27 posts tagged “animals”

I went apple picking yesterday with some friends, and brought home nine pounds of Cortlands.  Here are a couple of shots from the trip:

Yesterday was the First Friday Art Walk, but before I sat around trying to sell stuff, my father and I spent a lovely part of the afternoon walking around Two Lights State Park in Cape Elizabeth and taking photos:

I went to the Common Ground Fair yesterday and spent the morning walking around looking at crafts and animals and other lovely things.  I spent most of the afternoon volunteering, which in this case meant sifting through old dirt and separating from it things that had not composted properly.  This included a lot of old animal bones, which I am keeping for a future art project.

Here's a goat:

I have discovered two less-than-optimal things about my camera:  one is that the lens is long enough to block the flash when taking macro shots (which can be worked around), and the other is that the battery dies very suddenly (it spent the better part of two weeks reading at 100%, then dropped to nothing within an hour.  My replacement batteries entered the camera at 79% charge and fell just as fast).  This is the bigger problem.

I recently discovered a website called Spoonflower that lets its users create custom-printed fabric.  It's fairly expensive ($18-$32/yard), but I ordered a few $5 test swatches and the quality of them is really fantastic.  I'm thinking of making pillows and iPod cases from my designs.  Here's a before and after of one of my test swatches:

My roommate Elise has three axolotls, which are neotenic tiger salamanders - basically, the vast majority of axolotls never metamorphose, instead spending their entire lives underwater.  'Lotl genetics are pretty fascinating; Elise has a melanoid, a golden albino, and a wild type with a special gene that makes it glow under blacklight. 

This is Ansel, the melanoid.  He's easiest to get pictures of, mainly because his tank is the only one with an overhead light:

I have a snow day today, which was really perfect timing for me.  It means I have some extra time to work on my Illustration and Graphic Design projects and to study for my quiz on An Enemy of the People. 

My Illustration assignment is the most pressing of these; I had to do eight 8.5"x11" images of blue jays, with various different requirements.  I've re-done a few of them, so when all is said and done, I'll have more like eleven pieces.  Here's one of the ones I've done (it's probably my favorite):

I've started to put some of my needle felting up on my Etsy page. Check it out!

Later today is my end of term foundation review.  I'm about equal parts excited and nervous.  I know it'll be fine; I just don't know how helpful it'll be.  My review last term was not very helpful, but the one before that was fantastic... so we'll just have to wait and see.  I think this one will be good, though, because one of the faculty team members is my GD teacher, who does really fantastic critiques.  She's pretty harsh, but that's okay with me.

After that I have a couple of projects to finish up (including the alphabet zine), and then I'm done.  That means lots of time for hanging out with friends here, maybe playing some Apples to Apples or Scrabble... 

Here's a mixed-media drawing I did earlier in the term for an endangered species project in my illustration class.  This is just one of the many things I'll be showing at my review:

This weekend I am taking part in a gelatin plate printmaking workshop through the Continuing Studies branch of my school.  We're forming a couple of books from the prints we make, but before we started working on them we had a chance to just play around a bit  here are a few of the experimental prints I made:

I was supposed to go on a hike up Mt. Washington on Saturday, but I overslept and missed the van.  So that was disappointing.

But!

On Sunday I went with my parents to the Common Ground Fair (an agricultural festival run by the Maine Organic Farmers and Growers Association), which was AMAZING.  There were all sorts of farm animals, poultry, and rabbits, and there were some amazing folk arts and other crafts in the tents.  I added to my button collection (one Amnesty International, one Heifer Project, one "STOP the war").  I bought some green glass beads and thought about buying some bunny wool... but I already have plenty of yarn.

Here are some photos of the animals: