Danger Den

It has gotten to the point where I have about ten blogs, and while maintaining them all has been my preferred method of procrastination lately, I decided I should streamline them so that I can have some sort of coherent “brand.” I used to have a website called leckybang.com (see banner above), but that’s not the most professional thing in the world, plus it’s hard to maintain AND someone hacked it, put a bunch of porno on it and got me in trouble with the server. Over the last month, I’ve decided Tumblr is my blog platform of choice. Maybe its the consonant cluster at the end, who knows. Anyway, now this will just be my random post/updates section, and art will go on my art Tumblr. 

-If you follow me for art, you should click “art” in the navigation bar and follow that Tumblr. 

Thanky! 

I’m developing a writing blog. The first week is going to be FAN FICTION WEEK. I wrote the first one about a fat American witch from the Harry Potter universe. I hope to write in it every day.

It has the same format I used for The Daily’s A&E Tumblr. I took one of the themes and tweaked the HTML until I liked it better. It makes this Tumblr look kind of shitty, so I might switch over to that soon.

Anyway, here’s my profile on Jelloslave in Sunday’s Star Tribune.

Today my friend John said, “Becky, you have so many blogs, you should get hired as one of those social media experts who get paid 90 grand a year.” 

and I said, “You know what John, you’re right!”

but for now just poor and fractalling my personality into blogs. 

colored version

my faux 3D version

I’m developing a writing blog right now and i think the first week is going to be devoted to fan fiction. i made this GIF for it

playing with this illustration that i made this morning.

ryan made his new facebook profile pic and i think it’s cool

i drew this in astronomy today. it’s from a GQ fashion shoot.

i think next i’m going to draw something with this in it.

I updated my language blog. It’s about Chatroulette.

this drawing has been a real pain to color. here’s my best shot.

listening to the new MGMT CD. It seems a lot sadder than the last one.

“it’s not the life lesson i’ve had guessed/

if you are conscious you must be depressed/

or at least cynical,” they sing on “Siberian Breaks.”

The track “Someone’s Missing” finds the band close to their old anthemic power, but the message doesn’t match the tone as they sing, 

“It feels like/ someone’s missing/ it feels like/ something’s missing.”

That’s not exactly “Let’s do heroin and fuck with the stars … find some more models/ everything must run its course.”

But I’ve always respected MGMT as a band that uses the difference between tone and content to make you unsure of their attitude toward what they’re saying. Are they sincere, or are they just performing a perspective they don’t agree with at all?

ANYWAY

Here is a list of things I want to learn, in the order in which I’ll get to them:

-Screenprinting 

-Spray painting

-Japanese/French, every language I come across

-Flash

-Font-making, but mostly to make codes more than fonts

-PHP (maybe … my brother-in-law says it’s not fun)

or there’s this. i want to make something with blue and red that looks faux 3D.

ok so i haven’t gone out and done anything cool yet, but i did something even COOLER. i figured out how to work with my drawings on illustrator. all you have to do is import them, go to this button that says “live trace,” go to the arrow next to it and pick “tracing options.”

then you click expand to turn it into a vector image you can mess with:

This is for all of us out there lacking in that $80,000 art education but also owning illustrator. Woo.

Anyway this is my preliminary messing with it, but with more time I’ll pick a better color scheme and separate some of the areas better.

Ok, a preface here. These aren’t my only favorites, just a handful, and the emphasis is on artists with a strong web presence. Also, I am going to post some of their photos, and if any of them read this and want me to take them down, just send me an email (lang0750@gmail.com) and consider it done.

Danimal

Danimal has a style that is totally bright, original and unpredictable. I love his compositions and he has the coolest house/screenprinting studio I’ve ever seen. I interviewed him last summer and I guess he thought in the story he sounded dumb. Not my intention! He is also in the band Gay Beast.

His roommate is Dan Black from Landland

Broken Crow

At the St. Paul Art Crawl I met Tony Tudisco, who runs the art vending machine at Altered Esthetics, and after I bought one of Broken Crow’s cigarette-sized pieces, he said, “Go to their website!” Six months later I did, and I was blown away. They paint wall-sized murals of powerful and vulnerable animals in bright colors. Broken Crow is John Grider and Mike Fitzsimmons.

Michael Gaughan

Michael Gaughan’s technical skills are some of the best in the city, plus he has a crazy imagination. He is getting super famous for doing the Gayngs cover art.

Terrence Payne

Terrence Payne is the founder of Rosalux gallery. I just discovered his blog and I think he is one of the most technically impeccable illustrators in the Twin Cities, and also has a very unique style. Hard to do!

Adam Turman

One of the most famous artists/designers in town, he makes the cycle and cityscape art that represents Minneapolis so well. I interviewed him and he was ridiculously humble and nice. 

Drew Peterson

Go to his website because the images are in flash and I can’t copy ‘em. Amazing use of color.

Tonja Torgeson

She’s creative and conceptual but has the talent to back it up. 

Amy Rice

Her work reminds me of Henry Darger.

Jennifer Davis

Just discovered her, but I love her use of color. Her images are girly, but in a dark way.

SisBro Design

Sister and brother Brett and Erin Smith. They are some of the creators of The New Land of Milk and Honey.

Annie Lee Larson

Her website banner cracks me up:

Her apartment is also very cool. She recently resigned from designing apparel for Target and now makes amazing knitwear. She’s also one of the creators of the New Land of Milk and Honey.

Other big names that I like:

Burlesque of North America

Aesthetic Apparatus

Deuce 7

Squad 19

Anthem Heart

Anyway I’m sure I’m embarrassingly forgetting a bunch of people, so I’ll try to add more later! It is Friday night, maybe I should go do something cool now, like ingest alcohol somewhere. 

 i don’t want to be one of those weird people who just paints famous people all the time because they can’t think of anything better to paint, but i kind of am. usually i pick a picture to paint because something about it grabs me, like the shading is perfect/it’s all 1.618 golden mean or something. if only i could channel my writer-y ideas into art i could be conceptual enough to be a “real artist.” 

i cover the art beat a lot in my journalism gigs and i’ve learned how different artists are from graphic designers. mostly, artists can get away with sucking a lot more than graphic designers can. you can make half a sketch or a portrait with messed-up eyes and people will just assume you did it that way out of some higher purpose. graphic designers get paid, and have to please a client. but my favorite of all in the twin cities are concert poster makers. we have an awesome poster making scene, and i’ve gotten to meet lots of them. maybe i’ll make a different blog of my favorites, so if it gets linked or something it won’t be prefaced by my rambly paragraph about my tina fey painting.

anyway, i wanted to post a bunch of songs today, but mostly i can only think of this one:

http://stereogum.com/306552/dirty-projectors-dark-eyes-bob-dylan-cover/mp3s/ 

Amazing! i love dirty projectors so much. they sound like mariah carey mixed with grizzly bear, aka my childhood mixed with my adulthood.

i made the Christopher Walken watercolor. I made him look very morbid. Maybe he looks more cheerful when he only had red and blue layers.

anyway, april is coming up and i have it marked as the month when lots of cool stuff happens:

-Dan Deacon comes to town (this time I am gonna remember it)

-Buffalo Moon’s CD comes out

-My baby niece (Kaylee) turns two

this is kaylee with my sister jenny. jenny’s an architect at BWBR, a St. Paul firm, and she is working on designing hospitals to be magical places for children. they want it to look like a treehouse, but not in a way that is, as she put it, “too literal” or “too kitschy.” as a kid, jenny taught me about red hot chili peppers, mariah carey and swearing. 

i was proud that i captured kaylee’s face after too many cookies. maybe i should be a photojournalist. just kidding. 

anyway, i got my esquire today and i thought, “is that fox TINA FEY!?”  when tina fey wins, we all win. can’t wait to read mine. this photo is extra cool because it reminds me of the movie “hair.”

ahoy! i’m trying to learn vector drawing. it’s like real drawing but faster and easier and ends up looking better, which is all depressing but mostly cool. this is me messing around w/ a picture of jack white. i didn’t have much time to fix up the stuff because there are lots of people over drinking for st. patrick’s day.