The Rise of the Moon Flower

A long time ago, when the earth was newer, wilder and untamed, existed a flower. Every evening she would slowly awaken as the inky darkness of nightfall overtook the brilliance of day, and the creatures of night arose from their daytime hibernation to roam the forests and grasslands of the planet. 

At first, her petals were twirled together so tightly, closed. At first appearing as though she were a tiny star on a vine. As the moon rose slowly in the sky, she would unfurl her petals, as if she were taking a stretch, sending her silent regards to the glowing moon in the velvet covered sky. "Good evening, little flower," the moon seemed to say. And she replied by opening her petals wide to reveal the beauty and quite feminine grace that only she, the moon flower, possessed.

I'm back(ish)

Ok so it's been a while since I posted. Life has been sort of flipped upside down for me lately. I'm still working on my Jr. Thesis project. It's coming along. Angel and I took an awesome trip to St Louis to visit Alec & Brad. It turned out great. I took about a thousand pictures, which are on my facebook. This weekend I went to visit my friend Ingrid's tea shop (Insani-Tea) in Montclair. That was fun and exciting. I ate an elevation burger for the first time in my life, which was delicious.

The sad news is Angel and I are no longer a couple. A lot of things happened. I made a lot of mistakes. I hoped for a while that he would take me back but he seems to be pretty set on this so I suppose now is the time to throw myself into my work and see how much I can accomplish this week. I'm sort of excited at the prospect of a trip to Philadelphia though to see a piece by Duchamp "Bride Laid bare by Her Bachelors, Even" with Cathlene. Angel is driving us so I'm hoping no awkwardness will arise. The two of us seem to be doing ok at getting over each other. He's still being really nice to me, which is something I wholly appreciate. It's kind of weird. I've never had a guy break up with me and simultaneously help me through the breakup as my friend. I'm thankful though. He does so much for me.

It's an action packed three weeks as we have scheduled trips to the MoMA, Philadelphia, and Felician Live is also coming up soon! (Think SNL) Mr. & Ms. Felician is coming up in April also! How busy I will be, so if I don't write you know why...

I'm off to do some real work now~
Ciao.

Tutorial 2

Ok so I started working on a tutorial today. (Wednesday) I came to discover (rather quickly) that there are some effects that can be created in CS3, but when you try to do the exact same thing in CS4 you get very different results.
The tutorial i started to use was: http://psdlearning.com/2008/06/luminescent-lines/

Using the tutorial I upped the brush size to 5, because 1 was way WAY too choppy. It looked *horrible* in CS4. That made thicker lines. After that I added an outer glow layer style (size 50) (yellow). I then used a radial blur on it at max everything. After that I used the leaf brush on a new layer (blue) and then I did another max radial blur, and then a gaussian blur (100px), I then set the blend mode to overlay. This is the result. I did finish the tutorial above but due to the differences of Cs3 and Cs4 it didn't look quite the same so I figured I'd just keep playing with it! As you can see, though, I did actually learn something from doing the tutorial which was the point.

Tutorial-a-Day

I pretty much decided that in order to tune my skills, I will do a tutorial a day. Today's tutorial was simple. Perhaps my next one will be much more complex. Here is the stock photo I used which belongs to Sugargrl14. 

The final result looked something like this:

The tutorial used was http://dewaldhein.com/joomla/photoshop/74-the-perfect-eye.html

It was a pretty easy tutorial. I found it to be entirely more effective than the way I was doing this before! I have only just now started entering the areas of adjustment layers. I hope that soon I will be navigating the Adobe programs with ease!

The JR. Seminar Project

Ok, so as you know I've been working on my Junior Seminar project about respect. I sat down today with my overseeing professor and listened to him tell me how to change my project into something it wasn't truly meant to be. I stuck to my guns though and plan to do the project anyway, my way. I understand that professors are more knowledgeable than us but at some point we have to become our own critic. I hate to take a lower grade for doing my project my way but I plan to.

This is my vision, nobody else can tell me what my vision is. I don't mind a little tweaking but I definitely don't want to hear about how everything i'm doing in my project is totally wrong. Only I know what respect means to me. I know what I think respect should mean in this world. He's trying to adapt my project to his idea of respect, and that just doesn't work for me. I chose this project purposefully, with a meaningful theory behind it. I'm starting to transition into that phase of being an artist that requires that I stop doing projects because they're cool and start doing them because they have meaning, they have value, and they have a life of their own.

Baking for Angel

Today is Valentines Day. As always I will from this point forward refer to it as Singles Awareness Day, as I always have. (Even though I'm no longer single.) Essentially I decided to treat this holiday like any other day, except perhaps that I'm writing in red today. Angel and I went to Saladworks for lunch, came home and I decided to bake him brownies. (Cream Cheese Brownies to be exact.) Which actually just came out of the oven!!! They smell delicious.


I figured I'd go ahead and post this recipe since I'm typing it up for Mike anyway.

Cream Cheese Brownies

1/4 cup butter
1 cup (6oz) semi-sweet chocolate
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 tablespoons of hot water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of Salt
(if desired you can add 1/2 cup of walnuts, although I never do.)

Cream Cheese Filling:
1 (8oz) package of cream cheese, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Prepare Cream Cheese Filling and set aside. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease an 8 or 9 inch baking pan. In a medium saucepan, combine butter or margarine and chocolate pieces. Heat over low heat until melted and smooth, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in sugar, eggs, water, and vanilla until combined. Add flour, baking soda and salt, stirring well. (If you're using them stir in the walnuts.) Spread half the chocolate batter evenly in greased baking pan. Top with Cream Cheese Filling, spreading evenly. Drop spoonfuls of remaining chocolate batter evenly on top of cream cheese filling, spreading as evenly as possible with a knife. To marble, swirl the knife gently through the batter. Bake 30-35 minutes. Do not overbake. Brownies should be moist in center. Cool in pan. Cut into squares, store in refrigerator. Makes about 20 (1-1/2-inch) brownies.

Cream Cheese Filling:
In a small bowl, beat cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla until smooth.

As you can see I decided to marble this set. I can't wait until they're cool and we can eat them. They're making the whole house smell delicious. So while I'm still protesting Valentine's Day, and the entire commercial establishment of holidays in general. I'm totally ok with spending a little quality time with my boyfriend and baking him brownies. Ok so maybe I'm sitting here writing this and he's playing Modern Warfare 2, and to some that might not really be considered "quality time." I think it is. The entire point is that we're together, even though we're doing our own thing. I'm sure later we'll sit down and watch a movie or something. :)

On a side note... Isn't it hilarious the screen names that people use these days?

Respect v2.0

I decided today that it was time for me to start learning flash. I love it and hate it right now since I can only do so much but I redid my original animation in flash and it turned out better. It has the "I will" leaving the screen at the end and you are left with the word Respect, in white.
My goal by the end of this project is to give the active viewer a look through my eyes at what it is we must truly respect in life. The initial animation simply says that we must respect. But what is it exactly that we must respect? I've come up with a short list. I plan to start with the simplest one. Life. We should respect life. This is not meant to be a pro life vs. pro choice thing. I simply think that we should respect the living denizens of this planet. I understand this isn't always possible and there are always people that we lose respect for, but for the most part I think that the world would be a better place if we respected life.

So now that I have topics set for two of my ten flip books... I just need to think of the other 8 topics for them.