Collette Curran's Art Tracker

Time For an Update Part I

2010-04-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

It's been too long since I've updated this blog. *sob* I'll just post three parts with work up until now clumped together. :)

Sketches

2009-08-29T23:56:00.001-07:00

Sketches - some old, some newer

Long time

2009-08-29T23:42:00.000-07:00

Good time for an update.

This post goes exclusively to 'Parting of the Red Sea' and its partner tutorial. (Click to see full sizes)

Part I

Part II

Elephant Rome

2008-07-15T20:49:00.000-07:00

I suppose it's time for an update, eh? Every time I start a journal, I never keep up with it. Usually, it tends to start out fairly strong, then it slowly dwindles to a sad and pathetic nothing. Not unlike my life. (Nah, life is a charm).
So here's the update: no job yet. I can only blame myself and my permanent laziness and inactivity as far as applications go. No matter how hard I try, sitting and doing nothing does not get me employed. I guess all those TV cliches of peeps sitting, waiting and maybe even wishing by the phone requires a bit more than mental enthusiasm. Not that I mind a life completely summed up by a line of Jack Johnson lyrics.
I've done a bit of artin' and fartin' since the last I checked in here, so I'll just plop down everything I've got so far now:

This one here ^ is for a tournament over at deviantart. There are only 32 people chosen to be in the tournament out of about 250 character entries. If the character was interesting enough (and though it claimed to be an unbiased contest, I'm sure some drawing skills helped determine the winners), you were chosen to participate in the competition. Just getting in was a challenge enough in itself, but I found out about a week ago that I had made it in. WHOO! I pat myself on the back for that one - the other contestants were pretty tough.

I'm going to say this is about a year old. Needs some tweaks now that I'm looking back on it.

Um, I'm not really sure about this one. It was a request from a friend. I'm guessing it's some sort of inside joke... :-/ Crazy pigs.

Nothing much to say here. I plan to recolor this in warmer tones pretty soon. The fur was a bitch to do.

So that's all that's really been going on in the art realm. I enjoy doing this kind of art, but it's definitely not where I want to be heading as far as a career goes. I actually mostly did the last piece to promote what I can do for commissions, so I can earn me some monies. As much as I love and enjoy dragons, they aren't my life. But the y are for a LOT of people, and I'm hoping that I can earn a little cash illustrating for the real dragon-fanatics. Or even just drawing a simple character is what I notice a lot of people pay money for. Either way, it's good practice and I don't mind terribly doing those kinds of illustrations.
I just noticed that I'm kinda going off on a tangent with no real ending point. So I'll stop here. The End.

P.S. As far as the title goes, it's one of the songs from Cyne's new album coming out pretty soon. I'm really looking forward to it. :)

The Battle

2008-06-21T03:39:00.000-07:00

So this summer looks like it will provide a lot of opportunities to do fun and interesting things sure to give me a third degree burn by the time autumn rolls around. I’ve marked my mental calendar with plenty of dates to go to the beach and camping, the latter of which I plan to carry out with the least amount of supplies and only the bare essentials. I’m amazed with as infatuated as I am with stars and space and what-have-you that I have yet to have spent an actual night under the empty sky, especially one without a river of smog flowing up to fifty feet into the atmosphere.
I still haven’t found a job, but I can honestly blame that on my lack of effort. Summer hours, open as a bird’s choice of destination, would have been ideal to land me a part-time job somewhere serving coffee or selling books, but our week of family vacation time is right at the beginning of July, early enough so I don’t want to apply anywhere, but late enough for me to go crazy with this heat and nothing to do but bitch and moan (in a very non-sexy fashion mind you).
Most days I spend awake for nearly all of the morning of tomorrow. I aim bedtime around three o’clock, but the hour hand usually drifts one more number before I have all my fans set up and the windows open and sheets pulled off to the side in preparation for chasing down the Sandman.
Yesterday, a summer night (morning) like any other, I was up alone watching Dante’s Inferno on Ovation TV, which I would like to mention as a very interesting and comical satire/ parody of the old literature. While this was happening (and while I was trying to enjoy my Pad Thai), I noticed this very large and homely creature scurry across the clean, yellow wall behind the TV. I was quite literally shocked (I think my heart stopped for about five beats). Now I’m not your usual pussy; I catch snakes, cut up worms, pick up horse doody, but giant insects are not my favorite foe. I tend to call for help if six legs are involved, I might screech for it if there are eight.
Fortunately, this particular specimen had only six legs, but sheer size (plus a pair of very usable wings) made up for any lack of creepiness a spider would naturally fill in for a modest aracnaphobic such as myself. Though in doubt, I new for the short moment the bug crawled out across the wall, then fluttered through the air back behind the TV furniture, that it was a monstrous cockroach.
Now, I know cockroaches are supposed to be common and every household can have them and they can even be enjoyable company (yes, I watched Joe’s Apartment when I was younger), but I have never seen a cockroach in my house before. Never. And I would have once boasted that my house would never be subject to such vermin. This is no longer the case. We had a cockroach.
A big one.
This problem needed to be solved immediately. You see, there’s this innate human fear of the unknown, and such is why so many of us fear death and dark places and entrance exams. This applies to everything. If I didn’t take care of this beast now, he could be anywhere tomorrow night, and not being a betting type of girl, you wouldn’t catch me taking a chance that he wouldn’t be hiding in the crevices of the couch the next time I sat down to watch TV.
The information I had now was valuable, so I had to take this opportunity. Looking around for any blunt object, my eyes fell upon my stinky basketball shoes (crusty socks still inside) that I had thankfully refused to put away. Perfect. Not only would this roach go down, but he’d go down the putrid way.
Clutching my weapon in one hand and eating Pad Thai nervously with the other, my eyes trained upon the wall around the TV, waiting and missing the movie (thankfully I have TiVo). I waited a while, but not long. Soon he appeared again, crawling like a sinful sunspot on the bright yellow wall, legs scratchy and horrible, antennae long and lethal.
I snuck up on him from across the room, slowly taking pillows off one of the couches so I could reach him. Climbing up slowly, I watched the beast and his foul ways, grooming his antennae, shifting with utter confidence upon the spot. Reluctantly – these walls were recently painted and my mother slept on the other side – I raised my shoe.
I paused. Aimed.
He paused. Stared at me.
I felt my knees quiver on the leather couch. What a ferocious beast! With shining body armor and the likelihood of giant, slobbery fangs, it just looked.
WHAM!
I struck before I even knew I had. The shoe collided with incredible force, landing with a hollow thud against the wall. But there was no crunch. The roach had fallen down behind the furniture.
Crafty devil…
So back to waiting again. I could hardly hold my chopsticks, so I instead just sat there across the room, watching. Once again, the insect-gladiator showed itself, this time crawling out from the other side even higher. This time he was behind the birdcages next to the fireplace; the was no way for me to reach him. Instead I watched. He would be the one to make a mistake, I knew.
And he did. He flew.
At first I panicked. I used to laugh at my father for having a fear of grasshoppers because they have a tendency to fly in every which way, more than likely directly at you. I understood that fear last night, when the monster took to the skies of my living room and piloted his way haphazardly in my direction. I readied my shoe, but he didn’t come within range.
Instead he flew over me and across the hallway, toward the front door. I pushed my tray away and followed closely, but I lost him in the darkness. I stayed in complete silence and stillness, watching for a flutter in the darkness. None came, so I darted up the hall, turned on the hall light, then returned just as quick, hoping that the bug hadn’t moved. The art room door was open next to where I had last seen him. If he had gone in there, all hope would be lost. The art room is a more like a catastrophe room, even though it’s recently been cleaned out extensively. If the cockroach had found his way into there, he could easily have hid behind a million corners and in all sorts of dark spaces.
I continued to watch, my shoe above my head at ready. This would end tonight. He had made one mistake, now he just needed one more.
Finally, crawling from his refuge behind the umbrella-holder, the roach made his way out and along the seam between the door and the tile. I crept close, doing all I could not to startle it.
When I got close enough to see his ugly, sinister face, I paused. If I struck now, while he was so close at the seam between the door and tile, the shoe might catch and form a triangle over the roach, protecting him in the right angle of my fury. So I waited. At long last, the beast took two steps outward from the door, his giant prickly legs scratching horribly for purchase along the slippery ground.
CRACK!
Again, I struck without thinking. This time, something crunched under the shoe. Hells yeah. I did a victory dance, then took a picture.

This whole story is not the punch line that I am trying to get to. After wiping the sweat from my brow and my heart rate had returned to normal, I decided to show my mother what I had accomplished during her slumbers. I left the roach flattened to the floor and my shoe nearby to illustrate the scene, then left a note (as you can see in the photo). I left another note to my mother elsewhere in the house where she always looks before she leaves for work.
The next morning my mother woke me up to tell me what she had done. Apparently, she had spotted the shoe by the front door before she read the first note she was suppose to receive to lead her to the scene. She was going to remove it, but then thought that I might have left it there as a reminder to myself to go to the gym. Then she saw the cockroach, made even larger by his pancake-status. Not realizing the roach was dead, and taking this perfect opportunity with my shoe so nearby, my mother thwarted the bug again.
Then, when it didn’t move (or change shape for that matter) and she spotted the note, everything fell into place.
Oh mom, what would I do without you?

And you too, dad...

Senchorlyne Reference - Final

2008-06-02T15:03:00.001-07:00

Finished this up. Pretty large file.
If you read it, there's a spot where there should be a space between "vomeronasa"l and "organ."

Blech

2008-05-30T01:37:00.000-07:00

April - May 2008 stuffs

More Drawlings!

2008-05-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

Two more pieces to throw out to the world of art-thieves. Enjoy.

^ Click to enlarge!

^ Looks better if you don't click!

Paper bags and movie-goers

2008-05-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I went and payed $18 to see Prince Caspian at the El Capitan theatre in Hollywood. The movie was pretty good, but the whole thing was deflated by this crazyass annoying lady sitting next to me. I thought that the biggest problem-makers in movies were children, but this woman must've been in her forties and she was pissing. me. off.
I knew I was in for it when she first sat down and elbowed be three times trying to get the lid off her popcorn-bucket. Everytime something happened to a good character, she'd go "awww!!!" or applaud when something good happened. She had endless conversation through the whole film with either her three children or whoever was on the other end of her phone (she was on the phone about three times throughout). She stepped on my feet when she got excited and spilled popcorn all over the floor. She asked ME questions during the beginning ("what did I miss?" or "Was there a show before the movies started?") She bounced around in her seat like a 3-year-old during every battle, gasped as loud as humanly possible, insulted the antagonists and cheered the protagonists all aloud and repetetively.
This was the best part of it all: during a part of the movie with rising tension, she kept saying to her kids and to the film "Oh, the lion's going to come!" "When will the lion get here?" or "Here comes the lion, I know it. He'll save them" and then turned to her son and asked, "Who's Aslan?" FUCKING STUPID BITCH!
I feel bad for my brother because he could hear a little bit of her, but had to deal with me leaning on him mostly for the whole movie because my space had been aggressively invaded.

I understand that people get excited for movies; half the theatre applauded when the stupid lion showed up or when the enemies were defeated. But I mean, c'mon, you can't be that stupid to not realize that other people can hear you. And these other people payed a lot of money for this experience.
I wish I had been able to say something to her, but she seemed like one of those creatures that gets fired up when you kindly say, "shut the fuck up," so the problem would have been worse.
Anywho, that's my rant. I'm done now.

And I finished this just a few moments ago. Fun and easy. It's good to get some art out quickly. Refreshing.

And this was earlier this week to go along with my nonfiction piece called "Bible of Cinema." Everything in it that I condoned as holy was broken by the crazy bitch at Prince Caspian. Irony sucks sometimes.

Quickie

2008-05-13T23:38:00.000-07:00

Speedpaint took me about 2 hours. Good practice, but I definitely need more. Textures make Collette angry..

Post Storm

2008-05-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

After such an angry post, I think it’s time to lighten up things a bit.. or at least let the dust settle. Here's what I've cooked up about a day or so ago:

Ha, I must seem like such a drama-bitch from that last post, and I guess at the time I was. Ah well, shit happens.
I’m up for a job interview tomorrow, so I’m gathering all me lucky charms. I don’t know why it’s so hard to find a quality job these days. I mean, all I want to do is get some decent employment above fast food. Is it really too much to ask not to work is a grease-dump? America apparently thinks so.
School’s going pretty well indeed, except for the part where I fail my Japanese midterm, but we’ll kindly ignore that. I’m actually quite enjoying my nonfiction workshop class… mostly. There are some wonderful writers in there that make me blush to turn in my own work, and then there’s other writers who I want to turn my work in with. I suppose it is too much to assume college students know that there is something grammatically retarded with this sentence: “When, I got home I decided to do my homework.” Obviously that decision was not favored for your years in grade school.
Sad really, but this kind of thing makes my work shine like some golden goose of riddles and alliteration. That is until someone tries to critique five pages of my masterpiece. You know people are hurting to find something to correct when their lecturing you on too many adverbs (of which there was about a total of three) or that “writin’” and “doin’” is less of voice and more of an inclination toward laziness. As if it took less effort to press the apostrophe key than to press a ‘g.’
My intermural basketball games are over and I’m as relieved as I am kinda let down. My team was a grand disaster, with three girls who could hold together a play and two boys determined to destroy anything even remotely similar to an organized strategy. The main problem I noticed was the fact that every other team we played not only had more than five players (enough to switch out and give a rest to others), but also seemed to have played together for long enough to ‘click.’ My team worked like five oxen pulling a wagon in each direction of the compass plus one. We’d never make it to Oregon.
Hopefully next quarter me and my good friend Danielle can rally up some peeps who once happened upon the word “teamwork.”
Anywho, I’d tell you lots more, but I’m too lazy and am in dire need of a showering.. and this post, I realize with regret, is quite boring. That’s that then.

Self Portrait

2008-04-26T12:42:00.000-07:00

Whoo! Finally done with this thing! I've been working on and off of it forever and had to hurry up and finish it last night before I got sick of it. Anywho, I think it came out fairly accurate, if not a little wonky...

In other news, I need a job... Still living at home is killing me slowly. I'm becoming volatile and taking out a lot of my malice on both of my unfortunate parents. Of course there's no way I could become totally independent, but I just need to get away before I kill someone.
And my financial situation is ugh!

[I've removed the great long drag of complaints in this area because I'm trying not to come off as a determinably angry person]

Man, I'm sorry for rambling, but this has really gotten on my nerves! I'm being rubbed raw and I think the final straws are being drawn.
Haha, so I hope everyone else is having a wonderful life!

Homework to spirituality...

2008-04-11T20:28:00.000-07:00

The gods lived here once, I know, where the grass still pushes between the cracks of stepping-stones and trees bend like old men over souvenir shops. Once, only the birds knew their own names and the foxes belonged in their own folklore. Moss, pushed now into forgotten corners, creeps like a stranger onto unshadowed sidewalks. Rivers fell where earth chose to end, mountains leveled where rocks chose not to rise. Spirits gave homage to spirits in the dry of hollowed logs, lighting vacancy only by moonlight, plucking ripe offerings straight from the tree and calling cherry blossoms to their damp face.

This place once harbored its own symphony; summer rains fell in a soft jazz of ivory and ebony keys, wind gasped between the bamboo thickets and fluttered in a drastic dance of tumbling red leaves. The biwa now, no matter the skill of fingers upon its strings, is but a carnal mimicry of the cicadas’ passionate requiem. Cliffs, steep and crowded against each other and the sky, echoed one another’s voice as softly-pummeled drums. Deer ran on three quick strings while wolves pursued on delicately stretched skins. Now, it is only the spring flowers that remember their bow-struck descent.

The gods once lived here, I think, beneath these stones of cement and in the wood of crimson-painted temples. They poured streams from the sky, raised insects from the soil, sacrificed holy deer and rebirthed them under wooded canopies. They once asked only the price of bravery to walk their unbeaten paths and cared not for the small metal disks that do not dissolve like the leaves do. They once gave all they had to give without a thought of a returned favor, save the respect to fear their omnipotence and beauty.

Things have changed now. Birds have become the sparrows, the egrets, the kingfishers. Great soulless structures house identities in plaster and gold, wrapped in the garb stolen from husks of farmed moths. Deer - protected, fed, fat - fear not the last wolf slaughtered without rebirth under a canopy molded from iron. Spirits – greedy – pick pockets and feed on the expense of a wish and prayer. Moonlight pales next to neon, raccoon dogs grin guilefully on the steps of shops. The cicadas are annoying, the cliffs are hard to climb.

Pay ten dollars, see the great Buddha, bronze head ripped from foundations of earth. These steps have been here hundreds of years, River’s corrosive labor spanning a century of centuries chipped and molded easily by hammer, nail, hatchet. This stream directed this way, that river stopped at that point. Move this mountain, cultivate that field. Too many trees, not enough streets. Too many mountains, not enough buildings. Too many rivers, not enough canals. Too many instruments, not enough conductors. Too many gods, not enough practicality.

Trees to lumber to houses.

Rocks to tar to asphalt.

Gods to spirits to imagination.

Nature to dying to dead.

The gods lived here once, I only but suspect, when a sparrow sings like a dove, or when the temple creaks like a tree, or when the buildings echo each other like softly-pummeled drums.

Gah, finally!!

2008-04-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

Finally finished an entry for a contest that I've been working on for what seems like forever. Sucks b/c I came back to it after about a week or two of inactivity, then forgot what style and painting methods I was using. So this is one deadline out of the way, onto the next...

Environmental Practice

2008-03-24T18:18:00.001-07:00

My biggest problem is environments, so I really really need to work with them. My goal for the next few days is to take the primary colours and do environments based off each colour. This one I did is for blue, but it's really more green than blue. Oh well

Body Practices

2008-03-24T18:07:00.001-07:00

I seriously need to practice more anatomy. It's so damn hard to get into a beginning art class at my university, I think there's only about 4 or 5 different classes offered. Unfortunately, you're kinda stuck floating helpless and unable to take any different art courses if you don't first take the beginning classes. Sucks like a vacuum it does..

Anyway, I'm trying to motivate myself to become a more consistent practicer. I want to do just one something for practice every day. Its just getting myself to stay with it and not become a lazy bum and watch TV instead that's the hard part. Good thing spring break just started so I have plenty of time to fall into some sort of habit. These I did just a few nights ago, so I'm off to a good start.

These are from a really popular book called Anatomy for the Artist. It's super helpful, but seriously neglected by me. I plan on breaking the spine a little more over the next few months.

First Test!!!

2008-03-19T23:23:00.000-07:00

Just a test. Yup. I'm changing that image up top pretty soon so it fits nicely, thank you very mucho...