027-030 Spirals and Hearts

January 27: The clip art continues! This one is in classy black and white.


January 28 and 29: Worked on an entry for the shirt.woot Heart derby. I did the sketch on the 28th and transformed it into the final piece on the 29th. I'm not entirely happy with how it came out, but conceptually I think it is one of my best. Hearts is a great card game. As always, click on the shirt composition image to go to the derby submission for a larger view.


January 30: Another derby entry. Came up with a fun concept for a quick and easy design. I think I did ok on the duct tape texture.


An alternative title was "It Doesn't Fix Everything".

Maybe I just need more tape.

019-021 Clip Art, Toes, Palindrome

January 19: Recall, if you will, the horror of January 11. Well, I've decided to make it a regular thing. Behold: clip art.

There are two arrangements. The first one was taken without flash, which is the reason why it's a little blurry. On another note, I can't believe my fingernails grew so much in just a week. By my previous estimates, I only clipped once every two weeks. Hmm.

January 20: TOES.


They grow much slower than fingernails. Awesome stuff.

January 21: It's the weekly shirt.woot sketch! It's been three weeks since MSCE started and I've managed to come up with an idea each week. Aside from Vertices, I haven't taken any of them through to final design. This week's theme is Palindromes. I went through a few other ideas - senile felines, stressed desserts, emit time, "No sir, away! A papaya war is on!" - but ultimately ended up back at the classic "star rats". Simplicity is where it's at.
I actually really like this concept. Rats fit so perfectly into space, given that the moon is made of cheese!

I'll consider doing a cleaner version of this for Saturday's MSCE...

011-013 Nails, Sonnet, Music

January 11: Fingernail art.


OK. Yeah. There's a lot of weird art out there, so this qualifies... right? Fingernails, each clipped in an entire piece. It's just something I do.

I took the photos myself. Having only two hands, the above image is actually composed of two photos. If my left hand looks a bit larger than the right, that's the reason. It's not just because I'm left-handed. ;)

The red mark on the knuckle of the middle finger of my right hand is a scar from my streetfighting days. Bare-knuckle boxing. Punching a wall? Fine, fine - I tripped on the stairs. ARE YOU HAPPY?

January 12: Petrarchan sonnet.

Her Eyes
How strange to see her eyes in novel frame!
But memories with Morpheus made new
Will yet retain the source in dreamt review:
So too her semblance shines with eyes the same.
And so he grew to love that sacred flame
That lights her eyes like Morning fills the dew -
Why must he then so seldomly pursue
The breaking dawn or heliacal claim?
'Tis fear and only fear that holds him fast;
"No more!" he says, but plying every trade
Of vision - scope and lens and pane and port -
He seeks her eyes, her light, the stars amassed,
The only constant source in shifting shade,
'Til finally he finds the sunlit court.

This poem is definitely not my best work. I decided to try something new - a Petrarchan sonnet. I've written several sonnets in the past, but mostly in the Shakespearean form. The unfamiliar rhyming scheme got to me, I think, and it didn't help that I was writing this late at night (the midnight deadline for MSCE is tough). I like my octave but I am not fond of the sestet. Might just be that I'm not a fan of the cdecde rhyme scheme of Petrarchan sonnets. The octave's abbaabba is alright.

January 13: Tone Matrix music.

Behold: the Tone Matrix! This fun little flash game lets you make very short music loops. A neat feature is that you can share creations by copying and pasting matrix coordinates (just right click on the matrix itself).

Here is my creation for today:

123650,8576,8200,1024,65760,0,78216,192,68612,8192,16612,19968,16416,19464,34306,33544

I realize that this is not the most innovative of things to do for MSCE, but it's pretty neat, kinda cool, and fairly quick to do. I'm somewhat busier than usual at the moment - it works, right? It's also fun.

Just for kicks, here are the various parts to the above loop.

Bass line:
122880,8192,8192,0,65536,0,77824,0,65536,8192,16384,16384,16384,16384,32768,32768

High notes:
2,0,8,0,0,0,8,0,4,0,4,0,32,8,2,8

Everything else:
768,384,0,1024,224,0,384,192,3072,0,224,3584,0,3072,1536,768