Paint for your life!

I realised that I probably will be moving soon again. I also realised how many blank canvases I have in my closet. I always end up buying stuff like pretty fabrics and blank canvases to wait for the inspiration. Sometimes it comes, sometimes I get really angry when I more when I notice how much stuff I have again gathered around me. :P

So, now I'm trying to do something for the matter - I paint. :) Here are the blocks currently residing on my shelf. The one from the Moon I finished yesterday.

Chaos

I've been ranting on before how much I love the chaos theory. I saw a documentary about it in the 80s and been completely captivated ever since. :) In this documentary, they showed how they connected a videocam to a tv and shot what was visible in the screen. Because it takes a fraction of the second for the image the reach the tv through the cable, the image stood never still and created some weird unpredictable patterns on the screen. It was awesome, but we never go it working ourselves.

Last week, I bought a video camera for myself to see what I can come up with it. Today I decided to give that old fling a try. I had some great great time playing with the thing, here's a short example how did it look like... Chaos theory still proves itself, since I have no idea how those patterns are forming! :D Awesome!

Flashy

It's been ages since I did anything with Flash. I still haven't really decided if I like the programme or not - it's slightly irritating - but naturally it has to do with my very limited skills with it... :P Well, I ended up playing a bit with it, after I had made myself a new wallpaper. Here's the result. Not bad for a newbie.

Life drawing

Our school has quite many courses to choose from. During my first year I went to the classes of life drawing in the art section. I used to do that when I was living in Turku, I was in an evening class and I had a fabulous teacher. She taught me to really observe the models and pay attention to certain things. That's why I was happy to continue that hobby here in Tampere, even more so thinking that I can get study credits from it! :)

I got a bit tired of drawing every week (it can be really demanding, since you need to concentrate so thoroughly) and skipped a bit too many times last spring. That's why I'm in there again to do few more sessions and gain my study points. The teachers in the school are nice and fair, so it's soothing to go there.

I'm doing so many things right now that it was a good idea to go to that class today, the first time in almost a year! The concentration helps me to disengage from my thoughts, which can be a bit overwhelming at times. And I like to notice that I'm still able to keep my level. I'm not a fan of croquis drawings, but longer poses I like to draw. This one I made today with 3 x 20min.

New Zealand blues

I lived and worked in New Zealand from Oct 2006 until Mar 2009. Every now and then I still get huge bangs of homesickness for the place. One of those is currently on. It's scary how used you can get to your everyday life. For me, it seams somehow unreal that I ever was there. I guess this starts to be the time when the time goldens the memories, since I don't remember anymore how cold it was during the winter inside the house or what difficulties I had with some of the things over there. I only remember the sceneries and how it felt to drive back from Timaru or Christchurch and reach the Mackenzie Basin. I felt like I could breathe again.


Me preparing for the night work while working in Earth and Sky.

I will always think that Lake Tekapo is one of the most beautiful places on planet Earth. It's really easy to prove: just go to check Fraser Gunn's photography. Fraser used to be my work mate and one of my best friends in Tekapo. He's amazingly talented photographer! I could watch those animations forever, the ones about the fog over Tekapo are some of my favourites.

And by the way, if you want to buy that Mackenzie splendour dvd, I still have few of them for sale for 12e each (incl. postage). I wrote the texts to the pictures. ;)

Saturnian reality

Ok, I don't normally post unfinished works here, but I did some painting earlier today and now this thing doesn't give me any peace.



When I start painting, I don't usually plan the composition in advance - I see the way how I want it to look. When I started painting this, I was mildly worried about placing the edge of the ring almost exactly in the corner, but was too lazy to think about it any further. After painting happily away for some time, I remembered that I probably would need to add at least one moon in to the pic, even if the only place for one would be in the tightest corner.

Still, after all and everything, I find the final composition extremely intriguing! When I take a look at this painting I need to give it another glance after some time and then I end up staring at it for minutes. Maybe the slightly weird (but still somehow balanced) composition makes it more real-looking, I don't know. But I really like the graphical feeling in it. Woah! :D

Animism

Let's get it straight, I am slightly animistic. (And not even ever so slightly...) Especially everything industrial makes gets me wondering, how human things might feel. I think one of my first post in this blog was about powerlines and their beauty. I'm not into robots, though, traffic lights are enough for me.



Driving in the night through a city makes me always think, how dutiful the traffic lights seem to me. Red light is like a miniature Mordor Eye, which ravenously keeps guard over the hapless cars. When yellow comes in, the red suddenly loses focus and manages to look embarrassed, like it would be blinking and explaining why it was looking so nasty in the first place. Green, on the other hand, looks like a talking mouth, blabbering "hey, guys, you can go now, c'mon, I don't have the whole day, guys! Gee, what's that piece of shit you're driving?". Yellow alone looks like a police which shuts the green's mouth and claims that there's nothing to see here and that people should disperse and go home before the force is needed. And then it starts all over again. (Yes, I really think of these things pretty often when I see traffic lights in the dark!)

And what about the speed limits, then?! (Come on, how many of you have ever thought how personal numbers look like?) Often when I see 50 km/h sign, I think about somebody, who has been doing his nine to five work for 40 years and is a bit of a nagger and is frowning while looking at the passers-by, just in case they are speeding. 60 km/h feels apologetic, looking slightly sad but dutiful.



70 km/h is like an old spinster, who thinks she's posh, since she can let people drive a bit faster than 60, but not yet 80. 80 km/h itself looks quite serious, like someone who takes his duties gravely, but doesn't get much fun out of it. 100 km/h looks surprised, like someone who has just noticed that she's actually very pretty, but doesn't really know how to take it. And my fav 120 km/h, who always looks very enthusiastic and sprightly, like a laughing swan.

I noticed in the beginning of this year that I truly like how 2011 looks like. It's not as steady-looking as 2010, there's more jaunt in it. For me, it looks like number 2 is leading the outing and the 1s in the back are trying the keep up while chasing butterflies. No, don't ask me. I have no idea where these things come to my mind. :P

Christmas presents

People can find it really hard to buy presents for me. I hate things I can't really use and I usually like to buy the things I need by myself. And because I still value the gesture more than the present itself (at least most of the time), I hate presents that are been bought to me on the solid reason that it's my birthday/Christmas/whatever annual/centennial/once in a lifetime celebration. I'm not really materialistic, so I want to keep my stuff as minimum as possible. The only good choices about presents bought to me are books (non-fiction), gift cards, self-made gifts and something that I can use.

Me and my friends got a Christmas parcel from our friends in Germany. It was filled with goodies like biscuits and stuff and we were all really overwhelmed about such a surprise. I always find it amazing how some people can be so like-minded that they guess almost instantly what amuses me/us. :D They even have the same kind of humour as we do...



Erich's (! :D) luxus body wash
"To be used primarily by the working class, comrade farmers and (in special cases) relatives in BRD. ... Is worth of two bottles of tomato ketchup, one banana or one half of a windshield wiper in street market."

Solar eclipse

This morning, a partial solar eclipse was visible in Finland (except in Lapland where there's still "kaamos" - the time the sun won't rise). As typical, they had forcasted thick clouds for the event. (With about 95% probability there's always rain/clouds when there's some heavenly incident.) So I hadn't really even prepared. I've seen quite a few partial eclipses during my years, can't even remember them all anymore. And after Turkey 2005 with the total eclipse, well, parial ones are just not terribly interesting... But when I left home to go to library and then to school, I noticed that surprisingly the sun was shining to the wall of one house. (It was really low in the horizon, since, hey, it's winter!) So, I turned around to pick my eclipse shades, just in case. Then I had the idea to go check if it would be visible from our roof terrace, even though I started to be a bit in a hurry to school already. I went up, stared at the scene in amazement, forgot totally about my hurry and rushed back to get my camera.

I only have a small digital pocket camera I bought last year (when my old one got broken after falling to the deck of the ship we were travelling back with from Rammstein concert in Tallinn last February), so I knew I couldn't really dream of very good photos, a) because the camera doesn't have very good zoom and b) it doesn't have any solar filters plus c) since my flexibility was limited in our roof terrace only I couldn't compose the image much at all. But I happened to be extremely lucky. The stage was set almost perfectly for me:


(Click the image to get it a bit bigger)

:D Awesome! And I managed to get to school in time, too.

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Btw, the application period to our degree programme has started! If you are interested in any of the stuff I'm talking about in this blog (well, school related anyway), you should check the pretasks and application process in the Media blog. Maybe I'll see you in school next year? ;)

Same shit, different programmes

I was thinking about my past life (nice way to put it) over the last days of 2010 and browsing through my computer checking some of the old files from my previous comps. I was giggling over some of the old writings, gee I used to write some amusing stuff... (Some of it was actually quite nice, too. Hehe.) I got my first PC around 2000, but I can't quite remember the year. (My first computer was a C64.) Nowadays, I think I was extremely young those days, living in my own world, being afraid of growing up. (I guess I still am, to both, but nowadays I don't see much wrong in that anymore.)

Still, in the beginning of the millennium I was drawing pics like this:



These kind of images were illustrations of my inner world and stories that I invented in my mind. I wanted to be somekind of artist or writer to get all those ideas out of my mind. Not much has changed, nowadays the ways are just more sophisticated?

It was actually pretty amusing to notice that I haven't really evolved anywhere, since I had just started to play with PhotoShop to draw something like this:



:D So, same shit, different programmes. I guess I'll just stay childish in this sense for the rest of my life, seeing things and stories around me and living in some kind of unreal world. It's not so bad, after all.