Friday, October 4, 2013
Monday, September 23, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Steve Zissou Portrait
My latest post for Fanartica. The theme is a combination of Wes Anderson and Studio Ghibli.
Monday, August 8, 2011
FANARTICA: Stump
Friday, July 29, 2011
WtD?: Roose
This week the word was "Roose" which means to praise. The image in my head that I kept coming back to however was a goose, so I made a roosing goose! I drew a few sketches of ducks and things, but this one seemed to be the most roose-ish.
To see what everyone else did, check out the full post on Creative Juices!
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
WtD?: Mucky
This week's What the Doodle!? at FableVision was MUCKY. Few things get muckier than mudskippers, amphibious fishes that hang out in mud all day to stay moist. They can breath air, but only when wet, hence the muckiness.
Check out everyone else's contributions here.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
WTD?: Rushing
The word that came out of the random word generator this week for What the Doodle? was Rushing. My doodle was mostly inspired by this neat old photo from the Library of Congress. I think the photo expresses the urgency of rushing much better than my version, but it was still fun to draw.
I couldn't resist adding a BRB.
Be sure to check out everyone else's creations on Creative Juices!
Monday, February 14, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Mod 53
Was digging around in the archives and found this bit of typing from March 2007 - written during my second year of college. It's brief sketches of my modmates from that year. I've changed the names, just in case any of them mind.
Let me tell you a little bit about the people I live with, my modmates.
There is Amy from London who wears little dresses with plunging necklines and a dark blue tweed coat with big buttons that cinches around the waist so that she can put stolen bagels from SAGA in the top half, accentuating her already rubenesque figure. She loves horses, dogs, and herbal remedies, and she made beeswax lip balm for everyone in the mod. She feeds Zipper the farm cat kitty treats when he comes to the door. She has a pet tortoise name The Colonel. She's currently working on her dream house, a painted bird house cottage on a slab of wood surrounded by cabbages, grass, plastic hens and dogs, and a painted blue pond. All of the People and Us Weekly magazines that are scattered around the living room are courtesy of Amy.
Her boyfriend Alex does not officially live with us, but he is here all the time. I'm not sure anyone knows where he really lives. Early in the morning on snow days when you think no one on campus would be conscious or functional you can expect to find him in the kitchen cooking something for Amy. He cooks her big breakfasts and fancy dinners. He doesn't say much, and once, to Amy's horror, he shaved his head. He's easy to see from a distance because his jacket is that neon hunter's orange and he has big clunky snow boots.
Elena lives in the room next door to Amy and she leaves every weekend to go home to New York City. She has dark hair and wears boots with dark jeans and lots of eyeliner. She rides horses, and gets sick often, and studies neuro science. She is probably one of the nicest people in the whole mod.
Also on the third floor is Cowboy Tom, who is just Tom now because he doesn't wear his cowboy hat anymore and he's also just a Pennsylvanian with a minivan. I don't think I've ever seen him use the kitchen, but every Monday night a bunch of friends come over to drink beer, eat pizza, and watch wrestling on tv. He drinks a lot of alcohol and when he is depressed he blasts Johnny Cash from his room with the door open and stomps around the house.
Bree is blonde and smokes cigarettes one after the other in her room. She has a signature giggle-laugh which is the first thing anyone notices about her. She listens to National Public Radio all the time and takes baths at midnight. The box of LIFE cereal on the top of the fridge is hers.
Meg lives next to Bree and has a boyfriend from the next town over as me. So when he comes over we talk about all the different versions of Newbury towns. Meg prizes her peanut butter, her strawberry jelly, her italian white bread, and her soymilk. She hates when the mod gets messy and is usually the one to do the dishes. She's the one who pulled the mod together in the first place, and the reason why the eight of us are in a renovated Enfield mod. I draw pictures of octopuses for her and she calles me 'love'.
On the first floor is the Matt Hurley. I say 'the' because he is the Matt Hurley who writes beat poetry and has a handle bar mustache. He wears tight pants and bright white cowboy boots and does silly little dances. He is the reason for the mod doll baby that looks like Hitler. It used to be covered in jelly and lived in the freezer. Now it's bundled up in a Bree-made swaddle, has a pipe cleaner mustache, feathers for hair, and a parrot on his shoulder. The baby might be sitting on the banister but the next time you walk up the stairs he'll suddenly be in the window.
Finally in the double is my roommate and best friend Circe and me.
Circe is a little person, short, with short curly hair that changes often and various piercings and tattoos. She makes a cave to sleep in which is a bundle of black curtains and dark gray sheets along side pictures of hello kitty or strawberry shortcake. Her wall is decorated with Escher drawings, Burlesque posters, Betty Page, and thongs. A flag for the California Republic hangs in our window. Circe's favorite food might be cashew butter, hot sauce, and cereal. And most of her clothes are either black or red or orange or camo. She makes tea five times a day and has a violin case with secret things inside. She's a burlesque dancer, a sex-toy entrepeneur, a body-modification expert, a painter, and an extremely talented writer.
We have two pet mice, Miso and Matzo. Matzo is light gray/tan and is plump and soft and tries to make babies with Miso. Miso is black with a little white stripe on her head and she does black flips to land on the wire roof of the cage and crawls around upside down with her claws. We made her a cardboard shelf that only she can get to because you have to get there from the ceiling.
And I don't know how to explain myself so I don't think that I will try. But that is my mod, and the people in it. And I like them all very much.
Let me tell you a little bit about the people I live with, my modmates.
There is Amy from London who wears little dresses with plunging necklines and a dark blue tweed coat with big buttons that cinches around the waist so that she can put stolen bagels from SAGA in the top half, accentuating her already rubenesque figure. She loves horses, dogs, and herbal remedies, and she made beeswax lip balm for everyone in the mod. She feeds Zipper the farm cat kitty treats when he comes to the door. She has a pet tortoise name The Colonel. She's currently working on her dream house, a painted bird house cottage on a slab of wood surrounded by cabbages, grass, plastic hens and dogs, and a painted blue pond. All of the People and Us Weekly magazines that are scattered around the living room are courtesy of Amy.
Her boyfriend Alex does not officially live with us, but he is here all the time. I'm not sure anyone knows where he really lives. Early in the morning on snow days when you think no one on campus would be conscious or functional you can expect to find him in the kitchen cooking something for Amy. He cooks her big breakfasts and fancy dinners. He doesn't say much, and once, to Amy's horror, he shaved his head. He's easy to see from a distance because his jacket is that neon hunter's orange and he has big clunky snow boots.
Elena lives in the room next door to Amy and she leaves every weekend to go home to New York City. She has dark hair and wears boots with dark jeans and lots of eyeliner. She rides horses, and gets sick often, and studies neuro science. She is probably one of the nicest people in the whole mod.
Also on the third floor is Cowboy Tom, who is just Tom now because he doesn't wear his cowboy hat anymore and he's also just a Pennsylvanian with a minivan. I don't think I've ever seen him use the kitchen, but every Monday night a bunch of friends come over to drink beer, eat pizza, and watch wrestling on tv. He drinks a lot of alcohol and when he is depressed he blasts Johnny Cash from his room with the door open and stomps around the house.
Bree is blonde and smokes cigarettes one after the other in her room. She has a signature giggle-laugh which is the first thing anyone notices about her. She listens to National Public Radio all the time and takes baths at midnight. The box of LIFE cereal on the top of the fridge is hers.
Meg lives next to Bree and has a boyfriend from the next town over as me. So when he comes over we talk about all the different versions of Newbury towns. Meg prizes her peanut butter, her strawberry jelly, her italian white bread, and her soymilk. She hates when the mod gets messy and is usually the one to do the dishes. She's the one who pulled the mod together in the first place, and the reason why the eight of us are in a renovated Enfield mod. I draw pictures of octopuses for her and she calles me 'love'.
On the first floor is the Matt Hurley. I say 'the' because he is the Matt Hurley who writes beat poetry and has a handle bar mustache. He wears tight pants and bright white cowboy boots and does silly little dances. He is the reason for the mod doll baby that looks like Hitler. It used to be covered in jelly and lived in the freezer. Now it's bundled up in a Bree-made swaddle, has a pipe cleaner mustache, feathers for hair, and a parrot on his shoulder. The baby might be sitting on the banister but the next time you walk up the stairs he'll suddenly be in the window.
Finally in the double is my roommate and best friend Circe and me.
Circe is a little person, short, with short curly hair that changes often and various piercings and tattoos. She makes a cave to sleep in which is a bundle of black curtains and dark gray sheets along side pictures of hello kitty or strawberry shortcake. Her wall is decorated with Escher drawings, Burlesque posters, Betty Page, and thongs. A flag for the California Republic hangs in our window. Circe's favorite food might be cashew butter, hot sauce, and cereal. And most of her clothes are either black or red or orange or camo. She makes tea five times a day and has a violin case with secret things inside. She's a burlesque dancer, a sex-toy entrepeneur, a body-modification expert, a painter, and an extremely talented writer.
We have two pet mice, Miso and Matzo. Matzo is light gray/tan and is plump and soft and tries to make babies with Miso. Miso is black with a little white stripe on her head and she does black flips to land on the wire roof of the cage and crawls around upside down with her claws. We made her a cardboard shelf that only she can get to because you have to get there from the ceiling.
And I don't know how to explain myself so I don't think that I will try. But that is my mod, and the people in it. And I like them all very much.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Anatomy of a Clam (or How I Spent My Sunday Morning)
During a moment of boredom while studying my biology homework, I made a (very simple) visual study guide on clam anatomy for myself. Enjoy!
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Lab Drawing of the Week: Amoeba
Unfortunately this little guy wasn't alive - he was dead, stained, and preserved between two glass plates. But he was frozen in a nice amoeba-ishy shape.
Amoeba moves around with pseudopods (meaning "false feet") which are really just extensions of the cytoplasm (the gooey inside of a cell). Amoeba uses its "feet" to eat too. It wraps them around some food item (usually another cell) and engulfs it. The food is now contained within a little bubble (vacuole) inside the amoeba, and can be digested.
Amoeba moves around with pseudopods (meaning "false feet") which are really just extensions of the cytoplasm (the gooey inside of a cell). Amoeba uses its "feet" to eat too. It wraps them around some food item (usually another cell) and engulfs it. The food is now contained within a little bubble (vacuole) inside the amoeba, and can be digested.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
"Nature Abhors A Gradient"
While working on an assignment for a biology class, I stumbled upon a book in the library entitled "Into The Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life" by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan. While the book didn't contribute to my specific homework assignment, it had an incredibly intriguing preface, and I ended up checking the book out and taking it home with me.
Before even diving into Part One, Chapter One, the authors made some profound observations in the introduction about life and its continuous battle against entropy. Entropy is disorder. Specifically, entropy is atomic or molecular randomness. Living things defy entropy because living things are complex, patterned, and organized. The entire universe tends toward randomness and disorder, and life moves against it. As an example, compare the complex structure and pattern of a living tree with the disarray of fallen leaves and decomposing branches. As scientist Evelyn Hutchinson said, "Disorder spreads through the universe, and life alone battles against it."
Just as nature prefers entropy, so "nature abhors a gradient" (Schneider and Kay 1989). A gradient is defined as a difference between properties (such as temperature, pressure, etc) between two regions of space. Unless maintained with an influx of energy, gradients will break down. For example, the heater in your room creates a temperature gradient of hot air against cold air. If you turn your heater off, your room will eventually become cold as the gradient collapses and the air mixes.
If the universe tends towards entropy and chaos, than how can life exist at all? What is its function? Schneider and Sagan make an interesting statement regarding a function of life, that life reduces, "over billions of years, the huge solar gradient between hot sun and cold space." Life can battle entropy because it receives a constant input of energy from the sun. And, as specified by the second law of thermodynamics, energy becomes less useful as it moves through the system. Living things bring energy and heat from the sun, process and churn and convert it, and then spit it back out as heat to dissolve in space. By this logic, we as living things are catalysts in the elimination of a gradient. Our low-entropy systems actually contribute to the overall increase of entropy in the universe.
I find the mixture of physics and biology in the book intriguing, and the implications of the idea astounding... And, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book.
Before even diving into Part One, Chapter One, the authors made some profound observations in the introduction about life and its continuous battle against entropy. Entropy is disorder. Specifically, entropy is atomic or molecular randomness. Living things defy entropy because living things are complex, patterned, and organized. The entire universe tends toward randomness and disorder, and life moves against it. As an example, compare the complex structure and pattern of a living tree with the disarray of fallen leaves and decomposing branches. As scientist Evelyn Hutchinson said, "Disorder spreads through the universe, and life alone battles against it."
Just as nature prefers entropy, so "nature abhors a gradient" (Schneider and Kay 1989). A gradient is defined as a difference between properties (such as temperature, pressure, etc) between two regions of space. Unless maintained with an influx of energy, gradients will break down. For example, the heater in your room creates a temperature gradient of hot air against cold air. If you turn your heater off, your room will eventually become cold as the gradient collapses and the air mixes.
If the universe tends towards entropy and chaos, than how can life exist at all? What is its function? Schneider and Sagan make an interesting statement regarding a function of life, that life reduces, "over billions of years, the huge solar gradient between hot sun and cold space." Life can battle entropy because it receives a constant input of energy from the sun. And, as specified by the second law of thermodynamics, energy becomes less useful as it moves through the system. Living things bring energy and heat from the sun, process and churn and convert it, and then spit it back out as heat to dissolve in space. By this logic, we as living things are catalysts in the elimination of a gradient. Our low-entropy systems actually contribute to the overall increase of entropy in the universe.
I find the mixture of physics and biology in the book intriguing, and the implications of the idea astounding... And, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book.
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