount of spinach in the finished product. So I upped the ante... 

'Cause I eats my spinach!

To five pounds of spinach. Bluto doesn't stand a chance.

I also used smaller, deeper baking trays. This was more a matter of necessity since that was the size of the phyllo dough I was working with this time.

It's getting good... but next time I think I'll use ten pounds of spinach, throw it in a food processor and save my hands the trouble of turning green.