Brain Matter: Summer writer's block

This summer was great in terms of relaxing on the beach and with my family (I spent a month and a half in Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina - I hung out with the cousins, water-skied all day and every day, went to the beach, got awesomely tan, didn't eat anything but peaches and corn-on-the-cob for a week and a half because my father's mother can't cook anything without liberal amounts of bacon grease), but horrible in terms of getting my work done. I had very little creative inclination, and when I did, none of my stuff really turned out well. It was especially bad because it wasn't only art I had to do, but a summer essay and a few personal writing projects. Oh, and college applications. Those I still have to do. Anyway. That's enough shameless griping and excuse-making.

So, I never really needed to take pictures of my stuff before this. I didn't even think to take pictures of my work! Luckily, some of my projects included elements of photography.

The photo on the top is of some dancers I saw with a friend of mine. She's Indian and knows all these wonderful people in Portland's Indian community, and they let us go see them as they got ready to dance at a wedding. I messed around in photoshop a tiny bit, cropping and bringing out the colors, but not much more than that. It's blurred, but I think that that communicates the motion of dancing. For my project I paired it with pictures I took of acrobats when I went to the circus. I took about twenty-six pictures of them, but my favorite is this one:

I like the light, and how it intersects with the blue ribbon. Artsy-fartsy, huh?

I also took a lot of pictures of my family. I used my mom to do those four pop-art type drawings, and I made one lino-block print of my sister that turned out really bad, and another that was better. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my brothers: I like the expression the youngest one, Finn, is making, and I like the way that the shadows fall the other one's, Cole's, eyes but I have no definite ideas. My father's picture is blurry in a not-good way, but the other pictures of him are worse - he's really not photogenic. At all. And I think it's intentional. I have to be like a camera ninja and sneak up on him. There was also a picture of my cousin - I based the green portrait off of that picture - but my computer ate the file. (It did, I swear - it just woke up one day, grew teeth, and went "ohm nom nom". It also ate my pocket dictionary, my Captain Kirk action figure, and the tricorder that went along with my Mr. Spock bobble-head. It was quite sad. And I do like Star Trek, why do you ask? ~~And it's not that I'm obsessed or anything~~.)