He'd let us in, knows where we've been

I guess I'm just like a turtle hiding underneath its hardened shell

Messing around with the image of a turtle on Illustrator to try to make it look like a car

Golden slumbers fill your eyes smiles awake you when you rise

Working big again: 18x24 graphite and black prisma with some gold acrylic on drawing paper. But what is it?

(a waffle)

Beep beep'm, beep beep, yeah

Next undertaking: parking permit design for DOTS at Maryland. There's a contest where you can earn a free permit for next year if they decide to use your design for the permits, which is especially enticing in the midst of $206 spring-only permit registration. Official rules:

Create a design using University of Maryland, College Park images, pictures, or logos and colors using Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.

Designs submitted in Adobe Photoshop format must be:
• In editable layer format and not flattened
• Be at least 300 dpi, and have a 0.125” bleed

Templates should be designed with the following in mind:
• Permit dimensions are 4.75”x 2.75”; please include a 1/8" bleed
• A 1" x 1" lot assignment foil box will be placed on the bottom portion of the permit
• A 0.75” x 2.25” control number box will be placed on the bottom of the permit
• The designs should be versatile to enable color changes for status differentiation

Finalists will be selected by representatives of the Department of Transportation Services from eligible entries received. The judges will select the entries based on the following criteria in their sole discretion:
• 50 percent positive representation of the University of Maryland
• 25 percent appearance of design and 25 percent suitability for use

And the template:


I'm thinking probably Photoshop, not Illustrator, so I can bring in images like Testudo and the M, and because I feel like that's been more my strength anyway.

When it's time for leaving, I hope you understand...

Car drawing, ok?

And the rest is simply shady

So I added the shadows with a black glaze, and you can really really see the texture of the gel medium on the eggs. Patrick Craig would hate it. There are some full opacity marks in the carton though, and I think I might actually be done.

Got a good reason for taking the easy way out

Let's not look at this as "You half-assed this on the third day," but instead, "You did a bit of casual contour drawing on Christmas day. How dedicated."

Leave it all behind, never change my mind

Today I completely changed the colors, and then knifed on some heavy gloss gel to prepare to glaze shadows over. So basically all that remains of yesterday's painting is the cartoon. The nice thing about working small like this though is that you can change your mind about big things like colors without spending 12 hours and $87 in paint to redo everything.

"Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn't, do something else."

If you make art every day for a year, the odds seem bad that it will all suck. Ideally it might even get better over time. Basically, I'm an art major and all, and this is allegedly what I want to do with my life. FDR seems to think "doing something" is more likely to lead to progress than "not," so in 2010 at least, I'm going to try his approach.

Every day for a year I'm going to make something that could, by someone charitable, be considered art, and then photograph it and post about it here. Worst case scenario all this malarkey will just take up a lot of space, so I'm covering that loophole with photography and prompt gifting/outright disposal.

So here goes. First project: more eggs (a fitting, new birth-y image, right?). Reference image:

And progress so far:



By the way it's tiny. Just 5x7, because I happened to have a little baby canvas on hand. Not sure yet if this is going to serve as a sketch for a bigger one, or just a full-fledged, 100% convenient and manageable project.