Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I have already watched it a couple times this month and I swear, Wrath of Khan gets better every time. Crazy channel Space (sort of like Canada's Sci-Fi Channel) is playing something like nine Trek movies in a row. Anyway… It's probably partially because I'm obsessed with post-apocalyptic eugenics and artificially created homo superior as a part of my own childhood mythologies.

I did this painting with Nefarious — “Ducks at Sunset” — for her grandmother. Nefarious drew the picture (the grey things in the background are mountains) using pencil crayons, and I applied the paint for her in the colors she specified. I like how it turned out:

We managed to do that in about an hour I think because it's small (12″x12″ — normally I work in 36″ to 48″ sizes)… Now I'm thinking about doing a series of them, like one a day for a week or something.

I've also been teaching my friend Saira to paint using a graphic method that's pretty close to how a tattoo artist builds up an image (including creating a stencil for the portrait and all that, which is a lot more than just copying or tracing it), coupled with ideas from silkscreening to punch up the image. I think she's doing a good job so far (and this is the first time she's ever painted a portrait, let alone painted at all, since highschool I think):

(I can post it because she previewed it for her husband who's in the picture and who it's for).

I'm in a construction-y mood lately and have been doing lots of painting and building related action and thought… I think I've mentioned I'm working on a series of canes both for myself and some friends who also occasionally use them, and I've got a bizarre little chair I'm making for Nefarious curing in my garage right now. It's good a solid armature under the foam of course, which now needs to be carved and cleaned up (it won't look anything like this in the end), and then I'll finish it in fiberglass and maybe add some light upholstery.

I haven't decided about the upholstery yet because that's sort of determined by whether or not I get myself a sewing machine as a boxing day present… I want to make my old XXL and XL (since I wear a M or L now) BME shirts into a quilt, and I want to do the upholstery for the furniture I'm making.

Speaking of construction, the rented house I live in (built something like two or three years back) is a piece of junk. It's kind of heartbreaking because this is the owners' first house and they seem like a really nice couple. I mean, pretty much every seam in the house (like where one part connects to another) has split by 1/4″ or so, meaning that parts of this block of houses have shifted from the remainder of the construction for whatever reason.

You know why this house sucks? Because like most modern homes, the people who built it just didn't care. It was just a low paying job for the workers, and a bottom of the barrel bid by some construction management company. I mean, they didn't even bother to take the purschasing tags off the lumber they used to build the house.

It's pretty pathetic. As you can see it's even on the top balconies where it's difficult to reach… Seriously, I would never buy a modern home that I didn't have a hand in building myself. Mass market construction already has made nearly every product valueless… doing it to our source of shelter is completely foresightless.

Hope everyone's having a good Christmas morning. BME has been updated with I think 13,000 new pictures (since the last update only became active now) and I think around 350 new experiences as well are posted… Fingers crossed that I actually got everything fixed.

Now to decide whether I go out, or stay here and work on BME and art projects…