Tiny Trot

In my character design class we had to draw a character of a little girl named Tiny Trot,"Her father is the captain of a sailing schooner, and her constant companion is Cap'n Bill Weedles, a retired sailor with a wooden leg. Trot and Cap'n Bill spend many of their days roaming the beaches near home, or rowing and sailing along the coast."

Adam is an intramural champion

Everyone knows that there are 3 things that are most coveted at BYU. From lowest to highest, this is what they are:

3. A diploma

2. A spouse

1. An intramural championship t-shirt

To win one of those t-shirts is the dream of many BYU students, but very few attain this lofty goal. If you've ever played or watched a BYU intramural game you know that they are intense, winning this t-shirt is no trivial matter. Adam is usually in about three intramural sports per semester, several times his team has made it to the championship game, but somehow they never won that final game, UNTIL NOW!

This semester, Adam's brother, a couple of his cousins and several other close friends who have been on multiple sports teams together, formed an intramural dodgeball team. At the beginning of the tournament they were in the lowest seed of the first division of this intensely competitive sport (in case you don't know what that means, like I didn't before I married Adam, that means that they were playing against the very best dodgeball teams at BYU and were expected to be the first to lose). But did they lose, no they did not! Instead they rose up higher and higher in the rankings, winning every single game in the tournament, beating much higher ranked teams than their own. On Thursday night they faced the only other team that had survived and thus ensued a battle to the death. And who do you think won that final game? Well, you already know, Adam's team came out victorious winning 4 to 2! It was a glorious moment. Adam now has the t-shirt he has always coveted and will certainly be busting with pride every time he wears it, even when he's 62. 

The team of glory:

"Beautiful"

This is my latest piece for my acrylic painting class. You have to guess what it means before I tell you what I think it means.

K, this is what the painting means to me: If you enlarge the image you can see that it is painted on a dictionary page with the word "beautiful" on it. The word beautiful is on her shirt, where her heart would be. So, this perfectly lovely girl is cutting off her love-handles to conform with what the media tells her is beautiful. She is willing to harm herself and cut into herself to get to that. I think it's sad that the media convinces gorgeous women that they are not quite perfect, that they need to harm themselves to become perfect. I wanted this picture to show how sad that is that many girls and women feel the way this girl feels.

And this is one of my first digitally-made art pieces. It had to depict the words of a fortune from a fortune cookie. I definitely prefer to draw and paint by hand than digitally but it's a good thing to learn.

Las Vegas and why I would do dishes at 4:30am

To celebrate Adam's birthday and Valentines Day we saved up and took a trip to Vegas.

$3/ huge-o slice of pizza at this hole-in-the-wall pizza place that had no drinks (not even water) and no napkins. How awesome is that? On the strip, that is a great deal!

Watching an opera/juggling show at the Venetian

Adam holds the stampeding horse's hoof

New York

We stayed at that hotel in the far back, Planet Hollywood

I'm supposed to be posing like the MGM lion in the background, obviously

We walked several miles everyday and so sometimes we would have to sit down and just rest, well, I did, and Adam would pretend he needed to rest too

Jelly belly statue of liberty

I love this picture and I love this boy!

We always have to stop and watch the magic shows along the side of the street

Even Darth Vader enjoys strolling down the strip

Oh my heavens, the yummiest sandwich place!

I made Adam pose for almost all of the pictures by himself because on Thursday night I pulled out my contacts to go to bed and all of a sudden my left eye was going insanely crazy with pain. It was positively gushing tears. I tried to fall asleep, despite the painful waterfall spewing from my eye, I fell asleep out of exhaustion for about 45 minutes, but was soon woken up by the pain getting even worse in my eye and the continuous flood of tears. So I got up and found that keeping my eye open felt a lot better than keeping it closed. So from 1:30am--4:30am I was doing dishes and when I finished with that I wrote a letter to my brother on a mission. I attempted to do homework, but I couldn't see well enough to draw, so I watched random episodes of random shows on Hulu (with sunglasses on because the light from my computer was hurting my eyes, even on it's lowest light setting) until the BYU Health Center was open and Adam could take me to Urgent Care. By then my eye was all red and swollen. It was not a pretty sight. They scheduled an appointment with an eye doctor who informed me that I had an ulcer in my cataract! How joyful does that sound? And apparently it can lead to major eye damage if not taken care of immediately. So I had the privledge of spending $90 on a itty bitty bottle of eye drops to squeeze into my eye every two hours for a couple of days. I was banned from wearing contacts or make-up for several days, so basically this all sums up to equal the fact that I kind of looked like a disaster this weekend in Vegas, with my red puffy eye and I'm squinting in almost every picture because the light is hurting my eye and I can't really see, so that's why I made Adam pose for everything. 

This most glorious artist

Look at the work of this artist, Julia Denos. Oh my heavens, I think she is glorious!

She just had a book that she illustrated published. It's about Audrey Hepburn. 

And here is another artist I found on etsy recently. I like his stuff too! His name is Matte Stephens and the titles for his pieces are so amusing!

"The Abernathy family was happy yet a little surprised that Humbert the rare red sweater wearing elephant was out for viewing."

"Alfred was obviously underdressed for his induction into the Adventurers Hall of Fame."

So, I entered into a show

K, so remember how just a few months ago I put my artwork up on my blog for the first time, and it was totally a nerve-wracking thing for me to do? Showing people my art and being judged by it is so scary! And so my blog is pretty much the only place I put up my art. So if you asked me if I wanted to enter my art into a juried art show, I would say, "Ptsh! No way." When I was little I used to enter my art into competitions all the time and I would get toys and gift cards as prizes, but it is one thing to enter a competition as a little kid and another to enter a competition at an art school as an art major who, therefore, is expected to be good. I've been in several art shows for my various art classes, but those are different because the teachers kind of don't have a choice about whether or not to put up a piece of yours, because you're in the class. However, I made it a goal of mine to voluntarily enter a juried show. I entered this piece (above) into a figure drawing show at BYU. I didn't tell anyone except my mom, not even Adam, because then no one would ask me whether or not I got in and only I would know if I didn't make it. Today I was walking through the HFAC to work and I looked up at the 4th floor and I saw a familiar drawing up on the wall. It was my piece! I had had no idea I got in the show until I saw it up on the wall! I got into the show! In all honesty, it's not that big of a deal to get in this show, but for me to have the courage to enter and to get chosen to be displayed, holy cow, I was stoked.

What I do during the Super Bowl

Unfortunately, I do not avidly watch the game. I do this instead:

How funny that I am an art major but I love drawing stick figures. I just love her little spindly legs and arms! For this picture (above) we got a fortune cookie in class and we had to do an art piece that depicts what the fortune cookie says. My fortune said: You are heading to a land of sunshine and relaxation. This is not the final art piece, this is just the comp that I have to turn in this week before I start the actual piece.

My future.

Adam told me that the picture at the top of our blog needs to change. Apparently it isn't the most attractive picture and I look like I have a second chin. This is true. But we don't really take very many pictures of just the two of us anymore. In fact, I went looking through pictures we've taken recently and majority of them I took to use as photo reference for art pieces. See:

These all became paintings for class:

This is for my next class project:

So, I guess I'll have to work on taking some real pictures of Adam and me to replace the one that we have on our blog now.