ADULTS WHO PLAY WITH CRAYONS?
(Yes, I'm using the same picture to illustrate this entry that I used on Thursday. But this is an entirely new entry. Trust me.)Coincidentally, the same week that I made
my first serious attempt at creating art with Crayola crayons, searching for more bloggers' crayon art using
Google blogsearch, I've found out about
an open call for submissions for an upcoming crayon art show in Massachusetts:
Adults Who Play With Crayons - mail art call
MailArt Call
Theme Show: Adults Who Play With Crayons
Please send detailed drawings done in crayon for a large International Mail Art Show. Landscapes, portraits, political, surreal drawings, abstract etc...all done in crayon.
Photographers must include crayons in their photos.
Size: open
Deadline: November 2007
All works to be displayed at The Lawrence Heritage State Park Art Gallery in Lawrence, Massachusetts in December 2007.
Send to:
Sharon Silverman
P.O. Box 1212
Haverhill, MA 01831
USA
Documentation to all participants. No returns.
Please keep drawings suitable for all ages.
Mail art? You mean like the time I sent all that
Sailor Moon fanart as "postcards" to YTV's
The Zone?
Well, if I submit anything, it'll be curled up in a tube. Drawing directly on the envelope/postcard is fine when you're using coloured pencils, but wax crayon art would probably get all smeared by the mail sorting machinery.
If I'm submitting something to a show, I'll probably use the entire sheet of card rather than just a piece of the card, just so I can include a lot more detail than what I was able to include in the
crayon Piccadilly Circus drawing, and increase the precision. As to what I'd draw, I would not rule out just doing a larger drawing based on the same
photo of London's Piccadilly Circus that I took in July 1998. Another quite real possibility is that I'll draw a picture of the
Ferrari 360 Modena driven by Enron Broadband CEO Ken Rice, not that I want to make any kind of grand statement about Enron but simply because I really like the composition of the picture. And/or maybe I'll draw something completely different from what I'm considering now. I have quite a while to make up my mind, and do several pictures, since they don't need to be in for almost a year and a half.
PICCADILLY CIRCUS CRAYOLA'd!
It only took me two days, but my
Crayola crayon drawing of London's Piccadilly Circus in July 1998, my first foray into crayon art as an adult, is completed.
Since I was using crayons and not coloured pencils, and most of the crayons rapidly turned into stubs, I wasn't nearly able to capture all of the detail of
this photo of Piccadilly Circus in July 1998, and it looks really clumsy compared to my
Prismacolor colored pencil drawing of Piccadilly Circus in July 2000, but the picture does have kind of an Impressionistic vitality about it, and I kind of like how bright the advertising signs look compared to the rest of the picture, like they're electric in the drawing.
For most of the white text, I pretty much had to scratch the words in using the tip of a dead pen, but, otherwise, everything you see is completely crayon. (And drawing the Coca-Cola logo in coloured pencil was tough enough... here, in crayon scratches, it's almost completely illegible.)
As you can see, professional crayon artist
Jeffrey Robert won't find serious competition in me, but I don't think this experiment was a total failure, and I might try drawing in crayon again sometime this summer, but, rest assured, my primary medium of choice will always be coloured pencils, as drawing with tiny little crayon stubs was just murder on my wrists.
I've added this drawing to my
Fotopic drawing gallery.
The same pictures archived on different servers just for Google image search purposes:
Crayola crayon drawing of London's Piccadilly Circus in July 1998A photo of Piccadilly Circus in July 1998Prismacolor coloured pencil drawing of Piccadilly Circus in July 2000Crayola crayon drawing of London's Piccadilly Circus in July 1998A photo of Piccadilly Circus in July 1998Prismacolor colored pencil drawing of Piccadilly Circus in July 2000
DRAWING IN CRAYON IS MURDER ON THE WRISTS...
Really, it is. I'm not kidding. It's because the
crayons break in two so easily and you have to draw with those tiny stubs. I needed to rub
Rub A535 (Capsaicin) on my right wrist just to make the pain go down. I can see why most creative-minded adults don't bother using crayons as an artistic option.
I have no idea how
crayon artist Jeffrey Robert can do it so well.
I've taken a break from my crayon experiment for the evening, but, hopefully, I'll have something worth scanning tomorrow. But, as you can see from my
sneak peek, I doubt that I'll abandon my Prismacolor coloured pencils for Crayola crayons... certainly not on a regular basis.
In other personal news, yesterday morning (blargh, had to get up at the inhumane hour of... 8 a.m.... feel sorry for me, please), I went for my second appointment with the psychiatrist that
I saw in April. This time, my mother came in with me. She tried to make a stronger, more persuasive case, that I might have Asperger's, demonstrating the "flapping" I talked about the other time as an example of weird, repetitive actions, though what she showed him was kind of a (Brian from
Family Guy voice) "I've done that, what? Like, maybe, three times in thirty-one years? Once a decade?" Okay, probably a fair bit more than that, but it's not something I remember doing nearly as much as she thinks, and, sometimes, I suspect that what she interprets as "flapping" is just me dealing with wrist cramps that I get a lot from drawing. She also mentioned that, while I've never been too comfortable in social circumstances, I do sometimes like being at least passively confrontational, by holding non-standard political views (by Canadian standards), carrying Canadian (and Quebec) flags on Saint Jean-Baptiste day (hey, I love Quebec, still a lot more than Ontario, I just don't like separatism), and wearing my stars and stripes shirt to piss off communists at Concordia. I'm not sure that's a sign of Asperger's, because the Asperger's sufferer says inappropriate things with no knowledge of the inappropriateness of it all, while what she mentioned is just examples of me acting like a "little bastard" for the fun of it. It's fun to piss on people's parades. And I know a fair bit about group psychology, so I do it in a passive confrontational way, where I can mildly piss off people without actually getting into direct confrontations. She probably made a relatively more convincing case than I did, and the doctor acknowledged the possibility that I could have Asperger's in addition to Social Anxiety Disorder, but I get the idea that he was far from convinced, and, right now, I'm leaning towards his view, that I'm too "interested" and "engaged" when I'm talking for it to be Asperger's.
Most of the appointment was having him fill out forms the government sent me, since the main purpose of the appointments is to officially get diagnosed with something, so I could get the assistance I honestly need to be a properly functioning adult. I'm not comfortable giving too many details here about the exact nature of the assistance I'm getting, but, while, in the short term, it's to help us get through a particularly rough patch, in the slightly longer term, it's to help me get a job, because I'm a smart guy and should have no difficulty functioning in most jobs, I'm just, because of my Social Anxiety Disorder and my lack of experience at 31 years of age, shit poor at selling myself and need someone else to vouch for me. I'm also hoping to get into Carleton University with the help I need to help me focus better, because I'm the sort of guy that probably could have been in an Ivy League school on a scholarship a decade ago, or, alternately, could have had my dream cartoon about the kick-ass fighting flight attendants on television 5 years ago, but I've never been able to focus at most things long enough to turn my potential into reality. Except for blogging, and I don't say this often but I am amazed that I have kept this up for over three years with hardly any breaks of longer than a few days, but that hasn't gotten me any money, fame, or credentials. I keep doing it because I enjoy it, but I'm not nearly a significant enough blogger for it to have any bearing on my station in life, so, ultimately, I'm spinning my wheels here for the sake of being semi-entertaining to a few dozen regular readers.
Not that it bothers me, I'm just sayin', that's all.
BRUSHING MY CAT...
My 10-year old cat, Ember, really, really loves being
brushed and
preemed.
So, on Saturday afternoon, while my parents were out shopping, I obliged her, and took a few photographs while I was at it.
It sure isn't easy brushing a cat and keeping a camera steady at the same time, though. So, some of these are rather blurry.
She's such a cute little girl!
And now, for the first time ever in this blog,
LET THERE BE HOME VIDEO!First-person perspective footage of me, Steve Brandon, brushing, petting, and stroking my pussy cat, Ember.(If the direct link doesn't work, it's hosted here, on Ourmedia/Internet Archive.)Yeah, that's what my voice sounds like.
LONG LOST PHOTO!
Even though I already have
a rather sizeable Fotopic gallery, I recently got
my own Flickr account mainly so I could look at the private photos in
my brother John's Flickr account.
Unlike my Flickr account, where I have every photo "Public", all but a handful of my brother's photos are "Private".
One of them is a photo I've been looking for for quite a while, one of the only photos of me in my late teens that I know of.
Here I am in my old basement, wearing a Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion t-shirt, playing Street Fighter II on the Super Nintendo at some point in the summer of 1993.At the time I was trying to grow my hair as long as Wayne Campbell from
Wayne's World (even if I knew that Mike Myers was really just wearing a wig), but, instead of a pleasing, handsome "mane", I had an uneven, ugly "mullet". In August 1993, my father started getting really frustrated with me (as I had recently flunked out of John Abbott College and was directionless) and I had to get my hair cut (not that I regret getting it lopped off).
I still have acne, but thank god it's not as bad now as it was then, where you can easily see dark red spots (and I think I was still on Accutane back then, which exasperated my depression but still left large spots on my face).
That carpet, which we had replaced when we had our house renovated in the summer of 1997, had a really tacky pattern, but somehow I miss it (and the pattern still shows up in my dreams from time to time).
We also had two turtles living in a smallish, leaky aquarium at the time. We went to England in the summer of 1997, while our house was being renovated, and left the turtles in a large wading pool, but, by the time we got back from England, the turtles had disappeared and we never even found their bodies.
