Behold the blog of Jen!

FIN!

2009-06-10T10:29:00.000-07:00

I have officially completed my sophomore year. Thank GOODNESS! Even though I still need to finish cleaning my house, I can nearly taste sweet summer. Now all will be well and good...assuming that I passed astronomy. Stupid astronomy.
Anyway what's done is done and now I'm on my way to freedom! Look out summer cause here I come!

The one that didn't make it...

2009-06-06T18:36:00.000-07:00

I really wanted to put this into my book, but the horizontal thing is such a downer. I mainly wanted to show off my photoshop skills. That's actually two photos, one where I stood inside to create the shadow and one where I stood outside. I combined them in Photoshop to make it look like two people. Cool no?

Behold! The Book of Jen!

2009-06-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

Yes here it is! My final assignment for DMF. I quite like it, if I do say so myself. I took all the photos myself between the hours of 1-4 in the morning. Pulling a Cindy Sherman, I also modeled for them. And although I'm a craptastic model, I think it worked out. So enjoy my experiment into our fear of what lies beyond our doors in the dark.

MY GOD. Finals are eating my soul!

2009-06-06T18:08:00.001-07:00

Yes it's true. Finals may, in fact, be eating me alive. GAH. I am SO insanely jealous of my friends who are already home. All relaxed and in summer mode. I just want to get home to this:

And this:

And of course this:
And the TONS of other things that I miss and am starving for but all of them would take up far too much space on my silly blog.
I just want my smooth TK summer.
Immediately please.

A little preview...

2009-05-31T16:11:00.001-07:00

...of my book! I've always been interested in our fear of what is outside our doors at night. For this series of photos I'm exploring this concept with the notion that maybe what we should be fearing is behind those doors. Are you excited? I bet you're excited.

The most intense romantic movie ever!

2009-05-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

And bonus: it takes place in a castle. Oh yeah baby.

If I were to write a book called The Crew...

2009-05-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

...this would be the contents page. I know Dennis had six little boxes, but I liked the size and layout with just four so HA. Also, I'm not sure how to create a border in InDesign, thus I didn't make one. HA again!

The Epic Motion Picture of the Summer!

2009-05-18T13:27:00.001-07:00

Come one come all to the motion picture event of the summer! Will good prevail over evil? Your future depends on it!

Lets take a trip to the 70s.

2009-05-11T18:48:00.000-07:00

For my latest endeavor into the world of photography, I decided to appropriate pictures of my mom by recreating them. I displayed these in class in an old photo album along with some of the original photos of my mom that I didn't recreate, thus creating confusion on who's experience you were viewing. They aren't exactly the same as the original photos, but I feel that I got the gist of them down. I also added some aging to the photos once I printed them, so they look a little different in person. I'll post the original photos of mom so you can compare later.

Botticelli Knew What Was Up.

2009-04-29T10:43:00.000-07:00

Above is the Birth of Venus done by the most awesome Botticelli. Such a lovely piece. In art history I learned all about this painting and this time a year ago I could analyze the crap out of this thing. But it's been a while so I'm a little rusty. From what I can remember the shell that Venus is being blown to shore on is supposed to be some kind of a metaphor for lady parts. And the guy blowing her in was Zephyrs, a God that was all about passion. I can't remember the name of the lady on his arm, but I do know that she was all about flowers. And I'm pretty sure that he abducted/raped her. Something crazy happened there.
Anyway, it's a lovely painting, one of my faves. I saw this one in person when I was in Florence and it took my breath away.

Picturing the Other

2009-04-28T19:24:00.000-07:00

This is Steve, he works at the Houston's gallery and framing place downtown. He MAKES custom frames! Wicked cool. All those corners behind him are sample pieces of frames that he can make, and they also make for a nice background.

First Collage

2009-04-27T19:24:00.000-07:00

Behold! Collage 1! Here we have Nick in the foreground, refusing to allow me to actually take a decent picture of him, and in the back is Emma being her lovely silly self. Combined we have a girl being shocked by the obscenities of a boy.

The Alphabet: Censored

2009-04-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

b
V
o
I
E

And here we have the same stuff edited up in the Photoshop. I didn't edit the "b" photo though, I liked it just as it was.

The Alphabet: Uncensored

2009-04-20T18:24:00.001-07:00

b
E
V
I
o

Here are my unedited photos for the alphabet soup project!

Douglas Huebler

2009-04-19T19:40:00.000-07:00

It just occurred to me that not every knows who Douglas Huebler was, thus my cool kid photo reference in my last post was pretty much useless. So here's an example of his work. It's called "Variable Piece #34" and it was done in 1970. Here he went up to people, and took a picture of them right after he said "You have a beautiful face". I've only posted a couple of those, but his piece consisted of eight photos like the ones above and a statement.

Strangers

2009-04-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

When I was little, I was very afraid of strangers.
My mother told me that if I was not careful,
a stranger would take me away forever.

This is a third of my first photo project for Photo II. The above statement is some text that I'm going to post next to my photos. The assignment was to create conceptual photo art. So I did a little channeling of Douglas Huebler, and decided to test the boundaries of our socially conceived notion of personal space. I went up to people I didn't know and sat next to them. I got a variety of reactions, but I think this one is my favorite. Here I decided to swing next to this older man (Who may have been homeless, it was hard to tell. He did have a little cart that he was pushing around, hmmmm...) and he definitely was not pleased with my swing choice. He imediatly stopped, looked at me, and then took off. It's obvious in these pictures that he was not comfortable with me being this close to him. Although I expected it to be awkward, I didn't really expect him to just book! I mean, if a homeless looking guy came and sat next to me, I'd probably leave. But I guess I didn't think that the same would happen in the reverse situation. I mean I look like a fairly good kid. I'm clean cut!

Slightly Gross

2009-04-15T16:04:00.000-07:00

So I think Miles wanted us to post our experiments with saturation, and here's mine. It's pretty gross, Noelle looks slightly, well more than slightly, diseased here. Oh dear.

Bear Fears Mole

2009-04-15T15:53:00.001-07:00

So I've just been trying to up my Photoshop skills, and this is one result. Granted, I'm no master, but I'm definitely way cooler than I used to be. All I did here was mess with the color balance of the highlights in this silly picture of Noelle snarling at a stuffed bear. Winter in TK does not provide many activities, thus taking weird pictures of each other in the cheesy AK giftshop was the fun for the day.

Frank is always in the limelight.

2009-04-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

When I was 13 I discovered Frank Sinatra. All it took was a moment of Frank's screen time in the 1955's Guys and Dolls film, and I was hooked. While classmates found this new craze of mine to be a little odd, I would not be shaken and I've been a Blue Eyes fan ever since.
For me, this oil painting done by Carlo Beninati totally captures Frank. Lit with color in a black and white world, Frank was all about being the center of attention. Plus, this painting really shows his love of his craft. And while he definitely struggled from time to time (the album "Frank Sinatra Sings Only for the Lonely", which he recorded shortly after his very public divorce with Ava Gardener, is a definite example) he always managed to get back into the light.

Robert Durr=No bombs?

2009-04-12T20:04:00.001-07:00

Since my grandpa died this February, I've gotten into the habit of searching his name into various search engines. So today I decided to search for him in google images, and after many photos of his memoir covers (he loved to talk about himself), there was this photo. He asked lots of unanswerable questions like the one above, "If a man yells in the woods, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?", or "What would life be like, if we were never born?". All of which my grandma would respond with "Oh gwad Fat Head who cares?!?".
Obviously this particular question is about peace. While the image itself isn't the most intriguing, the question posed is.

Of angels and murders.

2009-04-12T19:36:00.000-07:00

I found this photo when I searched "too late" on google images. In this photo I see two clashing images of death. The first that I noticed was the angel wings. Angels often conjure up feelings and images of peace and tranquility. And yet, when more closely observed, I could see the chalk that traces her body which is more suggestive of a crime scene. So what do you feel? Sad, content, uncomfortable?

Another scratch

2009-04-11T17:38:00.000-07:00

My second attempt at making a scratch in Photoshop. Again, just a silly little thing, but I enjoy it.

Scratch

2009-04-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

So here is my first scratch using Photoshop. Just something silly.

BAHA! I have a blog.

2009-04-08T18:30:00.001-07:00

Although this is something I swore I'd never do, it's a requirement for DMF. Thus, the required part is kicking in and I must obey. So enjoy.

Bonjour cool cats!

2009-04-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd start this here blog off with a little Bogart and Bacall.Here we see Bogart in his classic kissing position. Taking control, he grabs Bacall by the shoulders and lets his mouth hover over her's for a brief moment before going in for some awesome kiss action. You really don't see kisses like this in movies anymore. It's a shame really.