I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

it's funny, I was talking to someone last night who didn't really know what an illustrator was. so when I introduced myself as one, he gave a speech that would've probably gone over well with a gallery artist, but which was precision-tailored to make any illustrator within a 50 mile radius go into eyes-glowing-red kill mode.

his speech was about how there is a difference between craft and art, and how people can practice craft (as in, skillfully execute a painting) without it having any artistic merit.

so I'm someone who gets paid to paint waffles for restaurant menus and dinosaurs for museums exhibits, and AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH! you can't make art without it being something something you've made. does that make sense? like every illustrator I know has an individual way of approaching any given imagery that is informed by a lifetime of inspiration, and of passive intake of culture, and of the specific mistakes they make because of whatever their particular mass of grey matter deems as important thing to render or unimportant, just fuck it up.

I can make something that is informed by both a century of Canadian print-making and by my own particular neurosis, and it can also be commissioned commercial imagery that I regurgitate without care because I want to pay my mortgage. everything is art, nothing isn't art, art is something sticky and impossible to shake off of you.

anyway he got very wide-eyed and said "I'm sorry if I offended you," so today I feel a bit bad for having gotten so, uh.... excited.

It pisses me the fuck off that yoga is actually ancient and really good for you. Part of me still feels like it was invented to extract wealth from white socal moms.

interesting fact i have titanium in my spine

Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns

Japanese Windchime Earrings // Sekai Art

New Crow Time! It’s the Hound Knight. He’s a good boy!!!

I will always remember Christopher Lee as that horrifying moment in the LOTR commentaries where Peter Jackson says he started to direct him on how to act like he’d been stabbed and Christopher Lee goes “no no peter dear, when someone is stabbed like this, THIS is how they look, they don’t make a sound, air just leaves them all at once” and peter jackson remembers in that moment that lee was in the secret service and just slowly backs away.

Guys. I can feel it already. THIS is the year. This is the year that Jonathan Harker will go on his business trip with no issue. Just a lovely train ride through Europe where he collects paprika recipies for Mina, meets some friendly, living people looking to buy properties in England, and then returns home safely.

Free him from the time loop.

With great excitement I can finally unveil: Glass Roses!

This is my year long student film, with Echo the Dragon and Harper the glassblower learning to communicate and get along. Best enjoyed with sound as it has a custom score.

The story concept was mine and I got to be the art director and story lead on it. I did most of the animation on this, I designed Echo the dragon, and gave feedback and direction on color palettes, layouts, and VFX. My awesome team pulled out some awesome work and overall I think our final film is absolutely stellar.

Please feel free to reblog this! I spent so much pouring time and love into this! If you want you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, and I have an Echo design up on Redbubble if you like my little dragon!

finally finished this painting i sketched out months ago… please click for better quality i know tumblr is gonna kill it (reference used)

fraud

Get shigeo'd idiot

(:

D U A L I T Y

this was a huge and gorgeous commission that I got to make for Tyr! a ton of detail and time went into this piece; I really recommend zooming in to take a closer look at it.